The output

By the end of February of 2010, less than a year after the original meeting in Seville, the chapters that we present in this book had been completed, revised in draft form at least twice, and approved by the editors. The eleventh chapter was added soon before the submission of the final version of the paper edition of the book in April 2010.

Contributions were received from individuals living in all of the inhabited continents. Most of them, however, were made by colleagues who were approached at the outset by the editors and by members of their immediate teams or circles of collaborators.

Despite their ease of use and the availability of technical support at all times, some contributors preferred to use traditional electronic mail to produce content over the online resources available on the OPIMEC platform. This made the editing process difficult at times, as contributors would send different versions of their work directly to individual editors, creating unnecessary confusion and duplication of effort.

The editors, on the other hand, communicated mostly by electronic mail, complementing their frequent (at least weekly) text-based interactions with online videoconferences and in-person meetings whenever possible.

The conversion of the contributions into homogeneous versions in English and Spanish was not a straightforward process. The translations, which were mostly precise reflections of the original text, required heavy editing to make them flow as comfortably as possible for readers in the alternate language. This led to inevitable mismatches between the versions, which bilingual readers will recognize easily in most cases.

Another interesting aspect of this effort was the process to decide when to consider the digital content that was emerging through such a diverse collective of contributors to be ready for publication in book form. In most cases, the threshold was determined by the absence of comments from existing or new contributors. In the remaining few, the editors had to decide, by consensus, that the chapter was good enough for release in static form. Continued revision of these few chapters was not possible because ofthe limitations imposed by the publishing timelines and the need to launch the content as a paper-based book in early June 2010. Nevertheless, having the entire contents available online, through the OPIMEC platform, should enable any interested reader to make suggestions as to how to improve on what has been produced so far.

In any case, the book achieved its original overarching objective: to act as a powerful stimulus for collective effort, across traditional boundaries, among people interested in improving the management of complex chronic diseases. Without the incentive associated with the creation of something so tangible, or the pressure generated by publication deadlines and launch dates, it would have been difficult to achieve so much, in so short a period of time, and with no financial incentives. Along the way, those who responded made a substantial and generous attempt to summarize the limited knowledge available around this important and seriously neglected area, while proposing innovative strategies to fill the gap between what is known and what should be done to meet the needs and expectations of a growing number of vulnerable people in every society in the world.