Program and Project Posts

Here are some recent posts related to our programs and projects from the InSTEDD team blogs.

Hello World

This is my first post after a blogging hiatus that started more than a year ago. Much has changed in my life between then and now so I'll make this post a quick intro of myself, and a catch up for those wondering about me dropping off the blogosphere.

At the time, I was an Architect at the Microsoft patterns & practices team, shipping content, frameworks, and tools to help folks be more productive when building large scale applications. I then became the architect with the Microsoft working on prototypes and designing approaches to foster of innovation within the company. But then...

I met Eric, InSTEDD's CEO, during Strong Angel III, a big civilian-military disaster preparedness exercise. Later in 2007 I was partnering with Robert Kirkpatrick (now in InSTEDD too), Ted Okada and Nigel Snoad from Microsoft Humanitarian Systems working on one of our prototypes that was being deployed in Afghanistan to help evolve open standards for data synchronization.

When last October InSTEDD took its current shape with Eric and Robert on board, I was presented with a great opportunity. Although I was working with smart folks across a successful company with an amazing team on pretty cool stuff, I had a longing to work in the humanitarian and health space full time. I wanted to bring in the best of technology to communities that really need it worldwide and to those who work with them. The choice was clear: I took the plunge and joined InSTEDD to lead the engineering arm, so... here I am.

Some of the things that excited me about joining InSTEDD besides the mission and the people, was how we wanted to go about things:

Contributing to disaster and health information flow by reframing it as a collaboration problem. I believe in the ability of technology to augment human capability - and its proven ability to get in the way!
The opportunity to create a field lab. Taking the notion of "If you don't go you don't know" and "design for the wild", mix it up with agile engineering to build and integrate technology so that can continuously adapt to the needs of communities.
The ability to work in a space where platforms are just a means to an end, and cross-platform interoperability part of everyday life. Our scorecard is based on improved livelihoods. We can use Linux, Google, Eclipse- you name it; contribute to stellar open source projects such as Mono or Sahana, and participate in the technical community with a strong emphasis on long term sustainability.

If you are reading this coming from the humanitarian or health space, you can infer I am a new on the block, so please be patient. I appreciate any and all guidance, feedback, recommendations, warnings, and advice you might have. If you come from the technology space, well, there is so much to be learned from what happens in the toughest environments, and I hope to share the lessons as we find them (or they find us).

Right now some of the things we are working on include:

How to develop better situational awareness of "who's doing what where" and how to use that awareness to accelerate the process of people building relationships.
How information flow can be improved "up & down": from the far field where SMS barely works to headquarters and back, with visualization and analysis, as well as between communities finding their own innovative approaches to deal with problems, and "between" the silos of human, animal, and environmental health.
How to take information typically consumed individually to create customized group collaboration environments.
What is a good mix of existing and new software, services and devices for the problems above? What is the simplest architecture that can keep it all working together in an interoperable, reliable and secure fashion?

Do any of these spark an idea? Please come and share it. It is up to us.

Looking around at the beginning

I've had an interesting and exciting few months since arriving as CEO at InSTEDD in October. Much of that time has been spent traveling with colleagues to visit difficult areas around the world, talking with professionals expert in epidemiology and disaster response, and hearing from communities and governments how hard it is to watch for diseases and prepare for disasters in the face of innumerable other obligations in their days. Through subsequent conversations with the superb staff at InSTEDD, we've been sorting out how and where InSTEDD can be most effective and we have some ideas.

We're now designing tools and developing partnerships that we think might help us put together resources that make sense. Over the next few months I'll mention a few of those capabilities we're thinking about, and why, and I'll ask for your opinions. When we later find something interesting and useful we'll talk about it openly, evaluate the pros and cons honestly, try what seems useful in the field, and tell you here, clearly and fairly, how it went.

When it comes right down to it, those on staff at InSTEDD have quite a bit of experience, so know very well how big the world is, how many smart people are already trying to help around the world, and how little we know about what's out there. So we'll be obvious when we ask for advice, and I look forward to hearing from those who can help us design and build simple, robust, effective, and free tools for the humanitarian community.

Share and Sync. Any information. Anytime. Anywhere.

Whether you are a life science researcher, a practitioner, a veterinarian, an epidemiologist, a decision maker or a patient, you're always faced with the reality that information is often not shared in a timely manner. To make things worse, the value of the information is lost because you couldn't use it in time, or didn't have the means to share it when it was most needed. You want to quickly collect information and share this information with others in your discipline, across agencies, or across cultures. This is also the case if you are a patient, and your information resides in pieces across different places with no track of your lifelong health record.

Our engineers just released mesh4x to meet your needs and help fulfill your mission. This work is still within the context of our overall collaborative approach which enables and facilitates specifically social networking, participation, apomediation, collaboration, and openness within and between users: health care consumers, caregivers, patients, health professionals, biomedical researchers, epidemiologists, governments, NGOs, just to mention a few. The potential of mesh4x is great: realizing the promise to accelerate discovery of science, predict emergence of diseases, detect disease outbreaks, allow multiple response agencies to share "meaningful" information in a timely manner, assist the humanitarian community in its relief work in harsh and austere environments, enhance outcome research...

Big science, small science - we live in an era of big information. Tony Hey (Microsoft) once described the emergence of new science from a progression that started with experimental sciences (a few thousand years ago), to theoretical science (a few hundred years ago), to computational science (a few decades ago), to data-centric science of today. We’re in a constant state of denial about how much usable information is being lost in an increasingly vast amount of data at our fingertips.

The future is to manage and figure out global ways to respond to your needs.

Of course, the journey for us is just starting - we need your input and your help so we can make best use of our approach and tools to meet your needs. We want to respect and understand what works in your environment and what doesn't, and with great respect to your culture, policies, environment, connectivity and more.