#hcsmca 2-year anniversary – what can our data tell us?
Cake creator & photographer Jenn Sprung @mindthecompany
Can you believe it? #hcsmca is 2 years old! Happy anniversary to us.
In the past 24 months the community has generated a lot of content.
- 5657 participants
- contributed 74,876 tweets
- in 96 chats.
Each and every chat is archived in the #hcsmca Transcripts Collection. We are sitting on a treasure trove of data just waiting to be mined. And for our second birthday, our gift to ourselves should be finding the jewels in our collective knowledge.
We’ve crunched numbers and made useful infographics at 6 months and 18 months thanks to Christine Crowley and Alaina Cyr. But what else can we learn?
As Yaser Alyounes reminded us:
@audvin We’re all analytics people here. The difference is some just don’t have the right tools yet ;) #hcsmca
— Yaser Alyounes (@YaserAlyounes) August 30, 2012
In this case, we need to know what questions to ask.
On September 19 at 1pm ET help me crowdsource meaningful questions to learn more from our data and collective knowledge.
- What would you like to determine about #hcsmca from our transcripts?
- What answers do we need to improve, advance and build capacity in health care social media?
Here is the transcript of the September 19th #hcsmca chat.
Colleen Young 
Happy Birthday to #hcsmca and thanks to all for being part of this amazing evolving community. Most importantly thanks to Colleen for establishing, growing, and inspiring this community that helped many of us in different ways from quick access to reliable information & knowledge to *cough cough* getting some people employment.
I’d like to kick start the questions I would love help answering:
1- What manuals/guides can we develop from content mentioned in #hcsmca chats? Many tips and great conclusions were shared, can we aggregate & group them?
2- Can we collect & group resources shared in an easy to access format (e.g. wiki, etc)? this would be the #hcsmca resource knowledge base a great aggregate of all the amazing links our community shares in a very structured and easy to navigate manner.
and
3- Can members give us examples of how they applied things they learned from #hcsmca in real-life & what was the result/impact?
Looking forward to a great chat tomorrow and once again, congratulations to Colleen and all and happy birthday #hcsmca
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As a patient, I have to ask- what are you counting for? I would be very interested to know which #hcsmca topics created the most buzz, as well as which sessions attracted the most patients vs medical professionals vs IT’s vs SM’s. Are the analytics able to tell us this?
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I think we should focus on how we can make the transcripts serve a practical purpose, and to me that means making them more user friendly. I agree that there is a wealth of information in the chat transcripts, but it is difficult to sift through to find the nuggets because of the length and the searchability of the transcripts.
With that said, I think we need to keep making the full transcripts available. But I’d like to see something as simple (in concept, not necessarily in execution) as a summary, snapshot or preview of the transcript provided with each. This summary could be something like pulling out some of the most (discussion-related) RTs, or quoting some of the most poignant tweets from each question. Even running a keyword analysis for each chat (or question) would be great.
To Yaser’s point, these could be the first steps toward creating topic-focused wikis or guides.
And one final thought (for now), I think it would be helpful if we consistently linked back to past chat transcripts that relate to new topics. It would help thread conversations together, and could also prevent us from having the same conversation twice.
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Happy Birthday hcsmca and I can hardly believe that it has been 2 years since I joined the chat on the very first day as a guest from the UK. You really have gone from strength to strength.
So there already seems to be a certain amount of data collected but what you are all alluding to is the meaty content locked up in your conversations. And the content is on different levels or can be viewed differently. Each conversation could be seen as a single entity and tagged with the themes of that conversation. That is a very useful piece of content to see the convo in its full version but more findable. But it goes beyond that – you want nuggets from inside the convo – individual tweets, most RT’d tweet etc.
So how do you make things more findable? I wonder that ALISS could help. Each convo could be a single resource, tagged as appropriate and in description field extra info could be put in such as inciteful tweet, most RT’d etc. All that is required for convo record – URL, title, description, and tags. You could have front page that only filters hcsmca convos or extra info that is deemed appropriate.
Not sure how the data could be exported into ALISS though. Do you know any coders that want to work with the open code?
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I crowd source all the time, and the archive is a treasure trove of information from previous chats. But in two years, there have been so many chats and posts that it’s often hard to find specific references to topics or conversations.
I’d love to see a searchable directory of #hcsmca users, listing their specific areas of interest and expertise, along with contact information. For me, the most valuable interactions with other members have started out on Twitter, but have progressed to either email, phone or face-to-face meetings. A directory would be useful for sourcing information or ideas from within our own group of experts.
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Thank you for all your superb ideas shared here and during the chat. Here’s the transcript: http://bit.ly/PuTwni
Laura O’Grady is spearheading the first steps in learning from our data. See her post for more details: http://lauraogrady.ca/2012/09/19/crowdsourcing-the-analysis-of-hcsmca-tweet-chats-initial-ideas-and-steps/
If you want to take part in the first steps, please send Laura an email: laura [at] lauraogrady.ca
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