BioMed Central Blog

Guest blog: Harnessing science to foster sustainable improvements in the developing world

This guest blog entry from Evelyn Strauss describes Scientists without Borders, a new initiative from the New York Academy of Sciences.

Google's power is unprecedented, but even its strength fails when faced with certain tasks. For example, a person seeking organizations that work on neglected tropical diseases in Africa might type "Africa neglected tropical diseases organization" into the Google search box.  If so, 127,000 results would pop up. Sorting through these items is daunting enough—but what if the searcher desires more specific information? Say this individual is looking for blood samples from schistosomiasis patients or wants to help an African university that aspires to bolster its curriculum on neglected tropical diseases. Perhaps he or she wishes to study oesophagostomiasis in Ghana and wonders how labs there cope with the frequent power outages that plague the country.

The new Scientists Without Borders^SM Web site (http://scientistswithoutborders.nyas.org) might help. Launched on May 12, its cornerstone is a free database that collects key information about individuals, projects, and organizations that work—or would like to work—in the developing world. This resource will allow the scientific community to mobilize and coordinate its activities, thus harnessing its potential to promote global health, agricultural progress, environmental well-being, energy development, and so on. The online tool will fuel communication, link individuals with institutions and projects that would welcome their expertise, allow people to register their wants and assets, and provide a mechanism by which organizations can build on one another's progress. With a few clicks, users can start matching needs with resources and find out who is doing what where. Already, 141 organizations, 82 projects, and 421 individuals from all over the globe have completed profiles. The initiative has raised more than $1 million—and a wide range of world-class organizations have joined as programmatic partners. The New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS), which is spearheading Scientists Without Borders, envisions it as a community venture and actively seeks feedback about how the site can best serve its members.

As you know, vast communication gaps limit sustainable improvements in the developing world. Materials, expertise, and advice about how to navigate logistical challenges can be hard to track down. Finding complementary partners poses difficulties because organizations don't document their activities in a public log. Well-meaning agencies "reinvent the wheel," waste resources, and don't always deliver what's needed most, because local needs are not catalogued in a central location. A mechanism to address this predicament is needed now more than ever, with the growing realization that integrated rather than narrow approaches are crucial for addressing key global challenges such as extreme poverty and its associated public-health problems.

With generous funding from Merck, the initiative's founding supporter, and other companies such as Johnson & Johnson, GlaxoSmithKline, Novo Nordisk, Pfizer, Bausch & Lomb, Lundbeck, and Vestergaard Frandsen, NYAS is building and hosting the Scientists Without Borders Web site. It belongs, however, to the people and institutions that are improving quality of life in the developing world through science-based strategies. Members of this network—individuals, projects, and organizations—enter their own profile information in the database and invite others to join; they also vet other members by posting comments through a system similar to Amazon's book-rating scheme and contribute feedback about the site . Crucially, the community strongly influenced the blueprint for Scientists Without Borders.

Informed design

At the end of 2006, NYAS president, Ellis Rubinstein, hired me to bring to life a Web portal that would "create a broad array of synergistic linkages among the many bold but heretofore unconnected efforts to generate science-driven, sustainable development in the poorest of the poor communities" (see his article about the conception of Scientists Without Borders). I interviewed organization heads, researchers, project leaders, and others from institutions in the developed and the developing world and the NYAS team translated their responses into site content and functionality.

I was especially interested in individuals who lived in the developing world and had seen many agencies come and go. "What kind of mistakes do well-meaning foreign agencies commonly make?" I asked. They all echoed the thoughts of Walter Alhassan at the Forum for Agricultural Research in Ghana. "Donors and NGOs start a project and someone else is doing something very similar," he said. "People don’t do their homework about what has gone on before or what is happening now … Donors will come in and want to throw money at a problem and not know what has worked and hasn't worked before. [There’s] no institutional memory because the data isn't easily accessible."

From that observation, we crafted a "Lessons Learned" page, which asks registrants to record milestones met, next steps (what specific activities would maintain, bolster, or advance your project's accomplishments?), and challenges (what obstacles must be removed for further progress to occur?).

My visit to Ghana last summer further refined our plans. For example, we needed to make the site accessible even through extremely slow internet connections. My earthlink home page routinely took 30 or 45 minutes to load and one lecturer at the University of Cape Coast told me that he'd be satisfied if he could accomplish a single task on the Scientists Without Borders site per day. He typically starts loading a Web page or conducting a search and then reads a journal article until the computer task is complete. I returned home committed to devising better solutions. We created a low-bandwidth version of the site that contains few images and other features that might hamper use. Furthermore, we designed the data-registration forms so that the system saves information one page at a time; users can leave and return without losing their work.

Data in action

These submission forms request various pieces of information from individuals, projects, and organizations. Some fields—such as experience, languages, and other items that typically appear on a CV—apply to only one group of registrants (in that case, individuals, but not projects or organizations). Importantly, everyone can enter needs and resources. Perhaps a university wants to recruit foreign instructors to teach short-term courses or needs an LCD projector to launch a graduate-level journal club program. A project might seek the closest analytical lab or microbial typing facility; scientists from all over might desire collaborators. Even researchers who don't want to leave home could volunteer to help a colleague prepare a manuscript for publication.

The site's search engine ensures that someone searching for a "teacher" will find an "instructor" or an individual who is able to provide "instruction." Furthermore, it allows visitors to slice and dice data however they'd like. They can find nutrition-education projects in a particular country that serve children or identify infectious disease specialists in east Africa who have a PhD and work at a university. The database can list projects in Kenya that are studying drought-resistant crops or individuals from all over the world with expertise in biodiversity who are willing to travel to Tanzania. Similarly, those biodiversity experts can pinpoint individuals, projects, and organizations that might put their skills or other resources to good use. Visitors who don't know exactly what they're looking for (or might offer) can browse and refine their explorations step by step.

The site displays office locations as well as where individuals, projects, and organizations work or are willing to work; in some cases, an agency or person might be based in Paris, for example, but run a project in Rwanda or Benin. In the high-bandwidth version, office locations for search results can be viewed on a Google map as well as in list form. After the site is more fully populated, regions with many activities will display a dense collection of icons, each of which represents an individual, project, or organization; in contrast, areas with few activities will visually convey gaps. The database therefore communicates not only what is happening where, but also how much is happening where. One of our challenges is to communicate to individuals and organizations the importance of separately register pursuits at locations other than their office addresses. Doing so is the best way to convey their full geographical reach.

Come aboard

Since early January, the database has been accruing information; it opened its doors last week so users can now mine the data. The enterprise is relying in part on its members to ensure quality and appropriateness of the individuals and organizations that will continue to populate the site. It employs a model, similar to that of LinkedIn, that allows people who have submitted full profiles (and agreed to keep them updated) to recruit others. The name of the individual, project, or organization that invited the new member will appear on that member's profiles, thus promoting a sense of community responsibility. Aspiring registrants can also request an invitation from the Scientists Without Borders administrators by filling out a brief application form on the site.

The potential power of the database is tremendous, but depends on the extent to which it is populated and used. To raise awareness about the initiative, we have been promoting the type of "viral marketing" that other Web sites have harnessed to create different types of social and professional networks. For example, organizational partners are expanding the database's universe by educating their constituents and contacts about the initiative. At press time, organizational partners included the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa, the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World, the Earth Institute, the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research, the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, the Pasteur Institute, Duke University Health System, the African Centre for Technology Studies, the Sabin Vaccine Institute, Health Sciences Online, SciDevNet, the University of Ghana, INDEPTH Network, Seeding Labs, Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative, Universities Allied for Essential Medicines, the Science Initiative Group, the Information Training and Outreach Centre for Africa, the International Foundation for Science, the Nigeria Higher Education Foundation, the American Society for Cell Biology, the Partnership for Quality Medical Donations, and Sustainable Sciences Institute. We welcome additional organizational partners.

The initiative belongs to you, so please participate in its evolution. Create a profile for yourself and your projects. Tell leaders of your organization—and other worthy organizations—about Scientists Without Borders and encourage them to register. Explore the site, let us know when you make meaningful connections through it, and tell us how we can improve it to better meet your needs.

 

Evelyn Strauss, Ph.D.

Executive Director, Scientists Without Borders

Posted by Matthew Cockerill at 20:06    Comments (1)