I was directed to a terrific site today which I hadn't seen: Gapminder uses sophisticated animations to illustrate important data and trends with AIDS, global health, the Millennium Development Goals, and other issues.

The Global Fund talks a lot about transparency -- and acts on its word. Their Web site is an impressive testament to transparency, providing detailed information on proposals, grants and funding for the world to see.

Efforts at transparency should continue to improve. One feature The Global Fund will be launching shortly is a "drug price database" which will track the procurement price of ARV medicines as reported by all grant recipients. This will provide a powerful mechanism for promoting lower and lower procurement costs. Web-based "disclosure" programs of this sort have been powerfully adopted in other sectors (environmental issues, campaign subsidies), but this is the first good example I've seen applied to AIDS. In a perfect world there would be a parallel "black market" database, but congratulations to the Global Fund for moving this issue in a very smart direction.

The XVth International AIDS Conference's Web site does a nice job in presenting information and schedules about the conference. It misses many opportunities, however, to be much more effective in facilitating information flow and networking among delegates. Here are five ideas on how it should be improved for 2006:

1) Put conference content online: There is a great deal of information about the conference, but little from the conference: abstracts, presentations, posters, other information materials are available mostly in print or not at all.

2) Put delegate directory online: When I signed up for the conference, I gave permission to share my information with other delegates. But where is the directory? A good attendee directory is often the single most useful thing about attending a conference.

3) Search: With lots of materials online, a good search capability is required.

4) Links: Encourage links to the site through an updated policy and by building the site with unique URLs for each page.

5) Interaction: Every session, every satellte meeting, every training course lends itself to a unique home page which offers not only information about the offering but also the opportunity for delegates to interact. An easy way to do this is through a conference wiki, but a more structured community site would be the best option if there is sufficient planning.

The "real world" conference was very well organized and useful. The "virtual" conference can go a long ways to assisting delegates -- and ideally even those that aren't able to attend in person.

One important element of the Bangkok Conference is the "poster sessions" -- approximately 2000 (!) mounted posters with (in most cases) authors standing by. The posters represent a rich source of current material not found anywhere else. While it is hard to quantify, posters certainly represent a major percentage of all "content" at the conference.

Unfortunately, useful posters are hard to find (the guide book lists two thousand abstracts with no capability to search), and more importantly, once the conference is over the posters are gone.

One team I met from the US Census Bureau was frustrated by this issue in years past, and so they have a novel idea. They brought a team of three staffpersons with the responsibility of photographing as many posters as possible, developing the film, scanning the pictures, putting together the mosaic of pictures for each poster, writing descriptions of each poster, and putting all of the information into a database which might later be put online. It's a huge amount of work, but in their view worth it given the value of the information. It certainly is better than nothing and I applaud them.

But wouldn't it be easier for conference organzers to simply invite electronic submission of all posters? Or maybe they have them already from the application? Most posters are derived from Word documents, and those that aren't reside in various graphics formats. Why not put those online, make a huge amount of valuable content available, and save enormous effort and money?

The International AIDS Society, organizers of the XV International AIDS Conference, has an interesting Web policy which reflects the disconnect between important AIDS organizations and effective use of communications technologies. It in part reads:

"Linking to the websites: www.ias.se, www.ias2003.org, www.aids2004.org and www.ias-2005.org: Other websites wishing to link to the IAS websites shall obtain permission from IAS. Requests for permission to link may be emailed to secretariat@ias.se."

Permission to link? I thought this issue came and went years ago (see, for example, this Wired article from 2001). The IAS should be doing everything they can to encourage linking. They should be begging for links. Links drive information flow (and perhaps more importantly, search engine rankings). If the Web site for the most important international gathering on AIDS discourages linking, that is a big step backwards for all of us. (Incidentally, I note that the IAS main site currently has 287 links to it -- my little 25 person consulting firm has 2160.)

I suspect most reasonable people will ignore this linking prohibition. Actually, I just did -- three times. I hope I won't be arrested...

Which organizations should lead in articulating and promulgating effective global AIDS policy? To my eye the leaders should be UNAIDS, WHO, the World Bank, CDC and the Gates Foundation. How effective are these groups in this policy role? They certainly could be doing much better. For example, recently I searched Google on "Global AIDS Policy". None of these groups came up in search results -- or more precisely, they came up very low:

UNAIDS: #45
CDC: #71
WHO: #191
World Bank: #195
Gates: (not in top 200)

As a rule of thumb, you want to be in the first 20 search results (first screen) on Google or you are essentially "invisible". The groups faring well on Google are mostly smaller NGOs that pay attention to Web and communications issues.

UNAIDS should be the highest profile AIDS policy organization in the World (and in some ways they are as described in a recent IAEN study). I however tried to see if I could find UNAIDS with any search string on Google. I tried:

AIDS policy
AIDS ARV
AIDS orphans
AIDS blood supply
AIDS condoms
AIDS prison
AIDS vaccine

In no case did UNAIDS appear in the top 20 search results. That's disappointing. I haven't looked more closely to see what they are doing wrong with their keywords and search engine optimization -- but apparently neither have they. I don't mean to overstate the importance of Google, but I do think it serves as a reasonable test for an organization's attention to information dissemination, and the most important policy organizations should be doing much better than they are.

Which AIDS professionals are most influential on global AIDS policy issues? One way to approach this (probably unanswerable) question is to check Google citations. Google searches in the format ("jim cashel" aids) resulted in the following results:

Name / Organization / Google Citations

Peter Piot / UNAIDS / 25900
Tom Coates / UCLA / 6780
Paul Farmer / Harvard University / 6310
Richard Feachem / Global Fund / 5390
Helene Gayle / Gates Foundation / 4430
Alan Whiteside / University of Natal, South Africa / 3270
Seth Berkley / International AIDS Vaccine Initiative / 2740
Paulo Teixeira / Ministry of Health, Brazil / 2120
John Stover / Futures Group / 1520
Vadim Pokrovsky / Russian Center for AIDS Prevention and Control / 1320
Debrework Zewdie / World Bank / 971
Geeta Rao Gupta/ International Center for Research on Women / 914
Mead Over / World Bank / 748
Marina Mahathir / Malaysian AIDS Council / 721
Catherine Hankins / UNAIDS / 712
Milly Katana / Health Rights Action Group, Uganda / 680
Mechai Viravaidya / Population and Community Development Association, Thailand / 674
Michael Merson / Yale School of Medicine / 651
Salim Abdool Karim / University of Natal, South Africa / 593
William Makgoba / Medical Research Council, South Africa / 579
Zeda Rosenberg / Internation Partnership for Microbicides / 553
David Serwadda / Makere University, Uganda / 530
Bernhard Schwartlander / WHO / 527
Peter Lamptey / Family Health International / 523
Ties Boerma / WHO / 489
Susan Kippax / University of New South Wales, Australia / 443
Rafael Mazin / Pan American Health Organization / 418
Awa Marie Coll-Seck / Ministry of Health, Senegal /301
Yiming Shao / National Center for AIDS/STD Prevention and Control, China / 228

Sorry if there are misspellings or if folks routinely go by more than one name -- but this isn't intended to be published in Science, just to get an idea of whose voices are loudest.

I think very well of the UNAIDS site -- it is the closest thing the planet has to a "gathering place" for AIDS professionals. The UNAIDS team did a good job with the relaunch last year (to see from where they've come, here is the UNAIDS site in 1997 -- minus a few graphics.) I hope they continue to push the site, though:

First, while it dominates in the AIDS space, its metrics still are not dominant compared to other major policy-oriented sites. Here is a list of "links in" by Google:

UNAIDS: 11k
UNDP: 16k
UNICEF: 18k
UNEP: 24k
US Dept. of Ed: 28k
US EPA: 93k

Second, I suspect that folks at UNAIDS still view the Web as one of their secondary efforts, when in my opinion it should be the principal focus of their efforts. They have a huge comparative advantage, a good head start, and should think very ambitiously about the features and resources they add online in coming months.

In establishing this weblog, I wanted to take a look at the best blogs out there addressing the global AIDS epidemic to learn from folks that know more about this than I do. I first looked on technorati which tracks nearly three million weblogs. I found six posts in the last week on "global AIDS", some of which are moderately interesting. But only six posts? As a point of contrast:

"iraq war": 609 posts
"global warming": 338 posts
"school vouchers": 33 posts
"kyoto protocol": 26 posts
"school prayer": 19 posts
"kitchen sink": 68 posts

There you have it -- folks running blogs are interested in pretty much every topic more than global AIDS -- including the kitchen sink. This would be easy to dismiss as reflective of the "teenage blogger" stereotype (which isn't so true -- bloggers tend to be older and more educated than even typical Internet users). And why should "global warming" get fifty times as many posts?