this may be a timely opportunity for those interested in how web 2.0 can drive global health. pat is a clinician working at partners in health in rwanda. i worked with him a few years ago and he is an all around good guy. send him an email if you are interested. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Pat Lee <patlee.pih@gmail.com> I am writing to ask if you might know someone who would be willing to donate technical expertise to an exciting new network that I am helping to establish. It’s called Economic Governance for Health (EG4Health), and it aims to harness the voice and public health mandate of the global health community in support of existing efforts to reform the global economic system in favor of equitable, climate-friendly and pro-health development. We’ve got a website that is approaching readiness for launch that you are welcome to check out: www.eg4health.org. But in a nutshell, EG4Health’s core ideas are: • The global economy is critically important to health, especially in developing countries • If we hope to achieve global health equity, we must first restore democracy and fair play to global economic governance • The surest path to a genuinely democratic system is through a genuinely democratic process, free from the undue influence of wealth and power • The voice of the global health community can and should help to inform, stimulate, and shape these critical reforms A friend who helped lead the Doctors for Obama campaign offered us some helpful tips on this kind of web-based grass roots mobilization. She said the most important person on the team was their IT wizard and that the effort to ‘go viral’ and reach tens of thousands of people would rise and fall on this person. At the moment, we’re all working on a voluntary basis though we plan to seek funding soon. We’re borrowing some time from a web designer who helped put together Oxfam’s site, but he’s only available intermittently. We’ll need better IT support than this, which is why I thought to reach out to you. Do you know anyone who, out of the pure goodness of their heart and belief in the importance of these structural issues, might be willing to give some of their time and expertise to this effort?