The Face-to-Face Complexity of eHealth & Knowledge Exchange

The Public Health Agency of Canada‘s 2010 Knowledge Forum on Chronic Disease was held last night today in Ottawa with the focus on social media. The invitation-only affair was designed to bring together a diverse array of researchers, practitioners, policy developers, consultants and administrators who work with social media in some capacity. There were experts and non-experts alike gathered to learn about what the state of the art of social media is and how it can support public health. By state of the art, I refer not to the technological side of things, but rather the true art of public health, much like that discussed earlier this year at the University of Toronto.

Last night began with a presentation from Leanne Labelle that got us all thinking about how social media is radically different in the speed of its adoption and breadth of its social impact drawing inspiration from this video from Eric Qualman’s Socialnomics website.

Today we got down to business and started working through some of the issues that we face as a field when adopting social media. I would probably consider myself among the most experienced users in the audience, yet still gained so much from the day. Although I learned some things about how to use social media in new ways, what I learned most was how others use it and what struggles they have. This is always a useful reminder.

What stuck out was a presentation and related discussion from Christopher Wilson from the University of Ottawa’s Centre on Governance and a consultant on governance issues. In speaking about the challenges of doing collaboration, Christopher pointed to the problems of a ‘one-size fits all’ strategy using a diagram illustrating the fundamental differences between engagement at a small scale (under 25 people) and what is the mass collaboration that folks like Clay Shirky, Don Tapscott, and others write about. His diagram looks like this:

What Wilson stressed to the audience was the role that complexity plays in all of this. Specifically, he stated:

The more complex and interdependent things become, the more people need to be aware of the changing context and the changes in shared understanding.

As part of this, groups are required to engage in ways that enable them to deal with this complexity. In his experience, this can’t be done exclusively online. He further stated:

As complexity increases, the need for offline engagement increases.

I couldn’t agree more. In my work with community organizing and eHealth promotion, I’ve found the most effective means of fostering collaboration is to blend the two forms of knowledge generation and exchange together. The model that my research team and I developed is called the CoNEKTR (Complexity, Networks, EHealth, and Knowledge Translation Research Model).

This model combines both face-to-face methods of organizing and ideation, with a social media strategy that connects people together between events. The CoNEKTR model has been applied in many forms, but in each case the need to have ways to use the power of social media and rich media together with in-person dialogue has been front and centre. Using complexity science principles to guide the process and powered by social media and face-to-face engagement, the power to take what we know, contextualize it, and transform it into something we can act on seems to me the best way forward in dealing with problems of chronic disease that are so knotted and pervasive, yet demand rapid responses from public health.