Social Media Rocks– Now what?

I love social media. This is not news. Just look at my tag cloud and you’ll see it’s what I’m blogging about.

I also happen to be passionate about International Affairs and Global Public Health. I can talk your ear off about the number of people in the world living on less than $2/day and the need for mosquito nets, medication, etc. That’s what I’m studying at school and it’s what I care about.

So how do I connect them?

How do I use the technologies that the geeks in the world’s most affluent countries are embracing to help the 2 billion people who are earning less than $2 a day?

I’m not sure.

Justin Cox just reminded me of www.kiva.org which is a microfinance website that allows people like you and me to make small loans to entrepreneurs in the developing world and gives them a way to lift themselves out of poverty. Kiva is a well respected organization and they are definitely doing some good stuff over there as far as giving people the chance to do something small that has a HUGE impact on another person’s life.

But what else? How can we use these websites that have enabled us to be so connected to people we otherwise never would have met and discover content we never would have seen to help people who’ve never used a computer or had internet access?

Maybe it’s a matter of pushing social media more and more mainstream. The world is shrinking and there’s an argument that that is a good thing. What if we could connect the humanitarian workers to each other as well as the experts back home?

What about a medical network for doctors in the field? You could catalog your town’s statistics and send them to a central database. Suddenly patterns and trends could be spotted.

Suppose there is an outbreak of a strange disease in town A which is along river X. The doctors and the aid workers are perplexed. This isn’t something they see normally and they aren’t sure where it’s coming from. But they’ve been using their medical database and the computer will map out the trend showing that doctors in towns all along river X are reporting the same illness, except it 20 miles north of town A– no one along river X is having this problem upstream of town B. Suddenly the disease has an origin. Has toxic waste been dumped into the river lately? Are there other types of polutants that enter the water at town B? I don’t know– I’m not a doctor, but if we could increase the connectivity of the health professionals and the aid workers maybe we’d be able to spot trends faster, increase the efficiency of the flow of supplies… who knows what’s possible?

I’m not an expert by any means. Maybe these systems are already in place, but with the rate at which these technologies and applications are developing, I’m sure they aren’t up to date.

I don’t know.. I’m just thinking outloud here (or thinking in type?). It’s food for thought though, to be sure.

Explore posts in the same categories: International Affairs, Social Media, development

Tags: Global Public Health, International Affairs, kiva.org, Social Media

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