A Web Networking Proposal for ICIM

Fully Engaging Technology; A Web Networking Proposal for ICIM

As I answer the phone for the International College of Integrative Medicine, I am often asked if we are a college where people come to study. We do not have a physical campus, a consistent student body, or a degree-granting academic program. However, I reply that we are indeed a kind of “college;” we are an association of medical practitioners who come together to learn, teach, and share knowledge in a supportive community. Without bricks and mortar to contain and locate this college, our main portal and hub is our website. This is where the public finds us; this is where our members come to participate. Though we meet in person twice yearly, our email and telecommunications provide the bulk of our interactions. Already we rely on technology to help us associate closely with each other. How can we develop by fully engaged the smorgasbord of technological potential available to us?

To guide my answer, I will use the model of a college campus, echoing Adam Greenfield’s assertion that in the next few years, computers’ “processing power [will be] so distributed throughout the environment that computers per se effectively disappear (p.1). As we envision ICIM’s website home, we need to assume that it will be able to exude the atmosphere and emotional resonance of a college campus, with the logistics of technological information secondary to the natural thought process of a college community.

We have made great strides in building an engaging website over the last two years. To continue that growth, I would like to think about web networking using four themes: Finding, Staying, Participating, and Reaching Out.

Finding

Currently, a Google search for “integrative” medicine does not even bring up our website http://www.icimed.com/. We have been offered the use of a portal to help us register on search engines by Empowered Doctor, an essential first step if we are to take the resource of the web network seriously. As a smaller, but also important step, we are beginning a campaign of asking likeminded groups, our members, and our corporate sponsors and friends to link to our site, consciously building the web of links that will draw search engines our way.

Staying
Once the public finds our site, we can see by our web stats that many spend very little time on it. Currently, the sidebar choices we offer are: Home, Find a Practitioner, Doctor of the Month, Conferences, Corporate Sponsors, Marketplace, Classified Ads, ICIM Forum, ICIM E-Journal, Specialty List, Library, Links, Board, Members Only, and Member Application. Some of these can be developed to be more engaging, interactive, or useful, and more can be added to make our site a memorable destination. In the next year, we intend to add or re-design the homepage, a multi-media page, Politician of the Month,, Library, and Marketplace.

Our campus commons, or homepage could be made beautiful and intriguing, rather than utilitarian in style. Friendly images of doctors taking care of patients could fade from one to another with original music that we sell our our Marketplace page. This kind of welcome is necessary to prepare the way and open the heart for the learning and interaction that is to follow.

We have a wealth of video lectures and radio shows recorded by our members that we must display prominently on our website, making us multi-media. This provides our “campus” with those winding pathways that help us encounter people we might have otherwise missed. Internally, our links to each other will be enhanced, but we can also use this raw material as YouTube data and Empowered Doctor’s medical news story releases, for the benefit of raising the profile of integrative medicine.

A new page of the site is in the works; “Politician of the Month,” where we will encourage and post comments on these profiles of professional politicians who make integrative medicine part of their platform.

Of course, every college needs a library at its center, and our “library” page needs to be expanded to include the full texts of donated books written by members. We need to develop a FAQ page with an automatic range of answers, reflecting the fact that we have diverse opinions on some issues, and giving the basic information about ICIM. As part of our library, we must make our collection of articles, power points and newsletters available to the public in a searchable way.

Some of our members have written books that are for sale on our Marketplace page, and we can quickly expand this section by making automatic links to Amazon.com for these resources rather than typing and scanning all the information ourselves. By becoming an affiliate for Amazon, our organization can get a cut from every book sold that we recommended. We can also include links to movie trailers like Lorenzo’s Oil and The Tomato Effect that portray issues struggle for integrative medicine on an emotional level (don’t forget the fine tradition of a college campus bonding over an art or international film series).

Participating

Making our website a place where people want to linger and stay is an important goal. Allowing the people to participate in the creation of the site can save hours of administrative time as well as add even more valuable data with a prosumer flavor.

Our professor’s “offices” will exist in the form of email and website links to board members and guest speakers we hire for conferences, making them thoroughly accessible for questions from member-students before and after their lectures with us. The word college implies knowledge, that we are an organization that exists to share knowledge about the latest scientific findings in integrative medicine. If our website is a static data base, it will hold much information, but The Social Life of Information reminds us on p. 119 that “first, knowledge (as opposed to information) usually entails a knower.” There are people, teachers behind all that information on the website, and we need to make the human connection tangible to our member/students. It is this engagement that causes learning and breeds knowledge. On a very practical level, it is also this kind of engagement that will keep our members and public coming back to our site and in the long run, keep our group alive.

There are interesting features our webmaster has already built in our campus landscape that are special and hard to find elsewhere. “Find a practitioner” search by zip code is one. Another is a list where members have each defined one of the integrative medical specialties they do. To fully make use of modern technology, members should be able to add or change these definitions at will.

Every campus needs a stadium full of students, and our membership could be more engaged and more easily sustained with an automatic PayPal payment for all yearly fees and conference registrations. I’d like to see an email go out yearly to the physicians, letting them review their membership listing, email me revisions, and pay with the click of a button. We need to find a way to take credit cards or PayPal over the web to make these processes realistic. We need to create templates for online registration for conferences, as well as exhibitor registrations online that are self-serve. Once someone registers, they should be sent a packet of information automatically. This feature could save hours of individual calls and emails asking for clarification of conference information.

Reaching Out

One of the main reasons we have a website is to do outreach. It is time for us to think of outreach as something beyond just our site. It is time for ICIM to become a member of the worldwide web community and begin to participate in the wider forums of web discussion and discovery. College campuses have the same challenge.

Now that we have the ICIM Forum for discussion on our website, we need to make sure we use it! Our board president is the moderator and will be first in line to answer questions that arise. As the Executive Director, I will be monitoring the forum to insure only legitimate sounding students and doctors are posting. Most importantly, we need to recruit medical students to make sure discussions get started and so that others know that the venue is available. One of the best ways to do this is to make sure our forum is linked from the American Medical Student Association, one of the organizations with which we have a good working relationship.

Our webmaster has built the forum so that when someone signs in to leave a comment, they are automatically added to an email list. We use the mass email feature of our website to send out a monthly E-Journal with reminders and links to articles that have commentaries from some of the medical students involved with ICIM. We can now add the extra emails from our forum visitors and have a way to keep in touch with them. Our E-Journals will be listed on the public side of the website, so that they can be browsed by anyone who visits our “campus.” These E-Journals are also meant to be messages to the outside world from ICIM. We need to find ways to widen our audience.

Another important and easy way ICIM could reach out is by putting any videos of our members out on YouTube. We have already started participating in Wikipeadia, with a definition of ourselves. The next step is to appoint several Web Network Research Ambassadors from our website committee to continue expanding our Wikipeadia submissions, purposeful blog sites about our organization, and searching for ideagoras where our research could be put to use and more widely seen.

Conclusion

This vision for the ICIM website may take a while to come to fruition. Most certainly, it is a vision that will constantly change and be adapted as new technology and resources quickly become available. Our current budget for website maintenance is not adequate to include website development, and we need to look at a major expansion of that budget item in later years if the board agrees that our web presence is indeed the essence of where ICIM lives in society. We are expecting approximately $10,000 in corporate sponsor revenue in the next few months, and I propose that we use some of these monies to invest in website development before the year’s end. Our priority is learning, and we can take our cues from institutions of learning, and become a college in more than name only. Beyond bricks and mortar, we have the building blocks of knowledge, dedicated “knoweres” to communicate it, and our website is the best way to make these available to the world.