UnaMesa projects bring together multiple groups working to improve public services

UnaMesa projects: Research and development for knowledge-based services

UnaMesa projects seek to improve education, health care, and other social services by focusing on three primary areas, better sharing of information across organizations, greater transparency, and improving collective decision-making. All social services suffer from deficiencies in each of these areas. Whether it's barriers to sharing information that increase errors and costs in health care, hidden fraud that undermines the mission of social service agencies, or a shortage of good teachers because we lack the ability to identify and reward outstanding performance in education, society pays the high cost for failure.

Initial research projects in each of these areas include:

• ServiceLink - reducing the barriers to sharing records between providers of education, healthcare, and social services.
  Working with Headstart agencies to improve the quality of care by reducing the costs and delays of sharing paper and digital records with all of their partner agencies. Providers should be spending more time with their children and less time with the paperwork. The SharedRecords service (Services) was a direct output of this research.
  • Participants: university researchers, healthcare technology and service providers, child and family service providers
    
• Origins - reducing poverty by increasing opportunities available to small producers
  Working with cooperative growing associations in underserved areas and Fair Trade labeling organizations to improve information sharing to create better community based education healthcare and social service. The goal is to provide individuals and communities with the information they need to make better decisions about how they use their limited resources.
  • Participants: Cooperative growing associations, university researchers and nonprofit fair trade organizations
    

These projects have been made possible by the generous support of Ricoh Innovations, Inc.

1.1 Common ownership of intellectual property

UnaMesa acts as a charitable trust which holds the intellectual property developed within projects on behalf of the public interest. UnaMesa has a responsibility to participants, noncommercial service providers, and society to protect this property and ensure that it remains accessible to all and continues to serve the common interest.

To ensure fair treatment for everyone and clarify intellectual-property issues, all participants must agree to share any intellectual property developed as part of an UnaMesa project on a nondiscriminatory basis. In practice, this means that the copyrights for materials developed as part of a project are assigned to and owned by the UnaMesa Association. Participants maintain full, nonexclusive rights to use these materials for their own interests. This arrangement allows us to bring together people from academia, NGOs, and socially responsible enterprises on equal footing to serve the common interest.

Date: 2007/03/17