UnaMesa:About
From UnaMesa
The UnaMesa wiki is a place where individuals can exchange information and tools that improve the quality of education, health care, and other social services. UnaMesa can be loosely translated as one table and was founded in the belief that everyone deserves a seat at the table of knowledge.
Operating this wiki is a service of the UnaMesa Association, an open association of people dedicated to improving the tools and information that help educators, healthcare providers, and communities around the world deliver better services with fewer costs. The organization functions as a virtual research and development lab with projects focused on creating practical solutions to problems, such as sharing medical records, that cut across individual services.
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[edit] Purpose of the UnaMesa Association: Improving knowledge-based services
UnaMesa was founded on the belief that we can and must do better in supporting our best educators, health-care workers, and others who serve beyond their self-interest. UnaMesa provides the legal, technical, and financial infrastructure to bring these practitioners together with technologists and others to create new ways of working that improve the quality of experience for everyone. Participation in these projects is open to everyone who agrees to contribute their work to be held in trust by the UnaMesa Association for public benefit in order to:
- guarantee that all practitioners have access to these tools,
- ensure that practitioners have the rights and ability to continually improve these tools
[edit] Working on common problems
We work on common problems that everyone faces: Do teachers and students have access to the best teaching materials? Are the records for a patient up to date and available for their health care provider?
When we find a better way, we try to create common, sustainable solutions that everyone can use and improve. Usually these solutions include some piece of technology, such as a simple system for scanning and securely sharing electronic records or web based notebooks that can be customized for any type of class. See Project:Shared Records and Project:TiddlyWiki projects. UnaMesa supports the development of these technologies and makes them available for free or at no cost for education, health care, and all other noncommercial purposes. In doing so, we eliminate barriers to sharing and help spread the best solutions for common problems.
[edit] Success metrics
We measure success in simple terms: Are teachers spending less time on paperwork? Are students more engaged in learning effectively? Are nurses caring more for patients? Must they fight a system that treats interaction with patients as a cost to be minimized? Does it pay for anyone to be a true advocate for the best interest of their student, patient, or client?
Most of us are fortunate enough to know a good teacher or caregiver, someone who made the system work for us and changed our lives or the lives of our children. The UnaMesa Association strives to make those experiences the norm rather than the exception, to make sure that providers of knowledge based services like education and health care have access to the best of what we know, and to promote social norms that recognize and reward their efforts.
[edit] The UnaMesa Approach
- Start with a clear problem that detracts from the experience of both the provider and recipient of a social service. For example, both students and teachers suffer if textbooks are out of date or unavailable to schools.
- Identify potential alternatives, for example web-based textbooks that can be updated by teachers.
- Try these alternatives in practice by helping a few classes develop and use web-based textbooks,
- and learn as quickly as possible what really works, i.e. putting the textbooks on USB keychains so they can be used and updated without a connection to the Internet.
As part of this research mission, we continually develop better methods of evaluating services and assessing the quality of experiences for both receiver and provider. These evaluation metrics measure the success of UnaMesa projects and progress towards the overall goals of improving education, health care, and reducing poverty.
The UnaMesa Association itself builds upon the work of others, including the Mozilla Foundation and the Apache Foundation that create open source software, and the Creative Commons Foundation <ref>http://www.creativecommons.org/</ref> which develops licenses and best practices for communities pursuing commons-based development. Thanks to all of these groups were leading the way, especially to the Mediawiki Foundation who developed the http://www.wikipedia.org knowledge commons and supply the software used in this wiki.
As with all UnaMesa projects, the output from this research will be freely accessible for all to use and build upon. We do ask for and rely upon community support to cover the cost of our operations and gratefully acknowledge sponsors who contribute funds to support research and development.
[edit] UnaMesa Association
[edit] History
The UnaMesa Association was officially formed in September of 2006 as a nonprofit 501(c)3 organization based in California with seed money and support from the Community Network Services group at Ricoh Innovations, Inc. The groundwork for the UnaMesa Association was laid in 2004-2005 when Greg Wolff was a fellow in the Digital Vision program at Stanford University and got firsthand knowledge of the many difficulties people face in trying to bring together people from industry, academia, and NGO's to work with community members on shared problems. UnaMesa makes this possible by providing a neutral place, a common ground with clear rules which align the interests of all participants so that everyone is treated fairly and the results of projects go to the benefit of all.
[edit] Board members
[edit] Advisory Board Members
[edit] Contact Info
UnaMesa Association 2882 Sand Hill Rd #118 Menlo Park, CA 94025 email: support at unamesa.org
