Originally posted on Planet Well blog and posted on NetSquared Mashup 2.0 Competition 2007

Live Well
What is the Idea?

Elders and the rapidly aging within the nation will receive the connection to resources and support that they need in a manner that enables them to Live Well independently within the community and supported by the community.

Live Well is a platform that will enable individuals and those who support them to meet their ongoing needs through a community network and that harnesses the potential of technology to integrate their support within the communities in which they live.


What will change in the world because this project happened?

As care delivery is increasing pushed out of acute care facilities, as people are able to live longer with the assistance of chronic care treatments, and as the population ages, there is a need to improve access to social services for social services professionals, family/caregivers, and the individuals who need external support to Live Well in the community.

We aspire to promote people's independence and ability to live in the least restrictive environment possible. When adequate resources don't exist, people require "placement" into places where their needs can be met. A huge gap exists in the availability of place as well for people who do not require such restrictive measures, yet still need assistance to meet their daily needs. At this juncture, our country lacks the infrastructure capacity to "care" for people "in facilities," which necessitates developing means to support people who require assistance to Live Well in the community.

Live Well will provide a technology platform to fill the capacity gap in a democratized way while supporting our deepest aspirations for promoting liberty to all and the pursuit of happiness throughout all stages of life.


What information will people interact with to make this change?

Live Well will create a virtual nexus for connecting social services with the public in a dynamic way and will enable actual meeting of needs for people who require assistance.

e.g. Mrs. Jane Hammond, an 87 year old widow, lives alone and is assisted by neighbors. A neighbor creates a Live Well profile for "Mrs. J" and the profile enables the neighbor to see what social services exist for Mrs. J's needs within her city. The profile also links into programs like "neighborhoods" on facebook. The neighbor is able to indicate on the profile that Mrs. J needs some cat food, that request pushes to the "neighborhoods" application and another person who lives within a few blocks but doesn't know Mrs. J is going to the pet store and picks up cat food for Mrs. J. As, well the neighbor indicates that Mrs. J needs a quart of milk. A young professional stops at the grocery store en route home and using his iPhone checks local grocery store needs from Live Well, his grandparents use it in Ohio and he isn't there so helps other folks out locally. Finding Mrs. J's request under "grocery needs in your area," he picks up an extra quart of milk and drops it by her house on the way home. Reimbursement can integrated with a credit/debit network established directly to the stores and integrated to interface with Medi-aid and Medi-care. Community service effort may be credited to the individuals through a "time bank" system and/or employer recognition for companies that encourage participation by their employees as "in kind" donations.

Live Well uses technology to facilitate meeting social support both through virtual connections and "live" connections. Live Well disrupts and innovates the way we live in and think about our "communities" by creating a platform that bridges the virtual community world and integrates it with our residential community, that bridges the communities of needs with the resources for benefits, and that brings people together across boundaries to care for our community wellness.

While this is local in the sense of meeting needs peculiar to the way of western development, transience, and independence, as more people become geographically mobile and the displacement of people from larger family structure trickles into the developing world as the unintended (untold) cost of industrialization and 'economic opportunity,' the development of this kind of platform will be universally applicable.

What else have you done in this cause area?

This is an area that is ripe to grow. There is a real need for harnessing technology to meet the needs of those already aged, most importantly for those entering into this group. I am involved in bioethics, mediation, elder care plan facilitation and elder ethics issues, and I am particularly focused on the needs and concerns of marginalized populations.

I worked under the leadership of an ex-IDEO health innovation startegist and product designer as part of the product development team at ePatients.com, a web 1.0 company that sought to create products and services for patients and their families in the acute and post-acute care setting. Following the implosion of that company (not due to the product/fundability), the product development team co-founded a venture to support patient adherence in the chronic care market through user-focused design of a web-based platform, but the market bust at that time made funding impossible although people "got" the value and concept, the profits margins weren't big enough and the SE world only in its nascent stages focused primarily on education.

At this juncture, I envision this application could be developed as a stand alone or integrated into a portfolio of another company.

What inspired you?

An awareness that we are only as strong as the weakest among us and that though in the West, we fear aging, it is simply another process in the beautiful mystery of life. If we continue to deny it and fail to make the resources available to make this time of life one of possibility, the only people we fail are ourselves. I also see the grave economic disparities between our life in the West and those in other countries, and the influence of outsourcing and industrialization means that we are exporting an economic system that breaks down the social structure of those countries. It is my hope that if we can learn from those communities how to care for people within our own community and potentially reduce the export of practices that result in the transaction costs of destroyed social networks and/or to use technology to innovate the way we address this problem that exists increasing also in China and other countries.


What do you need at this juncture?

- Funders for initial development through Pilot
- Developers to realize a beta version
- People committed to harnessing technology and resources to meet local community needs as the first step in promoting the global wellness







Live Well by
Planet Well is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

The elements behind the living well app, see previous detailed post.

Posted on Planet Well blog 07 Oct 2007

Posted in response to the call for Ideas by the Social Innovation Camp 2007... tagged onto a similar idea already there for personal development evaluation targeted for at-risk youth, selected for SI camp 2007 ...

Idea

The "Be" Factor, a unique formula combined with an innovative 360 Skill Portfolio to create the Be Well, Work Well application
- that revolutionizes the way students are evaluated by promoting development and assessment of skills needed for success in the 21st Century.
- that teaches and evaluates adaptability, capacity for change, leadership/ethics, and communication skills in a meaningful way
- that provides students, schools, training programs, and employers with a "skill portfolio"

Be Factor: One's ability to set personal goals, modify and modulate behavior to achieve those goals, demonstrate reflective capacity on meeting personal goals previously established, exercise the capacity to refine goals, and sustain a "learning" mindset for personal development.

Be Well, Work Well: One's ability to work well with others, know oneself - one's moral/ethical outlook, understand one's strengths and weaknesses, demonstrate the capacity for responsiveness to others, capacity to tolerate uncertainty and difference, provide and receive feedback from others, identify one's leadership strengths, demonstrate commitment to develop one's weaker areas, harness one's energy to accomplish a desired outcome (including process outcomes)

What Social Need does it address?

Schools evaluate knowledge, and on occassion, analytic/reasoning skills, but life skills - communication, capacity, leadership- are not cultivated. Yet these skills are the cornerstone of success in the "real world."

Developing mechanisms that both cultivate and demonstrate a person's capacity, adaptability, communication skills, and personal development are vital to transform the status quo and to lead our education paradigm into the future.

This effort specifically arises out of an interest to develop a tool to evaluate interdisciplinary professionals who require a common skill set - such as communication, leadership, ethics, conflict resolution. In the absence of adequate tools to measure these skills, unequal access to opportunities arises, allowing less "skilled" people to be selected based on degrees and academic achievement, while the most important skill sets for success are "soft" skills.



What's New About it?

- While 360 reviews and skill portfolios are not, separately, new, this application would integrate these two approaches to innovate the educational paradigm with the aim of transforming the educational metrics and promoting cultivation of the most essential life skills that go untaught and unevaluated.


The System Would Work Something Like....

- One does a baseline skill self assessment and sets personal goals appropriate to the training course/situation, then at a mid-point interval or after each session (if short program), the person re-assesses their skills (blind to initial score), assesses their progress, resets goals, and upon completion of the course/training, the participant re-assesses skills, progress, and goal achievement. Participant also provides peer and coach feedback and evaluation.

- In addition to setting personal goals with one's own (blinded) subsequent "self assessment" of those goals, the person would receive assessments from peers and coaches... in order to reduce "rigging" the system (where we all give each other high scores), specific feedback comments/ examples would be encouraged/necessary for outlying reports....

- each person's personal assessment would be internally calibrated to how they assess themselves relative to others. e.g. if they are overly high for others, but low for themselves (vice versa) or if they rate everyone on a higher evaluation that weight might be calibrated as "less" weighted in the other's final score. That calibration would be incorporated into their portfolio and Be Factor.

- with coaches also providing assessment the student's peer feedback can be assessed for its calibration with each other and the coaches

- the self/peer/coach feedback and calibrations, hopefully, enable surfacing and reducing the adverse impact of personal biases that might lead some people in a peer or supervisory role to unfairly "grade" a person whom they don't like and/or is different.

- collectively, these three sources of input, akin to the 360 review in corporate realm, provide the basis for a "skill portfolio" for each student. More than simply self assessment the external validation from peers/coaches makes the Be Well, Work Well a robust skill portfolio that a person can share for professional development and job situations.

- the Be Well portfolio could be uploaded to a "Work Well" public portfolio that one could post on LinkedIn, Facebook, Monster, other sites for job seekers

- ideally, it would be a core platform with open source developer tools so that other institutions/programs/NPOs could build their own portals from it and for a nominal fee, they could use the central components/metrics whose validity and value arise from its measurement across institutions and training programs.

- the application could/would provide a foundation for accreditation in disciplines that have not yet established credentialing mechanisms (mediation, interpersonal, leadership, ethics training, professionalism, conflict resolution, etc)


What Inspired You?

The opportunity to build leaders from the bottom up - create an application that can change the classroom paradigm and metrics to reflect something meaningful and enable people with non-traditionally measured, valuable skills the opportunity to advance! Most of all, to leverage technology to disrupt the status quo - create recognition/ valuing of invaluable life skills.

I realized that these vital life skills - self knowledge, communication, leadership, interpersonal, capacity for uncertainty/difference, and personal development - are not taught and the tools to evaluate them are wanting - most importantly, we need to cultivate this thirst for growth when people are young and to provide recognition and opportunities for people who have them in spades ... it's a habit that one can grow, so why not start early?!


What are you Looking For?

I am seeking to develop this technology as a component for an leadership program. I know there are a variety of other disciplines/areas that could benefit from it, though I don't envision a blockbuster tech endeavor. I am considering pulling this out of the grant application and developing this component as a separate, private technology project as I am skeptical that foundation funders would fund this kind of SE endeavor.

Thoughts on that are welcome. Developers who might be interested in scoping out and building the project. Funders who would support the initial costs until endeavor is launched and self funding.





Be Factor, Be Well, Work Well Credentialing Tool by
planetwell.blogspot.com is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Planet WellMy first blog started in 2007, on Blogger was Planet Well.  Some of those posts appear here as well. 

Planet Well had the vision to provide interdisciplinary posts that C-CLEAR by discussing topics that included: 
Community, Culture, Leadership, Ethics, Art, Research 

About Planet Well

Planet Well Blog's Intention
With the planet well blog, we hope to open a dialogue about innovations in incubation and offer a forum to foster collaboration on endeavors challenging the status quo in the social sector.

Planet Well Mission
The PW mission is to develop and foster robust, practicable solutions that promote wellness, health and human dignity.

Planet Well Strategy
Building and expanding upon the great ideas of others, PW aims to achieve its mission by employing the tools of innovation, courageous determination, a bit of wit, and an unwavering commitment to excellence and humility in the problem solving process.

Planet Well Origins
Planet well ideas are the labor of love and fledgling brainchildren of Kate- a social innovator, pragmatic idealist, and pollinator- and collaborators, like you, invited to join the problem solving adventure.