Citizenship as a “Mainframe” Model

I recently watched Eric Dishman’s TEDmed talk on ted.com where he presents his research from his work from Intel on healthcare. He posits that basic technology combined with a mindset shift about the what healthcare is, could radically improve seniors’ quality of life. A basic example would be someone wearing a bracelet that has an accelerometer that can measure how quickly people are walking, how fast they react to the phone ringing, and other minute bits of data. In aggregate, these “behavioural markers” can show very early signs of disease that would otherwise go undetected.

While this was interesting in its own right, Dishman outlined five main sections in his talk, two of which could provide interesting fodder for the ChangeCamp conversation.

His third section (6:35) was entitled: From Mainframe to Personal Health. The idea is that the model of healthcare is similar to that of computing from the 1960′s. Fifty years ago there were huge rooms with tons of equipment that required lots of power and took specialized, highly educated people to run. They were expensive and difficult to access. Computing has since moved to be relatively inexpensive and distributed. The computing power in an iPhone, Blackberry or even some wristwatches gives lots of people access to lots of computing power. He argues that the healthcare system is the same way. Hospitals, doctors, nursing homes and the like are analogous to the mainframe computer from decades ago. It’s an expensive and poor way to provide healthcare to the North American population. He argues that a mindset shift, coupled with technology can move the power of healthcare into the home and into people’s peer networks.

While I’m not especially knowledgeable about health care issues, the idea of the “mainframe” made me think about government, governance and citizenship. With Government as an analogue for the hospital, I see movements such as ChangeCamp seeking to reassert control over the ways in which society progresses rather than relying on the institutional machinations of Government and its Band-Aid approaches to problem solving. One of the pillars of the ChangeCamp movement is technology and its ability to facilitate connections amongst people, avoiding the bottleneck that bureaucracy can represent.

The Fifth Section of Dishman’s presentation was on setting goals. His frustration with the American health care debate is that the conversation was around how public health care gets funded. He argues that there should be a goal. REFORM. Meaning going to somewhere from where we currently are. He proposed that the health care equivalent of “putting a man on the moon would be to have “50% of healthcare services to be delivered in people’s homes by 2020″.

Does ChangeCamp and other citizen-led, grassroots movements need similar “man on the moon” type of goals? Peter Block might argue otherwise, saying that the end goal of citizens working on projects is the community strengthening that naturally occurs. The argument for setting high level goals (at least from a government perspective) is that setting a quantitative goal can spur inspiration, much like the space race did in the 1960′s. The investment in science and engineering inspired a generation of people to take up the challenge.

Questions I’m still pondering:

• What is the best way for technology to enable peer to peer citizen leadership and action? What combinations of tools and processes are ideal?
• How do you bridge the gap between people who use technology and people who don’t?
• What kind of quantitative goal would one set to inspire movement towards a greater good?

Any other big questions that I’m missing? Any answers?!