Richard Knipel ([[user:Pharos]]) took me to the Museum of Modern Art the night of Friday 11th May. On Wednesday 9 May I was at a conference at Consumer Reports for the Choosing Wisely program, and at this conference I met collaborators in the program and came to understand what the program would mean to them.
Choosing Wisely is a campaign to produce and share information about healthcare diagnostic procedures. The premise behind the program is that physicians in the United States excessively recommend certain health diagnostic tests, and that if physicians and the public had greater access to information about these tests, then doctors and patients would be less likely to use these tests when the tests were unambiguously unnecessary. One way to describe the functioning of the campaign would be to recognize the following roles of players in the effort: there are producers of information like medical societies with health experts, there are sharers of information like patient and consumer advocacy groups, there are doctors who endorse procedures, then there are patients who receive procedures. The campaign strategy is to encourage expert communities to produce information, which they would give to information sharers, and hopefully the information sharers can get that information to doctors and patients, then hopefully the doctors and patients would consider the information when making healthcare choices.
At this 9 May event I met doctors, representatives from medical societies, and various groups advocating for patients (mostly labor-organizers). My part in this would be to give any of these information about how using Wikipedia as a platform for information sharing could result in increased access to healthcare information to people who might request it. The event was lovely, I met fascinating people, I came to understand healthcare advice from a new perspective, and I made professional contacts which excited me.
Consumer Reports is partnering with a consultant, Pete Forsyth of Wikistrategies, who is helping me to connect people who want Wikipedia information to this information. He is connected with the Wikimedia Foundation and makes introductions for me and connects me with resources to do whatever I want to do. While he was here we wanted to talk with Richard together.
I had been talking with Richard since before I had any thought of moving to New York City. He is the president of Wikimedia New York City and shows up in all kinds of Wikipedia-related outreach discussions. I met him in person for the first time on 1 May when he invited me to meet with some other visiting Wikipedians, and we talked for a few hours then. He took us across the Brooklyn Bridge and we discussed the upcoming Wikimania conference. I really like his ideas and talking with him. He is a positive, inclusive, and successful community organizer.
When Pete and I met him we talked more about developing relationships among Consumer Reports, Wikimedia New York City, and perhaps other community organizations. He has lots of ideas and more understanding than me of what others have tried in the past. Pete left for San Francisco and Richard suggested that we go to MoMA, and I was happy to have his accompaniment. We walked through Times Square to get there and since that was such a trafficked area I thought that I could have a coffee there but I checked out various places and they were consistently horrible even if they were selling espresso. I wanted a coffee and found one place which served me a bad espresso in a paper cup. Richard said that he had never been in the habit of having coffee.
We got to MoMA and I was in wonder. It does not surprise me now that I think about it, but I was not expecting that the museum contained a large number of works of art which are standards for learning about Western art. I think that most images shown [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_Of_Modern_Art#Artworks|here]] would be instantly recognizable to most people who have studied Western art. I quite enjoyed myself, and Richard told me about a past Wikipedia meetup here and about Wikipedia meetups in the area.
I quite enjoy working with Richard and expect to do more with him in the future.