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I am currently reading a wonderful book by Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfeld called Information Architecture for the World Wide Web. The book is a treatise on the philosophical underpinnings of information archiecture (IA) with emphasis on its political economy, for lack of a better term. This means the book deals not only with an explanation of IA, its best practices and preferred methodologies, but also addresses how to sell it within an organization with soft and hard benefits such as return on investment. The science and practice of IA is multi-dimensional, and is explored by the authors. I highly recommend this book to anyone in the business of managing, organizing or selling information (and really, who isn't today?). Judiciously, the authors have left out any discussion of specific technologies to implement a given information architecture.

My main interest right now is to understand how the principles of information architecture can be applied to modern healthcare as practiced within the United States. Are there lessons to be learned from other disciplines that have applied these principles successfully? I believe that the principles of IA can be applied to creating online communities engaged in the exchange of valuable health-related information. This is at the core of CareSeek's mission, and it is what attracts me to be a part of this movement.

The paragraph below is a direct quote from the above book on the participation economy of online communities:

"The major challenge faced by every online community is how to get people to participate. Participation requires a balance of give (creating content) and take (consuming content). It's difficult to ensure reciprocity between givers and takers; it's often human nature to lurk and learn, while creating good information takes time and hard work. If everyone consumes and no one produces, online communities fail. Those responsible for online communities therefore have a harder job than Ben Bernanke (the head of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board). Beyond tweaking economic performance, they have an even larger job: to create the economy from scratch. And since they can't force people to participate, a healthy online economy must therefore err in the direction of free market principles -- enabling, not overmanaging -- the creation of content in a way that keeps up with its consumption.

IA provides the rules that define the economy's infrastructure. The IA can then grease multiple levels of transactions in the participation economy by supporting different levels of participation that fit with human nature, and by monetizing that participation so that members clearly understand what their content creation and consumption is worth.

Help Change Health Care is an effort to kick start the dialogue of what it means to create a broad, deep, and vibrant online community of all Americans who collectively can affect much-needed change in a positive manner to our  current mode of dispensing care. And within that context, CareSeek is one of several experiments to build exactly such an online community.

Do share with me and the rest of the team who desire positive change in our health care system your thoughts on ways in which we can move forward.

Cheers,
Sunit.