Working collaboratively to prevent pandemic disease outbreaks is a huge area of Worldchanging concern. IBM just jumped into the fray in a major way:
"IBM and over twenty major worldwide public health institutions, including the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, today announced the Global Pandemic Initiative, a collaborative effort to help stem the spread of infectious diseases.
"Central to the effort will be the use of advanced software technologies, elements of which IBM intends to contribute to the open-source community, that are designed to help share information on disease outbreaks electronically and use it to predict how diseases will spread. ... IBM also plans to build a community of users around its epidemiological modeling framework, called Spatio-Temporal Epidemiological Modeller (STEM), which can tap the information collected from IHII, along with additional information such as roadmaps, airport locations, travel patterns, and bird migration routes around the world. It will allow users to rapidly develop models for how a disease is likely to geographically spread over time."
