What is the Field Lab?

This proof-of-concept level tool allows you to connect a cell phone to your computer and use it as a central ‘station’ for receiving and responding to SMS with a map as the main interaction tool.

It was used in Golden Shadow to enable community responders to report incidents from different neighborhoods. A community volunteer would send messages to the command center with a location specified as latitude/longitude or an address in the message. The message would pop on a map at the command center where a designated operator would triage and reply to those messages. As the day progressed we tracked specific users, kept track of the conversation threads and pinpointed visually which areas didn't have enough coverage.

Key requirements:

• Receive messages from any phone and place them on a map on the operator’s desktop,
• Accept position data entered as latitude/longitude or addresses,
• Allow the operator to reply, showing the threads as a conversation,
• Allow the operator to maintain a simple address book associating numbers with titles,
• If the operator is online, upload the information to a website for others to see,
• Expose the information using standards such as GeoRSS,
• Allow people to visualize the information in common consumer mapping solutions.

This project takes advantage of the following technologies:

• RSS and GeoRSS as the standard data representation on the wire,
• Google Earth as the local interactive mapping application,
• A simple local web application that gets opened to ‘reply’ to the messages built with ASP.NET,
• Microsoft Virtual Earth and Google Maps as free online mapping applications,
• Google Maps geocoding web services to translate addresses into positions,
• Microsoft Research SMS Toolkit to receive messages and send responses hooked up to an HTC phone,
• An ASP.NET web application to host the information online and display it using multiple mapping solutions.

For Developers

• Source code, wiki and technical discussions at: http://code.google.com/p/geosms/
• Source is available under The MIT License.

The Contacts Nearby application allows users to discover geographic locations of other people in their extended social network. Social networks or “friend graphs” are increasingly popular on the internet because they enable applications to learn of trust relationship between users. Combine this information with the geographical location of each user and you get a valuable tool in possible emergency situations.

Imagine being on site at an emergency situation. You might have the best aid workers or medical staff within a hand's reach. The Contacts Nearby application lets you see if you have contacts in common and allows you to ask for referrals from mutual contacts. This information can accelerate finding useful contacts in your area and building trust with them.

Key requirements:

• Allow you to specify your location via web, SMS, email - using a latitude and longitude or an address
• Allow you to specify your privacy preferences for who is allowed see your current position.
• Use an existing "friend graph" you might be maintaining on social networking sites like Facebook or LinkedIn
• Allow you to query which contacts are nearby via the web, email or SMS, using maps and text messages
• See contacts of contacts who are in the area
• Ask the "mutual contact" for a referral or "hookup" email or message
• You should receive updates when a contact enters your neighborhood.

This project takes advantage of the following technologies:

• Facebook as a provider for social information.
• Google Maps for visualization of geographical information.
• Google Maps Geocoding Services to translate addresses into positions.
• InSTEDD’s Twitter Bot technology which enables communication over SMS messages.
• An ASP.NET web application to integrate the application with Facebook.
• Facebook.NET - an open source library for developing Facebook application with .NET.

Developers:

• Source code, wiki and technical discussions at: http://code.google.com/p/contactsnearby/
• Source is available under The MIT License.

Interested in using this?

Try it out!!

The goal for the project is to provide libraries, tools and applications that simplify using standards-based data meshes.

Data meshes have some interesting properties:

• Symmetrical: They allow data to exist in a concurrent multi-master environment where updates can be applied at any node in the mesh.
• Asynchronous: They allow offline updates to information and synchronization with other nodes without requiring data locks, essential for occasionally connected applications.
• Dynamic: The synchronization can happen even in constantly changing connectivity topologies. I can sync to a server and later the sync can be done between my client and another client, who could then sync with another server if the first one is there, and so on.

These properties make them very suitable for humanitarian, crisis, and health care environments, where information sharing, data system integration, and technologies that assist politically neutral solutions are beneficial. For example:

• Symmetry allows you to have two audiences work on the same data through different applications, with no application being the 'master'.  You can also have data sharing of sensitive information between countries or organizations with no country hosting more or less data than the other. See Mary Jane's post about the NGOs in Cambodia, to understand how important this symmetry and neutrality can be. It also allows data to move around a user independently of the device it's been created on.
• Asynchronicity allows work to happen in environments where data connections are unavailable, bandwidth is low, or the only 'transport' is a USB stick.
• Dynamism allows the field teams to share data amongst themselves and servers as early as possible. Unlike email, there is no need to wait for connectivity to a specific server to let the information free.

Our contributions will be based on the requirements observed in global health, community development and humanitarian aid.

See the main content for the project at:http://code.google.com/p/mesh4x/

Intro blog post: http://edjez.instedd.org/2008/04/mesh4x-new-open-source-project-for-data