Incubating pandemic preparedness: a social algorithm for community-participatory intelligence in health security

Abstract Strengthening pandemic preparedness demands more than better indices or expanded surveillance infrastructure — it requires a fundamental shift in how health security systems generate and use knowledge. Communities hold anticipatory intelligence about risk signals, communication channels, and coordination dynamics that formal frameworks have yet to harness systematically. This perspective article seizes that opportunity, offering a novel methodological contribution to the field of health security. Drawing on community-based participatory research, positive deviance theory, and transdisciplinary systems thinking, it introduces the incubator workshop: a structured social laboratory that repositions communities as active, irreplaceable sources of preparedness intelligence rather than passive recipients of top-down planning. Small, purposively selected and composed groups work through three interlocking templates — an action matrix, a modified theory of change, and a work planner — to map what is working well, surface locally validated successes, and co-produce concrete, community-owned action plans. This approach generates community-participatory intelligence that enriches and extends existing national and global health security frameworks. The article also sets out the conditions under which such participation is legitimate rather than extractive: an explicit definition of community, transparent decision rights, paid facilitation and reimbursed participation, and safeguards for data held locally. The incubator contributes a replicable, scalable methodology that moves preparedness towards anticipatory, context-sensitive governance — grounded in the trust, local knowledge, and adaptive capacity that communities already possess. At a moment when global health institutions are building on the lessons of COVID-19 and shaping the next generation of pandemic frameworks, the incubator offers a timely and practical pathway for embedding community knowledge into the architecture of health security — placing the people and systems that respond when it matters most at the centre of how we prepare.