Paton, C.New Media Medicine: A Social Network for Doctors and Medical Students

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Social Networking for Medics

Dr Chris Paton BMBS BMedSci

Research Fellow: University of AucklandPhD Candidate: University of OtagoDirector: New Media Medicine Ltd.

Building an Online Community

• My Online Communities:– New Media Medicine: 45,000 members, 70,000

visitors per month, 1 million page views per month– Health Informatics Forum: 700 members– University of Otago Web 2.0 Summer School: 36

members

New Media Medicine.com

New Media Medicine.com

New Media Medicine.com

New Media Medicine.com

New Media Medicine.com

New Media Medicine.com

Health Informatics Forum.com

Health Informatics Forum.com

Comp 113 Summer School

Comp 113 Summer School

Open Vs Closed

• Open communities:– Leverage the power of the network– Need more monitoring and moderation

• Closed communities:– Difficult to grow– Less need for monitoring and moderation

Choose the Technology

• Run off your own server:– Vbulletin, phpBB, Invision Power Board

• Hosted communities:– Ning, Wikispaces, Google Groups

Running your own server

• Expensive

• Need to have dedicated server management team (24/7/365)

• May need more than one server

• More customisable

Hosted service

• Ning, Wikispaces, Google Groups• Lots of different types of service• Ning seems to be best for building communities• No need for server management (or any knowledge of

servers at all!)• Not so customisable• Ownership?

Managing a community

• Online communities are composed of real people!

• Need to foster a sense of community spirit with rules for what is an isn’t acceptable

• Keep to the forum rules (no exceptions)• Recruit moderators from within the community• Moderators should be calm, rational people!

Example Problems

• Users arguing with each other• Moderators disagreeing about a course of action• Copyrighted material posted• Libellous material posted• Key is consistency and hard work

Growth / Promotion

• Open communities grow faster

• Search engines need to be able to index

• Advertising helps kick-start things

• Welcome new members

• Recruit moderators early

Potential for Online Communities

• Answer questions from other users

• Contribute to MCQ bank

• Contribute Videos or other learning objects

• Rate, tag and comment on learning objects

Trends

• Hosted Services

• Mash-ups

• Integration (e.g log-in)

More Information

• Email: c.paton@auckland.ac.nz• http://chrispaton.org• http://www.auckland.ac.nz/nihi/• http://www.hein.otago.ac.nz• http://www.newmediamedicine.com• http://www.healthinformaticsforum.com