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Peer-to-Peer Makes a Difference

Social isolation and loneliness is a huge issue across contexts.
This feeling is massively alleviated through gestures of social solidarity – having someone to talk to, and knowing you are not the only person going through it
In a state of precarity, where you are living life on the edge, any and all resources make a difference. Small acts and resource exchanges, small skill acquisitions, are really not so small after all.
There are remarkable connections in radically different national contexts (From Bangladesh to Romania, Italy to Morocco).

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Mental Health and Trauma

Mental healthcare can be found in unexpected places --- gardening, through artistic expression, cooking and food sharing, engaging in intergenerational connection, and through helping others.
Feeling useful and purposeful is extremely important to people’s mental health, so treating them like patients is often counter-productive.
Support has to be support to be autonomous, as strange as that might sound!
Caring for someone else often means empowering them to do things --- feeling like part of a community and not isolated, and able to make an impact on the world.
There is a serious lack of available mental health professionals, and professionals are really needed sometimes. Though there are a lot of ways we can increase our mental health outside of institutions, mental health issues must not be trivialized or stigmatized and often require professional care.

Migration and Autonomy

Migration and refugee hardships pervade the Open Care stories.
The typical solution offered by institutions (giving goods and temporary habitation) is okay, but not as good as giving very competent and capable people the ability to shape their own world and do things for themselves (The Jungle).
Being displaced is very challenging in terms of people’s mental health and well-being, something that is not addressed enough resource-wise due to a focus on physical circumstances (Trauma Tour).

Battling Proprietary Health and Social Care

Healthcare technologies are proprietary and do not give people access to their own data (Nightscout)
Resources people need to survive, like insulin, are prohibitively expensive to serve corporate ends (Open Insulin).
Existing healthcare structures are rigid and confusing, they don’t treat people holistically, and it is easy to get lost (Woodbine Health)
DIY and Open Source technologies can help, and hacking is awesome, but there are existing legal frameworks in place that make these interventions difficult. And some of them exist to keep people safe, which is important.

Not Letting Illnesses take over Everyday Life

A lot of people (many more than you would expect) suffer from incurable/untreatable/permanent conditions, some visible, some invisible.
These conditions make the world harder to navigate.
There are some amazing technologies being designed to make life better for people!
The world is broken, we are not. So we can fix the external world, which is a productive response to being told to fix one’s body.
Allergico Ki, Invisible Illnesses, Open Rampette, Open Insulin
We can directly affect the world through technological engagement.

Distributing Resources

Sometimes we have the right resources in the wrong places, and people can’t figure out how to help even though they want to.
Connection across contexts can help us distribute them! But sometimes legal issues trip us up. (Drugs across borders).
When people cannot make it to care, we can bring the care to people (Street Nurses).
There are a lot of knowledgeable people out there ready to teach others skills and share best practices, if only we can connect them (eLearning, disaster kits).

Finding Meaning off the Beaten Path

Modern life can be soul-crushing and unnecessarily stressful!
A lot of Open Carers are interested in imagining life otherwise.
So what does that look like, and how can we take the jump to living differently while also being able to keep our heads above water?

Fixing Broken Systems

Some Open Carers are deeply committed to fixing systems that are broken (Care Homes)
Sometimes taking existing institutional frameworks and bringing them new places can be effective (Street Nurses)
And revitalizing communities is at the heart of this work (Policy Solutions, Neighbourhoods)
EVERYTHING IS BROKEN, WHY?

Finding Money for it all!

Productive Tensions

How Do We Do it?

So…. What have we learned?

Technology alone is not a cure-all for health and social care problems.
But we can design some pretty amazing technology to improve accessibility.
Some of the best work we can do is bring people into contact with one another, so they can share their approaches and offer support.
On a methodological level, network science and ethnography together can reveal connections that we couldn’t see before.
Care comes from communities. Self-care can only take us so far, and institutionally-based care can only take us so far. If communities are the locus of most people’s care practices, we must invest time and energy into community-building.