The following are the outputs of the captioning taken during an IGF intervention. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
***
>> JOHN LEE: All right. We're on time, let's get started.
Okay. Good morning, distinguished guests. I guess a bit between now and the next opening ceremony, we have very light session of the Lightning Talk. And I thank you very much for this opportunity to share a little bit about the Hive. The title is Hive, People, Pandemics and Health Information Platform, which is WHO's digital space for health emergency preparedness platform, powered by communities. My name is John Lee technical officer at WHO headquarters, Geneva, Switzerland. I work with an area where teams are working on preparing for next pandemic. As you can see, it is not really a popular topic. We just went through a pandemic.
But the idea is that when next pandemic happen, not if, when the next pandemic happens, we will be ready as a Global community together.
The purpose of this presentation is to share the high‑level overview of the platform and as you can see, in the name, like the beehive, we envision a platform that is creating a space of activity, support and community to come together.
You see the photo up there is Kyoto. Great to be here. Did a little homework about the Kyoto, the colleagues sitting over here might know a bit better about it. 1467, the war happened. It actually trigger the Kyoto citizens to develop autonomous communities to protect their lives by themselves. And in 16th century, it evolved into another version (speaking non‑English language) which is another former rulers, formulated by the residents of the Kyoto for the purpose of making the comfortable for themselves and maintaining the favorable environment in the community.
I see that there is the important similarities there between the high platform and the community sense in Kyoto.
So we just went through COVID‑19. So devastation caused by the COVID‑19 pandemic has brought real urgency to strengthen the way the world prepare for, prevent, and detect the response health emergencies. The question is ... are we prepared to Globally respond to the next major pandemic? Are we ready to cooperate and perform across countries and Sectors to survey such a threat? Not only to protect health in major epidemic and pandemic and protect economic development, the social systems, and not repeat the histories again?
This is a bit of a chart about the tangible impact or devastating effect of COVID‑19 and other emergencies that we just went through? It was a destabilizing event. The effect of the pandemic is continue to reverberate in our society. Our political system, health system and Global economy. So it is important to note that pandemics are increasing in impact and scale and frequency. And the epidemic and pandemic risk has become a Global strategic concern. And ‑‑ I will also note that this was the second pandemic of 21st Century.
So like it or not, this is the new normal. We don't expect the frequency of the epidemics to go down, unfortunately. And in fact, the vulnerabilities of the all over the world and whether it is developed or developing countries, have increased not decreased. So the question is how do we prepare the communities before the next pandemic happens again? And especially, I mean, obviously there are many work to be done. But I'll be speaking to the preparedness of the communities when it comes to preparing for the next pandemic.
So the WHO Hive team envisions community‑centered trustworthy health information that facilitates health information and synchronous and asynchronous collaborating practices, supported by few functionalities, including community spaces, document repositories and documentation, chat, breakout groups. Some of the technological effect, but I guess the ‑‑ when you think about the community center approach, to me, it is fully informed and appropriately informed community who are actively engaging in developing solutions. As some of the earlier speakers in previous session mentioned very important topic about this as well. Is that having the community centered and community led is very important piece of preparing our digital ecosystem for the next era.
Each individual is a part of the multiple communities. For the workplace, can be a faith community, learning community like Universities or health or wellness. And each community influences an individual and their access to information and decisions an individual makes during the health emergency and how they behave.
So the challenges ‑‑ when the high impact public health event happens, it is often accompanied by infodemic, I think it was touched on in a number of sessions of the IGF. It is defined as the overabundance of the information whether it is accurate or not, it covers acute outbreak event such as the epidemic like in COVID‑19. The infodemics thrive today especially in digitized and interconnected ecosystem right now. And individuals are exposed to a very complex and highly targeted information ecosystem, and the content is not always from the most reliable sources. They can serve to confirm biases.
And as you know, the ‑‑ it takes time to build trust and it is hard to earn, but as we observe throughout the COVID‑19 pandemic, it is so easy to erode very quickly.
So small term WHO began to think ‑‑ I think this was before COVID‑19 pandemic. How do we actually get the right information to the right people? In the format that is actually appropriate? So that they can make decisions to protect their communities. And when we recently went through the COVID‑19 pandemic, we were able to answer the question of, you know, can we rapidly ramp up the communication and address the key questions and concerns with large networks? And the answer is yes.
We were able to use the opportunity to use the COVID‑19 pandemic to engage with the work network, industries, associations, the faith network, youth Councils and other associations and groups associated in across the world.
So building on some of those success that we envision building a digital community space that is safeguarding communities during high impact public health events and putting a space for people to come together and discuss whether they have a question about the situation, whether some of the public health social measures, what does it mean in their context and reach out to the expert whether it is WHO folks or peripheral networks and Minister of Health. And other efficacy groups and stakeholders within pandemic preparedness.
The few features I would make this into the technical one, there is a four key components and the policy and the events, so you can build on what you saw in digital hybrid format in the events such as this. That you can really build the collective intelligence together and you can access information that is slightly more efficient using technology, machine learning and the communities, and having a digital space people can go to when it comes to the specific topic of epidemic, pandemic preparedness.
All right. So with the and before we open up to quick discussion, with the participants here, you know, as a WHO, we're not a technology experts. But we are the technical experts in health. So we would like to invite as many experts as possible, especially in digital space and IGF is really important Forum to learn about what it means in engage in communities in digital space. So we need help from Global experts and in bringing the communities together while leveraging all the technologies available. And enabling building community relationships for the preparedness and response to health emergencies and most importantly, not go through what we went through is not leaving anyone behind. Addressing the vulnerable and marginalized and the communities whose needs are also addressed and they have a place they can go to, to interact with the people.
And I give the communities an opportunity to bring the local and contextualized information that is the more appropriate for them and also connect with the Global ‑‑ the experts of the global health public event issues.
Also, this will ‑‑ could create an opportunity to directly or indirectly manage some of the issues around the misinformation and disinformation. Like naturally by participating and not letting some of the questions and concerns progress into the, you know, the information bias, thereby progressing further into narratives than what we saw during the COVID‑19 pandemic that created a huge impact on public health and everyone's livelihood and life in general.
So with that, I will end my presentation. Thank you for your attention. And yeah, if you have any questions, I will invite everyone for a quick discussion before we wrap up.
Any questions? No?
All right. Then, we'll end this session early, and maybe we'll proceed to next main session. There are a few pens and brochures. Feel free to take them as a reminder. Thank you.