One clear gap in the "information infrastructure" supporting global AIDS professionals is the lack of any widely-used online gathering place to share professional information. This Spring's information resources survey by the IAEN indicated diverse information resources in many areas, but few interactive offerings. There is no good online community site for global AIDS professionals.

Many professions have active online community sites. If I were a cardiothoracic surgeon, every day I'd be visiting CTSNet to interact with colleagues. If I were a particle physicist, every day I'd be visiting ArXiv (which has grown to 3500 research article submissions per month as shown in this impressive graph). But where do I turn as an AIDS professional? The closest model is probably the IAEN, but it hasn't had the funding base to grow to prominence.

What is necessary is a new online community site for global AIDS professionals, probably associated with UNAIDS (but not strictly part of the site) to allow debate across multiple topics. Ideally such a community site would help narrow the gap between policymakers in Geneva, New York and Washington, D.C., and those AIDS professionals battling the pandemic around the world.

In coming years there will be billions of dollars spent on AIDS medicines, most on generic drugs. The future of the AIDS response pivots on these purchases: they are the biggest line item in most AIDS programs, and programs and individuals will become totally dependent on continued future funding by "fickle" donors.

Unfortunately, there is relatively little good information online focusing on drug purchases. The Global Fund will be launching a drug price database (a big help), but other donors have not disclosed budgets or pricing information, and additional systems of surveillance of black market pricing or other data are not in place.

One step that would help greatly would be for interested donors to establish an "AIDS Drug Watch" Web site that would:

• Explain current issues with drug purchases (including contrasting perspectives of donors, Pharma, and countries);


• Aggregate drug budget information from different donors;


• Aggregate price data (as best possible) from different countries;


• Highlight areas requiring improvement.

Good recent examples exist of "transparency" efforts such as this, including the excellent "Oil Revenue Watch" sites of the Open Society Institute.

A "AIDS Drug Watch" site, to run well, would cost low to mid six figures per year, not a middling sum. It could play a key role, however, in performance and accountability of a principal element in our battle against global AIDS.

It has now been over a month since the Copenhagen Consensus concluded that AIDS should be at the top of the world's list in prioritizing development resources. Interestingly, there has been very little discussion of this stunning result within the AIDS community itself. I heard no mention of it in dozens of meetings in Bangkok last week. I find scant mention of it on Web sites for UNAIDS, the Global Fund, or WHO. I haven't yet heard anyone talk about doing a similar initiative focusing on AIDS.

Doesn't it make sense to do an "AIDS Consensus" exercise to recommend how the notional $27 billion for AIDS should be spent? There are two dozen principal interventions for AIDS, a half dozen key epidemiologic regions -- where should we put resources? Would it be possible to find scholars to write a couple dozen key cost-benefit analyses to be judged by a neutral, credible panel? It's impossible to answer resource allocation questions with precision, but certainly we can do better than we are doing now (trusting fate?).

One of the most remarkable information resources online is Wikipedia, a volunteer-driven online encyclopedia which combines impressive scope (over 300,000 articles) with admirable quality (see, for example, the entry on AIDS). A number of additional "wiki" projects have spun off -- dictionary, textbooks, quotes resource -- all also demonstrating impressive dynamism.

I could imagine a team of motivated volunteers (ok, some foundation stipends might help) doing something similar for AIDS, building "AIDSpedia.org" (I have the domain in case anyone wants to take the lead :) ). Right now an online search on topics of interest to global AIDS professionals, such as MTCT, surveillance, or monitoring and evaluation, provide a jumble of results. An AIDSpedia effort could simplify a lot of our lives by pulling together best resources on topics of interest. A good place to start would be to convert each of the 100 main session topics at the Bangkok conference as outlined in the conference wiki into a full AIDSpedia home page including definitions, news, key resources, background data, and individuals of note. This could grow to be an impressive free-standing resource, or possibly rolled back into Wikipedia in the future if that made sense.