About Swala.Org
Bringing the Power of Community to the Global Health & Development World
Swala.org was started in the Summer of 2007 initially as a small project to help fellow Global Health professionals and new Masters in Public Health graduates more easily find pertinent information on the Internet. The idea has now grown and encompasses a whole variety of topics - still with the same purpose of helping Global Health professionals to easily share and find resources and knowledge to enable them to better run Global Health programs in developing countries.
What is Swala.org?
The mission of Swala.org is to easily enable the exchange of global health knowledge and practices among global health and development professionals, researchers, health program staff members, policymakers and students. Swala.org accomplishes this mission by providing an easy-to-use internet-based network in which Swala community members can collaborate in discussion forums, create communities of practice, search for and post global employment and internship opportunities and add to and comment on global health-related resources and tools to the Global Health KnowledgeBase. At Swala, we enable members with the ability to add content, edit content and comment on content so as to give Global Health community members a full opportunity to share their knowledge and experiences from the field.
Swala is comprised of three major sections:
Community:
In the community section, members can share their experiences, knowledge and best practices on a huge variety of Global Health topics such as Malaria, Lymphatic Filariasis, Program Integration and Immunizations. In my humble opinion, I believe that large arena of potentiall useful knowledge is locked up in the minds of our Global Health program workers and that very little of it will ever end up in peer-reviewed journal to be seen and shared. The Forums are bit specifically to overcome this large barrier but still put into text the experiences of Global Health programs' managers and staff throughout the world.
KnowledgeBase:
The Global Health KnowledgeBase (GHKB) is a repository of internet-based resources and tools potentially useful to Global Health professionals. The GHKB is compiled solely by Swala members so is structured similiar to WIKI. Each resource and tool which is added into the GHKB can be rated by Swala members based on their experience with the resource or tool. Swala members can also comment on all of the resources and thereby exchange their feedback on the usefulness of a resource. The GHKB can be searched in a variety of ways and each resource is tagged to help others find resources by keyword.
CareerCenter:
The CareerCenter gives professionals and new graduates an opportunity to get involved with a variety of Global Health organizations. The Global Health Organizations Directory catalogues many organizaions' information including job page link, contact information and the program areas in which they work. The Directory is can be searched using a variety of methods.
Both internships and employment opportunities can be posted to the JobBoard by organizations through a very straightforward interface. Search options are extensive and the interface is built to be clean, minimal and focused on delivering the job information to job seekers. All job positions on the JobBoard are global-health related.
The Advantages of Swala:
- -Completely community-driven
- -Easy-to-use interface built to ease searches and posting of information
- -Numerous communication and collaboration tools
- -Extensive member feedback and commenting across the site to other users in their searches
- -Solely committed to the Global Health Sector
- -Comprehensive information on Global Health organizations including contact information and job page links
- -Highly configurable searching options across the entire site
Where did the idea for Swala.org come from?
I began Swala.org in the summer of 2007 for several reasons. The first and foremost was seeing how the emergence of social networking web sites (commonly called Web 2.0) was changing the landscape of communications on the Internet. I have been a web developer by trade since the mid 1990s and have run a number of discussion forums or electronic bulletin boards as they were commonly called early in the history of the Internet. The latest evolution of the Internet has been towards enabling users to fully interact with websites and communicate with one another across various mediums. Few Global Health websites exist which fully exploit the advantages of the web 2.0 technologies and so the idea to use them in the Global Health sector was born.
My major reasons for starting Swala are:
Easier Job Searching
-My own recent job searches in the Global Health arena were not the greatest. Global Health organizations do not have a great place to post their employment opportunities information; I found that most of the sites out there to which a Global Health organization might post either charged quite high rates or were very poorly designed. I began to compile my job searches and the links to the different job webpages from each organization. Then I realized others might be interested in this information as well....and the Career Center was born. I wanted to see a single repository of Global Health organization information and have it be easily searchable across the spectrum of unique characteristics which define a Global Health organization. I also was not interested in charging organizations to post jobs as I saw this to be a big barrier for the many small organizations out there.
Easier Sharing of Knowledge & Exchange of Best Practices from the Field
-Community forums are now commonplace throughout the Internet, yet very few exist for Global Health program areas. I found that those which do are poorly designed, hard to search, not comprehensive or are poorly attended for various reasons.In my work, I have completed a number of Global Health-related literature reviews and found that there was an immense amount of potentially useful information found only in the minds of Global Health field workers, managers and researchers. Now, I'm not bashing peer-reviewed journals because they most most definitely have their place, but there just seemed to be no arena to EASILY share Global Health programmatic knowledge from the field. In my opinion, this knowledge is the least likely to ever be published in peer-reviewed journals but potentially the most useful when it comes to learning how to operate a global health program in a developing country and answering questions such as - what are the best delivery systems, how do I create a cold chain, should I give a per diem to community volunteers and the like. My hope is that the Forums will give us the opportunity to share this knowledge and perhaps begin compiling best practices for various actions - yes they may not be peer-reviewed, but if we can get experts together we may be able to put together some amazing work.
Bonding of the Global Health Community
The Global Health community is quite small; if you have worked for years in the industry you will find that you know many of the major players personally and know the names of other highly respected professionals. I want to give new global health professionals an opportunity to make a connection with one another and with their experienced colleagues and soon-to-be mentors in the field. In a sense, this section is an ode to the many social-networking sites out on the web which seek to create a community online of users with similiar interests. Well I know we all have the very similar interest of improving the health of global communities and I hope this area will be useful to you in getting to know other members of the Global Health community. Make connections with others, join communities of practice and share knowledge.
Community-powered compiling of Information
-Community members can comment and vote on each Resource and Tool added to the Global Health KnowledgeBase (GHKB) so that other Global Health professionals can read about the experience of others and help them decide which resources may be best for them to use. This idea came from the user-driven search engines which have emerged online. As compared to Google, which uses automated programs to compile its search database of websites, the GHKB is a user-compiled search engine of Global Health information. As it is not fully launched yet, I will leave a description of the rest of the GHKB quiet for now.
I hope that you find Swala.org to be a great resource for your Global Health work. This site is a labor of love for me and I always look forward to hearing from everyone in the Swala community and beyond.
Aaron Wallace
