This page is the drop off point for assignments of User Interface Design (IS213) class at the School of Information Management & Systems.

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Project Summary

The concept of "Healthy Communities" first appeared in the World Health Organization Conference in 1986, when Len Duhl (professor of public health at UC Berkeley) spoke on the idea that the health of a community is like the health of an individual, and the two are interconnected closely.

In this information age, we have seen patients increasingly becoming partners in their own health care, researching health information online and participating actively in clinical decisions with their providers. However, in the larger arena of public health, or community health, there is a lack of partnership and participation by the general public to improve community health. It is not that people don't care to improve the quality of life in their communities, but they lack the appropriate tools to become easily involved. For example, issues such as residential crime rate and releases of a toxin in a community affect our living conditions and environment, and can in turn affect our psychological and physiological health. What can ordinary citizens interested in improving community conditions do about these issues currently? Not much, since there is no easy way to get involved. Although professionals from areas such as public health, city planning, environmental planning, sanitation services, law enforcement, religion, and other fields work hard to improve community health, there is also a lack of coordination and sharing of information/resources among these professionals, making the effort even more difficult. What is needed is an information network that tracks community health issues, promotes sharing of community information and best practices, and supports tools to help people get involved in making community decisions. The Healthy Communities Foundation, a non-profit organization founded by two public health professors at UC Berkeley, has decided to build such an information system to meet the need.

This system, the Healthy Communities Network System, will serve as a set of templates that can be built on and easily customized by local communities, so that each interested community can have its own version of the system while the underlying architecture remains centralized. The first community that has expressed an interest is Marin County, California, and we will build the first version of the system with customizations made for Marin County.