Swarm Creativity Blog

The Home Visiting program of the Maternal and Child Health Bureau (MCHB) helps parents and children of disadvantaged families to lay the groundwork for a better future for their children. As part of the Home Visiting program, MCHB has launched a Collaborative Innovation and Improvement Network ( HV-COIIN ). This MIT video gives an overview about the use of COINs in healthcare. Among others, HV-COIIN draws on earlier experiences creating COINs from a project on Chronic Collaborative Care Networks ( C3N ) originally for patients with Crohn’s disease. In the HV-COIN knowledge sharing of great ideas by home visitors and social workers is already happening in conference calls and on the   HV-COIN Web site which will provide an online forum where these ideas can be shared. However, to make the innovation process more sustainable, two issues need to be addressed: (1) From sharing of ideas to implementation of ideas: While home visitors from Local Implementing Agencies (LIAs)...

The madness of the crowd or the wisdom of the swarm,..... either way, somebody got $40k on kickstarter (and counting) for making potato salad .

Thanks to a student team in the COINs14 spring course   (Michael Sidler , Simon Fluehmann, Yulia Schmitt, Yan Zheng, Nicolas Zehnder, Silvio Pirozzi) and Stefan Wagner from FHNW the Wikishistory functionality described in a previous blog post is now online as a Java Applet.   In order for the applet to work, the Java security settings on the Mac/Windows have to be adjusted The applet visualizes the World’s leaders trough the ages, visualized as a Wikipedia social network, with links between leaders when two leaders lived in the same period (say at 1000AD) and have a link to each other’s Wikipedia page. A time slider allows the user to jump to a year, from 2000BC to 2000AD, in 10 year increments. Afterwards the leaders of that period are loaded, and their social network is constructed. Try it out, the applet works best with Firefox