AIDS Professionals Online Community

Tuesday, July 27. 2004

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.

Posted by Jim Cashel in New Ideas at 03:23 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

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Excellent idea!

But why UNAIDS? Most HIV professionals working in the field would not feel comfortable criticising any UN system organisation or action if the community was centred in the UN ...

#1 Jamie Uhrig (Homepage) on 2004-07-29 22:22 (Reply)

Good point, Jamie. It may be that folks would feel uncomfortable criticizing the UN, although I suspect the more common issue would be they would be comfortable criticizing the UN, but the UN would not want the criticism public. The World Bank's experience with public forums has actually been positive -- sure, criticism exists, but it is nearly always professional and constructive.

#2 Jim Cashel (Homepage) on 2004-07-31 12:46 (Reply)

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AIDS Matters

AIDS Matters is a Web resource for global AIDS professionals managed by Jim Cashel with the assistance of others. It is sponsored by Forum One Communications, a Washington, DC web strategy firm.