Building Strong Networks for the Advancement of the Public Health Agenda

Academic Networks, established as knowledge communities, are a cornerstone for the sustainability of Public Health strategies, as they are resources which enhance learning by sharing and building partnerships for strong alliances.  A knowledge community builds and complements the research, training, services, and public policy agenda in a globalized and interconnected society.  Today, the development of information and communication technologies (ICT) and the wide range of work provided by the web 2.0 make it easy to build this kind of communities, converging the social and digital elements and giving the possibility to configure new structures for sustainability and knowledge scaling.  A knowledge community formed from the ICT, will facilitate the construction, dissemination, exchange and transfer of knowledge produced on a collective way, breaking this way with the classic norms of production and transmission of hierarchical knowledge.  You go from a rigid, lineal, vertical structure to a flexible, horizontal, and collaborative one.  This workpiece analyses two experiences which allowed, from the use of the ICT, the construction of academic networks built in knowledge communities:  Leadership and Development Initiative in the field of Ecohealth and VBDs in Latin-America and the Caribbean Project, which generated a collaborative network from its EcoHealth ETV website and the Regional Public Health Competencies Framework in the Americas which formed a network funded by the Panamerican Health Organization.  In both cases, we used the benefits of the collaborative work provided by the new technologies and we placed the ICT as a clue agent to the service of the Public Health in the Region.