Geneva Health Forum Open Village
Vision
Background
6 in 10 humans still have no access to care, or do not adhere to it, despite rising investments. Alcohol-based hand rub and WikiMed illustrate how creating freely reproducible equipment and software with communities can: save millions of lives, increase integrity, cut costs by 90%. Cooperation-driven care is the only way to realize the 2030 agenda in time: health for everyone. We presente nine alternatives to the dominant proprietary excluding innovation model, to drive development towards a responsible, solidar society.
Aim
We federate not-for-profit communities enhancing collective health, enabling individuals to better take care of their health, and build more resilient healthcare systems through co-created, freely reproducible technologies. We lead and support a set of cooperation-driven, multidisciplinary, science-backed projects that foster solidarity and peer to peer contribution. We strive to mutualize efforts and tools, and help shape a common-ground for like-minded projects to work together on common outcomes.
Values
- quality of cooperation prevails over competition
- mutual support prevails over technical expertise
- freedom of adaptation rather than excluding propriety
- with and by user communities rather than for them
- creation-as-research rather than research after creation
Benefits
- sharing practices including open design, manufacturing of medical devices vs reproducibility, multidisciplinary community building, etc.
- mutualizing resources such as expertise of people affected, access to caregivers, health data infrastructures etc.
- developing common projects such as raising funds to test devices in various settings, hosting events to raise awareness on open health, etc.
- advocating for ‘public money, public-driven innovation’ policies in healthcare REF
Activities
Origins
The GHF Open Village was initiated by three people (Eric Comte, Thomas Maillard, Fabio Balli) and their respective organizations in October 2019, to value open innovation in medical care.
Patrons
- Geneva Health Forum is a biennal medical congress organized by the Hospitals of the University of Geneva (HUG). Since 2006, it "brings together key actors to help find solutions to global health challenges [...notably] improving health and care access in the world."[1] Usually held at CICG, it welcomes around 1600 medical professionals, NGO administrators, patients, and other interested people.
- Open Geneva is an association that organizes a festival of hackathons to "promote open innovation in a spirit of sharing knowledge for the common good."[2] Since 2017, it brings together about 1500 participants in 20-30 hackathons organized by actors from the civil society, with logisitical and communication support support from the association.
Organization
- Breathing Games is a global commons that "invites people to collectively create libre and open-source games and game controllers to foster mutual and self- care in respiratory and mental health."[3] Since 2014, Breathing Games hosted over twenty game jams, including a yearly event in Geneva – 2016 and 2017 as part of the Lift Conference, 2018, 2019, 2020 as part of Open Geneva.
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