Communities of practice
KISOP names three kinds of community. Your local community is the place where you live. A community of interest is the people who share a condition, a stage of life, or a concern with you. A community of practice is the third kind: the people who share a practice with you.
A practice is something you do: wearing a ring that measures your sleep every night, wearing a glucose sensor on your arm for two weeks, fasting on certain days, running, writing down what you eat, or sitting with your breath for ten minutes each morning. Each practice has its tools, terms, and routines. Most also involve a company.
- My local community is the place where you live: your street, your town, your county.
- Communities of interest are the people who share a condition, a stage of life, or a concern with you: heart disease, aging in place, a cause.
- Communities of practice are the people who share a practice with you: the same ring, the same sensor, the same method, the same discipline.
Your practice makes data.
A ring on your finger records data every night. That record belongs with your bloodwork, your medications, and your family history, in the archive you control.
An example: people who wear a smart ring
A smart ring measures sleep stages, resting heart rate, heart rate variability, skin temperature, breathing rate, and movement while you wear it. Each morning the ring's app summarizes the data in a few scores. The company keeps each member's data in its app and its cloud, and it lets a member export that data.
A person who wears the ring already has a morning score, a trend line, and a coach inside the app. What that person usually lacks:
- The ring's record alongside their labs, medications, and family history. The app uses only the ring's data.
- A way to compare a month of nights with people like them without handing their data to anyone.
- A plain answer to the question “what does this number mean for me, with my history?”
- A copy that survives a lapsed membership, a new ring, or a change in the company's terms.
- Someone in their town who will sit down with them and the ring, and help them get the most out of it.
The company behind a practice is welcome in the community as a member. It does not own the community, and it receives information only when the community sends it. Communities may choose to work with the company to share specific information for defined purposes.
Online activities
Today you export by hand. A connector to file each export for you is a proposed community job; it is not yet built. You can do this on an iPhone or an Android phone. The ways you can use that data there are limited to the apps in those ecosystems. KISOP lets communities use their data in the ways they need to meet their needs.
People who wear the ring write and update these explanations in plain language and in more than one language.
Make a plan together and share only the figures you choose, for as long as you choose. Every share goes through your consent gate.
Bring a year of nights and your last three blood panels to a model of your choosing, from your own archive. Keeping Your Data Safe with AI Tools.
Members of a community of practice can plan purchases in advance. Communities can help drive affordability. Buying together is built for that.
Export the records before your membership lapses, date the export, and file it in your archive. Community members maintain best practices for doing this.
In-person activities
The first table would be in Palo Alto, at the first Solution Center, when one exists.
Bring a month of records on paper if you like, and discuss questions with other members. Gather the group's questions for the company and send them together.
The parent wears the ring, keeps the export in their own archive, and chooses what to share. Activate the family describes this arrangement.
The prevention schedule already identifies which screenings are due. Bring the ring's record to the visit on paper or on your phone.
Each one is a hackathon weekend and a job on the board.
Members pay a person trained in the practice who works from a Solution Center. Local ownership is the plan for that.
What we would ask of the company behind a practice
Every practice with a device has a company behind it. We would ask that company for six things, with no exclusivity:
- Keep the export open and complete, in a format a person can read without the company's app.
- Let a member point the export at their own archive with one consent, and let the member withdraw it.
- Offer support for the KISOP Personal Neutral Archive in your technical stack, so your members benefit from your security and your features.
- Join the community of practice as a member. Answer the questions the circle gathers. Say what changed and when.
- Sponsor the job that builds the connector. Every community that wants the connector can use it.
- Send people to the practice table. A member who needs help beyond a help page can meet with someone in their town.
Where this stands
What exists today: this page, the other two kinds of community, the archive that would hold the export, and the tools for planning, buying, and sharing that every community uses.
What does not exist yet: no community of practice has formed, no connector is built, no practice table is open, and no company has been approached as of the day this page was written.
Next reviews: the founder's review of this page and a Spanish edition in her voice are both pending.
I wear a ring and I would join Propose a practice I would fund the connector