Aleks Berditchevskaia and Kathy Peach at The Conversation: “A Global Pandemic Radar is to be created to detect new COVID variants and other emerging diseases. Led by the WHO, the project aims to build an international network of surveillance hubs, set up to share data that’ll help us monitor vaccine resistance, track diseases and identify new ones as they emerge.
This is undeniably a good thing. Perhaps more than any event in recent memory, the COVID pandemic has brought home the importance of pooling society’s collective intelligence and finding new ways to share that combined knowledge as quickly as possible.
At its simplest, collective intelligence is the enhanced capacity that’s created when diverse groups of people work together, often with the help of technology, to mobilise more information, ideas and knowledge to solve a problem. Digital technologies have transformed what can be achieved through collective intelligence in recent years – connecting more of us, augmenting human intelligence with machine intelligence, and helping us to generate new insights from novel sources of data.
So what have we learned over the last 18 months of collective intelligence pooling that can inform the Global Pandemic Radar? Building from the COVID crisis, what lessons will help us perfect disease surveillance and respond better to future crises?…(More)”