These are excellent and useful comments. @sprague you are asking: what is most useful to share? I think the answer to this question isn’t entirely obvious in advance, but at the same time we’re not starting from scratch. Doing the conferences has kept us very close to people who are actively doing projects, and the barriers they face are at multiple levels: instrumentation, analysis, design of the project, domain knowledge. Amazingly, within the QS community there is (sometimes) knowledge at all these levels to help and get people onward toward their discovery, but there is a lot of serendipity required. For an example, see the project I’m currently trying to make progress on. It seems logical that I ought to be able to measure my tremor using a simple method, and in fact I got a great suggestion in the forum that got me a free app that did exactly what I needed, and then I hit a barrier around analyzing the data. More suggestions followed, and they are very plausible, but require familiarity with Matlab and/or Python. I think with more time these suggestions will evolve into an approach that I can manage, and I predict I’m going to learn something from my project - but I have, let’s say, “above average” access to community expertise. One of my goals in developing the pitch in such close consultation with people who have a history and a stake in QS is to remain true to what we already know is required by people, rather than to jump into technology solutions. That’s our greatest asset: our experience doing this. Figuring out what can be “templated” in some way for sharing is part of our collective job. To follow Richard’s line of thinking: recipes, standards, certification are certainly parts of the kit we could deploy, but which parts are most crucial and in precisely what sequence to work on them is part of what we’re figuring out.
@Steven_Jonas says:
This is so well stated, and seems of central importance to conveying the essence of our program. If our pitch as understood as delivering clinical knowledge (primarily) or supporting individuals to become “mini-clinical researchers” then we’ve gotten onto the wrong track.