About the Directory

Welcome to the InSTEDD Directory Preview!

It's early yet, but we want to give interested users a chance to test drive what will evolve into a service to assist crisis responders find the right people, at the right time, in the right place.   Please take a look at what we are doing and register with us.  Much more is on the way.

"Who's doing what where?"

This title refers to an experience familiar to most who have worked in the field. You need to coordinate activities with others working in the same region but you can't find out, in timely and accurate fashion, who is involved in the response, what organization(s) they represent, the nature of their participation, how to contact them, what they are doing, and where they are relative to your location. It's not difficult to imagine someone responding to a disease outbreak in a remote area asking of others he or she meets, "do you know of a good epidemiologist working in the area who speaks the local language?"

The inability to identify, locate and contact the right people in a crisis quickly - especially those you know you can trust - is a source of major frustration in the communities of practice InSTEDD hopes to serve. Seasoned responders often bring back stories from the field about how they arrived at the scene to discover that they recognize others they have worked with before, now working in different organizations. These relationships, and the mutual trust and respect they imply, may span decades, outlasting organizational changes.

Those familiar colleagues often prove to be a tremendous asset in bypassing red tape, sharing information, and collaborating effectively across organizational boundaries, but this benefit comes from direct recognition. There might be an equally valuable set of colleagues you could trust working nearby, but there are no information tools to help you find them.  Perhaps they are friends you know and haven't yet seen, or perhaps they are colleagues respected by people you trust; either way you have no method for discovering them.

Inevitably, standing there alongside the contacts one knows and trusts is a valuable but unrecognized resource: other competent professionals whom one might also have reason to trust because they are trusted by others you trust - if only someone were available to make the introduction.

While the need for this kind of information in more conventional settings has driven development of social networking technologies that have recently begun to achieve a substantial level of maturity, there are still a number of obstacles to broad adoption of such tools to the benefit of certain professional communities. And not all who might benefit currently can perform a unified search for friends of friends, even across the top few sites. Other limitations also have special impact on crisis responders. These highly mobile users need to access up-to-date information about one another, to update their own information, and to be reminded to do so frequently, with little or no access to the Internet.

Preview

The InSTEDD Directory will, in the coming months, develop into a service that we believe will help to address the scenarios described above. For now, we'd like to encourage you to register for the Preview.

 Try it out!

• Test Drive a preview of components that will make up the directory.
• Associate your application with your Twitter account to be able to interact via SMS.

For developers

We're interested in your suggestions! Participate in our open source projects by following these links:

• Visit our Field Labs and see the full code for this technology.
• Build your own twitter 'bots' using our Twitter Bots framework.