On Creating and Sustaining Alternatives: The Case of Danish Telehealth reviewed by Colin Dodds

In his 2015 paper ‘On Creating and Sustaining Alternatives: The Case of Danish Telehealth’, author Morten Kyng tells the story of a Danish organisation ‘4S’ which formed around a shared interest in extracting maximum benefit for the healthcare industry from a set of open source IT tools. A key problem posed by the author, and in this case a motivating factor which led to the creation of the 4S group, is that IT tools created during research projects are generally underutilised once the project has finished. Thus 4S was an attempt to create a group that would look after, and promote the use of the tools in the long run.

 

The author reflects on what made 4S successful and in doing so offers lessons in how to sustain the uptake of technology following the initial design and implementation phases of development. He argues that it is necessary to create a group formed out of interested parties to help sustain democratic control over tools and resources created during projects. He also expresses the importance of continuing the development of the tools and resources through Participatory Design methods.  

 

I was surprised to learn just how difficult it can be to get good technology taken up, how much effort must go into getting the right people and groups in place to support the technology in the long run, and how difficult it can be to get users to participate in the technologies continued development.

 

I was not surprised to learn that good software documentation and tutorials can make a big difference to the uptake of open source software.

I would have liked the author to explore further the impact that the telehealth project’s backdrop of corporate tax dodging may have had on the success of the project. The author claims that health care staff were very keen to favour using the open source software created during the project as opposed to licensing software from a big corporation (and thus taking a chunk out of an already stretched budget), but should the landscape be different in the future in terms of the public’s perception of big corporation’s tax policies, it is hard to know whether similar projects would achieve the same level of engagement from hospital staff and patients, and ultimately this could affect the project’s success.  

 

This week I would like to choose the 2004 paper Introducing Participatory Design In Museums by Gustav Taxen available here: http://cid.nada.kth.se/pdf/258.pdf