Discussion Report 26 Sabrina Erné - Mobile phones, audio wiki, etc.

HIV Wiki/UK Consortium on AIDS and International development This concept has been some time in gestation, but is now gathering speed. It actually breaks down into two interrelated concepts. The concept note gives more information and is intended to prompt discussion around both partnerships and improving the concept: File:HIVWiki Concept Note (3).doc. Your feedback is most welcome.

The long term vision for HIV Wiki is to provide a series of short briefs that together make up a knowledge base about the HIV response. This might cover everything from briefs on big policy issues to summaries of how money from different donors is spent in different countries to very basic FAQ about HIV. While we plan to shy away from medical information (for obvious QA reasons), we will see what happens as it develops.

While we have an ambitious vision, we plan to start (very) small. The concept note outlines a public wiki that is initially editable by only a very small group of organisations (although the discussion pages would ideally be open). The initial purpose would be to try to get some of the major communications NGOs to buy into the idea of producing shared briefs (instead of each doing a factsheet on vaccines they can do one together).

The incentive for them is the potential to free up resources to focus on translation into other languages and then dissemination (both electronically and in print as needed) via the networks that our partners have built.

The second strand is to explore linking this to an AudioWiki powered via the MobilEd platform. Our partner Meraka in South Africa are working on this at the moment. Users can SMS a keyword and get a call back from a server that reads them the closest matching brief. They are testing it in four African languages, as well as English.

Users can leave an audio comment at the end of the message, which can get fed back into the wiki. This allows for the generation of a community knowledge base, driven by those that lack access to a computer or the internet.

We aim to have a prototype with some basic content ready within the next few months. After that we will be looking for partners and donors to help trial this concept. Both ideas may run concurrently or we may just do the web wiki if funding for the AudioWiki is hard to secure.

Either way we hope to do things in a way that makes it possible for others to replicate (ie open source) and well documented. Let me know if your interested as we would be open to collaboration. Sabrina Erné & Anne Babcock