Here is my latest poster as part of my PhD dissertation on breast cancer communication. It is a social online model that I am developing based on how bees work in a community. This is also based on the chart published by Business Week last year.

Here is what I’ve found so far:
People need to be motivated to share their bookmarks to benefit others to complete the cycle of gathering and sharing. For example, a woman with breast cancer gathers a lot of information online that helps her make better health decisions. She is motivated by needing that information to save her life. But that information is usually not shared efficiently, or at all.

If she has no simple way of sharing this information that she’s gathered, it only benefits her. Even if she is motivated to share her knowledge with others, she may not share it because she doesn’t know how. This could be easily remedied with an aggregator like Del.icio.us that was specifically for a breast cancer community. But for now, cross-pollination is only happening with the few and rare expert worker bees and Queens.

What if we could do more than share links, but categorized and searchable links through social bookmarking? Like with Deligoo or Simpy? And people could enter that breast cancer library through anyone’s blog widget? That’s what I’d like to do. So if you’re a programmer and this scratches an itch for you too, say hello. Or if this is already out there and I’m just in the dark, hey really say hello.

So until people are sharing their resources, not a lot of cross-pollination is going on and websites decay from inactivity and bees go hungry. That’s the theory anyway. I say let’s do more than fill our baskets, let’s share them.

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