The increasingly widespread behavior of self-tracking is a regular thread that weaves its way through many of the forecasts at IFTF, from our Health Care 2020 map to our Map for the Programmable World. After following this trend for some time, we are thrilled to announce a formal partnership that will make self-tracking resources more widely accessible to the public and continue to support our mission of social action research.
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Pioneer Portfolio, which supports bold ideas at the cutting edge of health and health care, has awarded us a year-long grant, in partnership with The Quantified Self, to support the development of a complete online self-tracking resource guide. To kick off the project, an infrastructure is currently being built that will allow each self-tracking tool to be tagged, rated, and reviewed by the global self-tracking community.
"People interested in measuring their cognitive function, or sleep, or body fat, will be able to come to the guide to learn about the different tools available, interact with people who are measuring the same thing, and discover new ideas about how these observations can be useful," said Alexandra Carmichael, Director of Quantified Self Labs, who is running the project.
Our role at IFTF will also involve researching the dynamics of this shared online resource as it evolves.
The rise of the Quantified Self movement is a major transformation that will impact not only how we understand ourselves but also how we relate to institutions and professional experts. When people are able to collect their own data, aggregate, and analyze it, they are empowered to make decisions and choices that they previously outsourced to others. IFTF has been following and supporting the work of Quantified Self and we are happy to be working with Kevin, Gary, and Alex on this project.
IFTF is excited about contributing to this project as a way to gather and organize the world's collective self-tracking knowledge in one central place, facilitating collaboration between experts who are already engaging in this behavior and beginners who are just starting out. We will post another update when the guide is built and ready for contributions.
