Update on InSTEDD's work in the Mekong region Creative Commons noncommercial, attribution, sharealike.

2. WHAT APPROACHES WILL HELP
US ADAPT TO A CHANGING
WORLD AND PREPARE FOR THE
UNEXPECTED?
Banda Aceh, Indonesia, 2004

3. IN OUR OPINION, COLLABORATION
MAKES ALL THE DIFFERENCE

4. WHAT IT SHOULD LOOK LIKE
• Diverse groups self-organize seamlessly into a coherent whole.
• The flow of information is:
– free, reliable, secure,
– up, down, sideways,
– timely, accurate, complete, relevant, and credible.
• The response is agile, coordinated, efficient, and effective.

5. FEW REASONS WHY IT SELDOM
A
DOES…
Harsh field conditions
Slow, unreliable networks
Hot, tired, overloaded responders
Low signal-to-noise ratio
Data trapped in silos
Disincentives for cooperation
Lack of good tools for
emergent collective action
Ignoring the local community

6. 7

7. InSTEDD
Improve event detection and humanitarian response
Socio-technical organization and mission
Collaboration technologies
Worldwide, with field laboratory in Phnom Penh
Free & open source

8. CONSTRAINED ENVIRONMENTS CREATE A
PRESSURE COOKER FOR INNOVATION
GRAMEEN SOLUTIONS
GRAMEEN SHAKTI
GRAMEEN KAYLAN
GRAMEEN PHONE

9. The InSTEDD Technology Platform
Free Open source
Standards
Mesh4X: Share Data Across All Boundaries
MESH4X lets you integrate applications, devices, and information seamlessly
–
into a shared, synchronized, distributed data mesh
GeoChat: Take Decisive Action in Response
– GEOCHAT lets you engage and coordinate with everyone who needs to be
involved, linking headquarters, field, and the local community
Evolve: Synthesize Data into Actionable Information
EVOLVE lets you and your team monitor and collaborate around diverse data
–
streams to detect, analyze, triage and track critical events as they unfold

10. INFORMATION FLOW
Nokia Phone with Khmer script support, and an unlikely fortune cookie note

11. InSTEDD GEOCHAT
SMS, Twitter, email, …
Location
Open and Closed Groups
Explicit or Automatic Location
SMS-Only interaction
API Semi-structured information, extensible pipeline

12. INTEROPERABILITY
Laptops from all over the world come together to integrate medical records systems, HISA South Africa 2008

13. Mesh4x
A synchronization framework for seamless information sharing
• Fuse data from diverse applications,
sources, and devices
• Synchronize data automatically
between databases, files, websites,
desktop software, PDAs, maps, and
the Cloud
• HTTP, files & SMS
• RESTFull N-way data sync
•MySQL
• Open standards: FeedSync,
•Hibernate
RSS/ATOM, XForms, RDF
•MSAccess
• Multiple channels: http, files, SMS
•MSExcel
• Available in both .NET and Java
•AmazonS3
•JavaROSA
Come and play - Mesh4x.org •EpiInfo
•KML (G Earth)

14. SHARING DATA IS DISRUPTIVE
Les Lenert from CDC briefs about technologies they consider disruptive.
Mesh4x changes the game of data ownership and storage lock-in

15. FROM DATA TO COLLECTIVE ACTION

16. InSTEDD Evolve 1.0
Collaborative decision support around streams of information
Features:
• Create collaborative workspaces
• Subscribe to data
• Sift through the data for emerging events
• Annotate items with
tags, comments, ratings, links, locations, files,
alerts, and other social metadata
• Autonomous agents perform data
extensions, feature
extraction, classification, tagging, geo-coding
• Human teams act with augmentation of
machine learning

19. ARCHITECTURE
DECENTRALIZED TOP-DOWN AND BOTTOM-UP
DECOUPLED
DYNAMIC CONTEXT AWARE
INTREROPERABILITY USER-EMPOWERING
DIVERSITY SECURITY
OCCASIONALLY CONNECTED DATA AS A BUILDING BLOCK
…CONSTANT EXPLORATION!
PATTERNS -
SOLUTION TO A PROBLEM IN A CONTEXT
PATTERN LANGUAGES FOR ISSUES THAT MATTER IN THE MAJORITY OF THE WORLD?

20. HUMAN INTERACTION DESIGN

21. InSTEDD Innovation Lab
Socio-technical lab
Neutral space for gov, org, edu & com
In-situ interaction design
Dissolving silos of data & trust
Local Sustainable Innovation

22. Thank You!
Eric Rasmussen Eduardo Jezierski
rasmussen@instedd.org edjez@instedd.org
@rasmussene @edjez
Buddhist monks bless the InSTEDD Innovation Lab and our generator, 2009.
As far as illusions go, electricity is a darn useful one