Spreading the Word: Embedding as a means of advocacy

Throughout spring 2009, the Media Lab Helsinki had a common project with the World Health Organization to investigate and create new online concepts for WHO’s “Health Action in Crises” department. Our working group worked together with the WHO staff to evaluate to what extent social web concepts could be used for their public web activities.

The way WHO is using online content is very traditional. Also, the use of mashups and other “web 2.0″ concepts is strictly limited by WHO’s status as an international governmental organization, with an extremely strict policy on data publishing. The main findings of our initial research were that

• the web is one out of many vehicles for WHO’s message, with decisionmakers as their main target group
• the website reflects the way content is produced, not how it is consumed
• the potential of multimedia content has well been recognized by WHO, but it is “hidden” in a separate section

During a visit to the WHO headquarters in Geneva we validated our ideas and adapted the three main conceptual ideas – visualization, streaming and embedding – to the realities of the environment we are working in. We learned about WHO’s role of assessing, visualizing and disseminating information, made ourselves familiar with the organizational and technical backgrounds and reframed our initial ideas in the light of the notion of “advocacy”.

The idea: “Giving away” data to boost advocacy

WHO has a mandate to bring about change around the world, by proposing conventions, agreements and regulations, by assisting in developing an informed public opinion, by promoting international standards etc. WHO uses the internet chiefly as a tool for their institutional role in advocacy.

To support their goal of advocay better, we proposed to

• present content as a constant stream of data
• allow the embedding of WHO data elsewhere to multiply the targeted audience
• enable easy creation/addition of information in various formats and by different sources

A prototype for illustration

Our tool prototype is a small Flash application that individuals, organizations and governments can embed to their site. The tool can show either a selected piece of WHO information (the most typical pieces are graphs and maps) or it can update automatically to show the latest information from a selected WHO source, for example latest news from a certain health crisis.

Our concept requires that the decisions about publishing are not made for reports, but for smaller pieces that reports are made from: graphs, images, maps and tables and that they are reviewed and published as soon as these individual pieces are ready. This would provide the stream the tool would latch onto.

When the tool is set up onto WHO’s crisis page, it would be a visually attractive way to explore the latest news about the crisis. If the reader, “data consumer” is from media, or an interested blogger, he may decide to want to use the visualization he found on his article about the issue. The easiest way to add the visualization to the article would be to embed the tool into it. The tool provides a short embed code that the reader uses on his page, thus becoming “data republisher”.

When other “data consumers” find the embedded visualization on blogger’s or journalist’s article, they may try clicking around it and find other visualizations or want to find more information about some of them. The tool links back to the crisis site where it initially came from, thus makes it known to the readers.

Using the power of free data in a restricted environment

Our proposal is based on a strong belief in the changed realities of today’s internet. The web of today does not work in a top-down matter and content consumption habits are more than ever based on multipliers serving their “followers” (as they are called in Twitter, for example) with recommended readings.

While the early internet had simply been an additional distribution channel for publications, the so called “Web 2.0″ (turning the internet ultimately into a participatory medium) brought along the major change that the spread of a message can no longer be ensured by simply publishing it, but the publisher has to ensure that it is discovered and shared by their target group.

Another major change to be acknowledged in the internet age is that giving away information is a good thing. There has been a change in paradigm; where in earlier times power was about having (and holding back) information, “power 2.0″ – the power in the world of today – is all about giving information.

As a UN agency, all information published under the WHO brand has to be verified and approved. This limits the use of participatory strategies many current web concepts are based upon. While utilizing user generated content is not possible, the social web can still be utilized for distribution.

Two major principles of publishing data on WHO sites are that data has to be correct and accessible. We see that WHO communications can maintain trust and transparency in modern media environment by breaking up reports and communication products into smaller particles and publishing them as quickly as possible in public streams of data. When these pieces are accepted for publication, they can be streamed, trusting that the other existing information will provide the necessary context.

Download our concept poster as PDF (1 page, A1 format, 2.6 MB)

Download the entire PDF project report (21 pages, 5.5 MB)