We now have a map of the eHealth Forum users around New Zealand. Please check it out, and add yourself to it. You can be as specific or as vague as you like.
This is what it looks like:
Youâll note @emily.gill out there in Opotiki by herself (you rock, Emily!), and the largish conglomeration of Digital Health interested folk in Auckland. Take some time, have a look about, and note who is close to you; if you click on them you can send them a personal message without too much bother if you like.
This came about after a few of the @otago-students asked me the best way to find out who is interested in digital health in their local area. I couldnât tell them a way.
Then COVID-19 struck me for the 2nd time. Iâve made some good use of the glorious isolation (âcanât possibly look after the kids, love!â) and threw this together. The plugin itself is the work of @merefield, and is open source (like all of the Discourse goodness).
We do have postcode data in the Forum which is a hangover from our early days with the Digital Health Networks. And the missing piece was this little bit of open source NZ postcode goodness by a chap across the ditch:
Transformed data is mapped via postcode only, so is appropriately fuzzy on where we all actually are.
Known issues:
Is a bit slow to load the map (be patient - 5 sec wonât kill you!)
Doesnât open in a new tab / window
and is a pain to reload when you go back
Is a bit slow to make suggestions when you type in the field
Not for internationals (only allows NZ addresses) as having them in there would stuff up the default map
Isnât implemented for new joiners yet
If anyone has any feedback, suggestions, please reply and let us know about it!
Hi @NathanK, yes Iâm impatient but also prone to not understanding instructions. So when I click the map and get a literal blank screen saying no results found, I conclude that I have screwed up again. Maybe changing the âno result foundâ text prompt to something witty like âloadingâ. The other suggestion is the contrast in the fonts. Anyone with a visual impairment might find the light yellow on bright yellow a challenge.
Great start though and itâs good to get an overview. Thanks for all your efforts in this space.
I donât want to be a downer here, but Iâm a bit concerned about the privacy aspect here. On the profile page where you put your post code, it says âFor organising eventsâ. There is nothing about showing where you are located on a map. In my opinion this should be anonymised, i.e. just show a count of â1â instead of someones profile picture and link to their profile. At the very least there should have been an anouncement about this map before it went up so folks could have the option of opting out.
+1 here - @NathanK - I think you should probably take this down for now until youâve got explicit permission from folks that they are happy for their location to be public. And even then, from a granularity point of view, I think youâd want to have it city/town level only.
Also not sure why you are seeing âno results foundâ. Can you screenshot that please?
Iâm concerned about that too. You are quite correct - this is an example of data being used for a purpose beyond what was stated when it was collected. And that is why Iâve invited thoughts like yours.
You can âopt outâ easily by visiting your profile and deleting the location. Iâll make this explicit in the Original Post.
An alternative is to discard the postcode data and invite folk to opt in. Iâm reluctant to do that as it means starting from zero, it is a bit cumbersome to enter oneâs location, and it isnât working via a Wizard as yet.
On the plus, the location is not public - it is retained within the private eHealth Forum community. Some of the eHealth Forum may become public in due course, but not without explicit warnings and opt-out opportunity first.
Regarding granularity, it becomes a bit meaningless in a big city if hundreds of people are concentrated in a single point.
Hi again Nathan. Iâm sorry to push the point here, but there are hundreds of users mapped, some of which may not frequent the forum often and may not even be aware that this information is now âpubliclyâ visible.
For now, I think you need to take the map down, and add the option for folks to opt-in via a check box in the profiles âallow other forum users to see my locationâ
Youâve explicitly stated that you are using information for different reasons than initially intended. Asking users to opt out after publishing potentially sensitive information isnât really best practice.
To be clear - Iâll happily opt in, at a city level, but not to postcode granularity.
Thanks Nathan, this is a very useful map to help connect us. Agree with the comments around use of the post code data for this - being a different use. Other than that, itâs great!
This looks really great. For the privacy issue, perhaps have everyone start with just general location (like region) and then people can opt in for town/city. Region is probably pretty useful for people looking for anyone in their area and they can click through to see more details on individualâs profiles and you probably donât need to go down to postcode level.
I think this will be a great feature but will need to be built up with informed consent. You seem to have great control with how you position important posts - so I think you will get good buy in with active users.
Personally I will opt in happily to the city level as I am keen to understand who else is interested in digital health near me.
Agree with Cameron. It is a cool map⊠But this isnât what we agreed to when we shared our data. Giving the choice to opt out isnât really enough, you should be actively asking us to opt in to having our data shared in a way that wasnât specifically agreed to at the time it was collected. Same as we would expect of any data in the health system
Can someone rescue me? If I proactively share my location on a site as part of my public profile, and then the site as part of my public profile shares that across multiple formats, how have my privacy expectations been impacted? What unexpected risk or harm have I suddenly become exposed to, that I could not simply solve by switching my location off in settings?
The visual representation of our community is very cool, and the ease of finding out who you can potentially reach out to for support locally, especially if planning on working on a local DHI. Nice work @NathanK.
