Hi Victoria,

So, I Know Something grew out of my experience with my wife's cancer and her death in 2011. She and I used to talk about how fortunate we were, even in that horrible moment, to have the things we did have: good health insurance, a flexible job so I could take care of her, the education and experience to navigate the health system, supportive and available family, and more. So many people are forced to deal with so much additional suffering because of how we as a society do and don't support each other during illness, trauma, and loss. All of which left me with a desire to do something about those additional layers of suffering. The specific idea for I Know Something, the focus on difficult decisions, and the focus on all the ways we come to "know" (not just cognitive knowing, which is the focus of most health information) grew from my professional experience in peer learning and my personal experience in grief communities.

I would love to see I Know Something grow to be a national and global resource. I pushed on the idea a lot last year to learn from people, develop partners, build a simple prototype (http://www.iksproject.com), and work out the business model. My preference was to build the initiative as a client services business (healthcare providers hire us to capture stories that support their target community and most critical care decisions) but I found that to be a tough sell given the priorities and structure of our health system. I think the most reasonable model is as a consumer facing business, with investment up front for a few years to build sufficient scale, then revenue on the back end from participant contributions, referral fees, sponsorships, content licensing, and content production services.

Thanks for asking!

Jim

Hi Catalina De la Rocha Jan Rohwer Bettina Flieger Ivor Williams Paul Ennis Lee-Jung Kim Mansoor Fassihi Thouraya Safes Becky Lee --

I hope everyone is doing great! I'm continuing to work on building IKS into an ongoing initiative and I wanted to reconnect with everyone.

I found working with the OpenIDEO community incredibly energizing and thought provoking. I want to build a great community around IKS too as I move forward. People who care about the issue and want to stay in touch, maybe share a story, talk through ideas, provide feedback, or even volunteer to take on a task such as interviewing someone. I really believe open innovation works and I want to stay open to all the creative people around us.

Would you like to be part of the community as we get going? There's no big commitment required -- I can keep you up to date on what we're working on, and you can jump in at whatever level works for you. If so just shoot me a response here or LinkedIn works too (http://www.linkedin.com/in/jimrosenberg/).

I've just started to reach out to people now. Once I have a group together, the first step will be to talk about what platform we use to stay in touch e.g. a Facebook page, LinkedIn, a Google group, Slack, Trello, or something else. In the spirit of design thinking, I'd rather talk with the group and make a choice than guess up front :-) Let me know what you think. I hope you'll join in! And all my best!

Jim

Thanks Doug. It was really interesting and inspiring to talk with Craig. I'm glad I was able to share this story.