UnaMesa Academy Proposal

Imagine a clinic designed by doctors and nurses. Do they spend hours every day filling out paperwork instead of seeing patients?
Imagine a school designed by teachers and students. Does the teacher spend every evening grading papers and filling out report cards?

The proposed UnaMesa Academy will bring together small groups of nurses, teachers, and doctors to learn from each other the best ways to use free software and web services in order to deliver better care and education to their patients and students. UnaMesa will provide the technology infrastructure, support, case studies, and basic training. Caregivers and educators will bring their passion for service and deep knowledge of their needs.

Working together, each class will define a set of best practices for their situations, will learn how to achieve those practices with today's technology, and will take that learning back to their organizations. After this initial course, these groups will communicate online to continually improve their systems and support each other. UnaMesa will provide ongoing technical support and will integrate the needs of users directly into the design and development process of the information technology. Once completed and ready for use, this technology will be made available free of charge.

We propose that this model can address the fundamental barriers that underlie the digital divide and have prevented information technology from achieving its potential for improving health care and education. To that end, we intend to pilot this approach with several classes in 2008. This wiki - http://academy.unamesa.org/ - will serve as the place for planning those pilots and discussing the approach.

How you can help

At this stage, the UnaMesa Academy is an idea that's making progress. We're requesting your feedback and suggestions in order to make this a successful project that will greatly benefit the community.

• Do you have ideas about who might participate or what groups would be ideal for this approach?

Please join in the discussion with your input either by editing these pages directly or using the discussion tabs above.
To get started, we've set out a few categories and questions that need to be answered before we can make a serious proposal to begin a pilot.
Please see the Pilot Plan for details. In particular:

• Schedule What's a realistic time line? Can we do a pilot class with school teachers in summer 2008?
• Target Audience Clinics? Schools? Head Start programs?
• Free tools and demo Simple, secure records storage and exchange? Forms used in best practices?
• Facilitators Domain experts? Technologists? Other teachers and caregivers? Social entrepreneurs?
• Curriculum Basic tool training? Analysis of existing work practices? Case studies? Creating "How To" videos?
• Finances Community sponsorship of attendees?
• Measures of Success Client and caregiver satisfaction? Time spent on paperwork? Quality of experiences? Feelings of control?

Note that the UnaMesa Academy proposal is being considered as the main mechanism by which the UnaMesa Association can deliver IT Infrastructure for social services. For more info on the UnaMesa Association, see http://www.unamesa.org/, and for more info on UnaMesa projects, see http://www.projects.unamesa.org/

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