A Community for Online Action in Community Health

Today Guru, John, Swamy, Ravi, and I met in the Health for All - Learning Center workspace at SOCHARA. We discussed an action plan for the next 3 years (with a focus on 2023-24) for the Digital Archives Platform unit at SOCHARA. The archives becomes a core activity for a community of community health activist-scholars and activist-professionals to do study, reflection, action, and experiment online towards "Health for All". 

The larger hypothesis is that when we flood the internet with content related to community health, the second order and third order effects of that will lead to a massive movement by narrative building and discourse shaping towards community health.

The DAP at SOCHARA is going to focus on SOCHARA's own reports, publications, presentations, videos, audios, etc for the first year (along with medico friend circle's archive). This comprises items from Appendix A of Silver Jubilee Museum Archive Project that happened between 2016 and 2022. The year after that we will focus on Appendix B (which includes networks and organizations SOCHARA is connected to) and Appendix C (which has special focus themes and topics). What to do in year 3 will emerge by the end of 2023.

While this is just the Digital Archives part of it (which many organizations are now entering - NCBS, AICTU, APU, WIPRO, etc), there are many many other activities that this community can do:

• Communications for community health with things like podcasts, memes, reels, and so on need to be built.
• Stories of people and organizations need to be captured on wiki.sochara.org (which communityhealth.in now redirects to).
  
• A public discussion forum needs to be created (either as part of something like Azad Maidan or independently).
• Content of high quality and relevance like mfc bulletins and health taskforce report need to be modernized by conversion into web pages with hyperlinks.
  
• Effective sharing of resources with other similar efforts in the network has to be accomplished.
• The team at SOCHARA itself has to become comfortable with and active on these public documentation efforts.
• ... (your idea here)
  

There's plenty of interesting work that lies ahead. This month we will be focusing on the website and SOCHARA's evolution story, physical clean up of the unused sections of the library, and getting "systems of sustainability" available for use of the team.

The workspace in HFA-LC, after the meeting. I forgot to take a photo while the meeting was happening. The empty chairs symbolize the space for anyone reading this to come in and be part of the community.