Pulpp.
plan . understand . learn . practice . pass on

Pulpp is a knowledge base and suite of open source tools to support public, private, and academic organisations engaged in healthcare digital transformation by providing access to curated, open source knowledge generated by me and the wider Pulpp Community.

Pulpp provides answers to questions, curates publicly available information, provides tutorials and guidance, defines reusable processes, offers advice, helps its community gather and share knowledge, and builds tools that can be accessed and practised, passed on, and even developed commercially by the community.

The Pulpp Approach

There's a lot of useful words on this page. They will take about 7 minutes to read but I don't want to waste your time. Take 30 seconds to read my goal and aims for Pulpp. If you like what you read have a look at my video explaining Pulpp in five minutes. If you like all that then the remaining 6 and a half minutes and more awaits.

[I will put a video here really soon to support visual learners - insert video here]

Pulpp's Goal

The aim is to offer users access to a central store of open source knowledge they can use to support their organisations…

That supports a community based on open source principles, knowledge sharing, and free collaboration…

To achieve the goal of increasing the accessibility, use, and creation of open source knowledge, foster collaboration, and reduce duplication of effort by public, private, and academic sectors to support the effective and efficient digital transformation of NHS services.

Pulpp's Aims

  1. Increase the accessibility of knowledge for all users through the use of effective curation.
  2. Encourage users' self-development and broad general knowledge.
  3. Build tools that are useful, free, simple, and open.
  4. Develop standards and processes that make knowledge sharing easier and comparable between organisations.
  5. Freely licence all resources under appropriate open source licences.
  6. Support a community based on collaboration without boundaries, knowledge sharing, passion, compassion, and social value.
  7. Disrupt resistance to open sharing of knowledge and outcomes.
  8. Minimise knowledge silos, vendor lock in, duplication of effort, and overall public sector spend and effort on obtaining, managing, and maintaining knowledge.

How to Join

To find out more about Pulpp use the Pulpp Links page.

If you wish to join the community please visit the Pulpp Shop.

If you are interested in receiving the free monthly newsletter please click here. This will give you an idea of how Pulpp operates.

If you use WhatsApp, then please join our community.

Why do we need Pulpp?

Why does the NHS need to Transform?

Pulpp exists to support the digital transformation of the NHS and provide effective and efficient access to high quality knowledge. But why does the NHS need to transform anyway? Pulpp's view on this is below:

  1. Minimise suffering, maximise happiness - We want our family, friends, communities, and world to be healthy, happy, and free of suffering.
  2. Human needs first - We want there to be free access to high quality healthcare that meets our human needs in a manner that is efficient, effective, fair, compassionate, sustainable, and good value.
  3. Evolution is necessary - We need to evolve and transform from our old ways to achieve our goals.
  4. Reality neccessitates change - Every organisation has to learn how to achieve this and implement their own version of 'the future'.
  5. We all need to move together- There is not enough money for everyone to evolve their own approaches to the major challenges facing the NHS. We need to share what works, identify what doesn't, and be open and transparent with out information and learning. We must not spend the same money in every organisation answering the same questions.

The Information Challenge

Pulpp aims to create and curate high quality, reusable information, guidance, and templates. This is a small part of trying to support the NHS's transformation challenge. But is there really a problem? Isn't there information everywhere? Yes, there is. My view is that there is too much to know and follow and not enough of the right kind! Having worked in this space for over 10 years I believe we face the following challenges:

  1. No Curation - There is freely available information everywhere but it's lack of curation makes it inaccessible. You can't google what you don't know and AI can easily make mistakes in niche areas.
  2. Silos - Knowledge silos are being created at an organisation level yet each organisation is asking the same questions, solving similar problems, and outsourcing the same work. Suppliers to are repeating the same work and generating per organisation overheads within the public sector.
  3. Proprietary Knowledge - The culture for sharing methods and tools, lessons learnt, successes and failures in a meaningful and constructive way is not in place between public, private, and academic institutions. Each sector and organisation feels ownership of its intellectual property and focusses on standalone solutions.
  4. Conflicting Dependencies - The public sector relies heavily on the private sector to access freely available information and knowledge. The private sector relies on the public sector for consistent, unified approaches for efficiency. This must be reversed, free knowledge should remain freely available and consistently applied by the public sector to allow efficient support from the private sector.
  5. No Standards - without an open community-based approach to standardising and processing information exchange, there is no way for silos to begin collaborating.

Solving the Problem

The challenges set out above are not insurmountable but they are significant. The issue with jumping in and trying to solve the problem is that every organisation finds its own ways and we end up at square one again. The solution lies in the creation of a community and agreed open standards. This provides a framework within which sharing can flourish.

  1. Structured and Curated Knowledge - Resources collated and curated within a structured system to make it easy to find pertinent information. Learning pathways and guidance provide a structured approach to gaining broad understanding of a subject.
  2. Open Source Licensing - All outputs that are created must be under open source licences that allow the reuse, alteration and passing of of documents, even for commercial purposes.
  3. Standards and Structure - Creating easy to use community-led standards and processes that allow users to follow best practices and interact efficiently with outputs from other users.
  4. Culture of Collaboration - Creating a share-first community focussed on open and transparent sharing of knowledge and information to minimise repetitive, inefficient, and expensive practices and aligned to a agreed set of principle and guidelines.
  5. Simplicity and Replication - Delivering solutions that are technically minimal, requiring little to no training to use, low onboarding effort, and easily replicated to allow rapid adoption using standard tools, forever.

The Pulpp Solution

Pulpp can seem quite complex because there is a lot going on within it. At its core Pulpp is a solution that simply tries to make complex information accessible and provide tools to learn how transformation in the NHS can be supported and improved through shared knowledge.

Pulpp offers a simple and effective knowledge base that creates, collects, and shares information from across a wide array of sources. Inputs are taken from each user and shared with the whole community magnifying the benefit. Pulpp gives users an accessible and simple way to obtain knowledge and find related topics of interest using tried and tested technology. Open licensing will ensure that Users can access and reuse information in almost any manner.

There are 11 key features of Pulpp that set out its approach (I wish it was 10 but I am going to have to work out how to do that!):

  1. Single repository for all content - At its heart, Pulpp is a central knowledge base running on a simple wiki. Knowledge is brought together from a wide array of different sources including websites, documents, community input, and my own work. These resources are curated and maintained into a single accessible library. Pulpp also provides tools such as web bookmark libraries and a forum to support the users and community
  2. Collaboration Across Sectors - Pulpp offers a community approach to allow users to work together and collaborate. Unlike other knowledge shares, Pulpp aims to join public, private, education, and third sector organisations. Pulpp has created the structure needed to support a community such as common community goals and the Community Guidelines.
  3. Free and Open Resources Only - Pulpp only curates and maintains free and open information some of which is created in house and some which already exists. This ensures that anything users find on Pulpp they can rest assured will not have a paywall or incur other costs or commitments. Resources are curated in accordance with the Pulpp Principles and Pulpp Constitution. Users can be assured that Pulpp will remain useful and focussed without impacting flexibility and adaptability.
  4. Toolbox Approach - Pulpp's knowledge base operates as a toolbox. As well as written content, it provides practical resources such as training videos, downloadable documents, templates, standards and processes, and links out to other free sources. These singular entries are curated into collections to provide users with context specific reading, guidance, and resources.
  5. Community Led - Pulpp's knowledge base is community led. Users can request new documents, videos, collections, or other content to be found, curated, or created from scratch based on their interests. This gives the users control over the direction of the knowledge base and provides steer and focus to the topics that really matter. Most importantly, the community will not suffer from a replication of effort as requests are public and all outputs shared.
  6. Transparency and Standards - Pulpp creates standardised, easy-to-use formats and processes to underpin knowledge sharing. This will allow users share their own experiences, lessons learnt, documents and data directly onto the platform for the benefit of the wider community.
  7. Open Source Licensing - All original Pulpp content is licenced under the an open source Creative Commons licence. This allows users to take Pulpp content and reuse it and pass it on freely, subject to some terms, and even profit from the resources commercially. This ensures Pulpp outputs are free for all to use and stop information from being vendor or licenced locked.
  8. Affordable Knowledge - Pulpp is affordable, providing access to a shared knowledge base with direction and input provided by users allows Pulpp to provide guidance, templates, documents, and knowledge at a fraction of the cost of external consultancy and advisory services. Whilst external consultancy and bespoke work will still be needed, Pulpp aims to reduce the amount spent on replicating advice across the NHS and sharing solutions as much as possible to minimise duplications of effort.
  9. Simple, Tested Technology - Pulpp is built using simple, tested, free, and open technologies. This means that Pulpp is lightweight, requires no training, is easy to use with existing tools, and accessible with no specific technology or vendor lock in.
  10. Replicable and Future Protection - Pulpp has the ability to be replicated by the community at any point thanks to the simplicity of its design and the open standards and licensing models upon which its intellectual property is built. This function of Pulpp is built into its design giving the community protection from ever becoming a commodity or commercially abused. Pulpp strives to ensure its Constitution codifies users' rights to free systems and Pulpp's commitment to improving the accessibility of open knowledge.

To learn more about why Pulpp was created please follow the link below.

Pulpp Links

Join the community today…

If all the above interests you and you would like to find out more about how you join our community, just follow the link below and read details on subscribing. For the beta service we are currently working with organisations only; however, if you would like to join as an individual please get in touch and we would be happy to discuss your needs.

Join the Community