Health Democracy – GDHub hackathon

On November 26 2021, we hosted an hybrid activity as part of the hackathon held by the Geneva hub for Global Digital Health.

The topic was: How can technology help us collectively define the rules that affect millions of people?

The aim was to address political and economical barriers to health (critical public health), in particular how to overcome the centralization of decision-making, and the prescription of universalist, closed-source solutions to millions of people.

A launch video was released.

Goals

To explore how digital democracy methods and open-source technology can help thousands of humans:

1. hear each other’s reality and build trust;
2. reach consensus about common priorities;
3. put in commons resources to develop freely reproducible solutions within days, acknowledging our realities are plural, subjective, and locally rooted.

Assumptions

We acknowledge that:

• our health improves when we are part of decision-making;
• open-source technology is up to 99% cheaper than IP-based innovation
• today’s technology combined with appropriate coordination methods allow for collective decision-making, more rapidly and adequately than decisions made by an elite subject to legal systemic corruption (when the interest of a minority prevails over the collective interest).