InSTEDD CEO

Continuing Blogs on InSTEDD.org

2011-04-06T09:27:00.000-07:00

In an effort to centralize all of our blogs we will be moving all posts to the InSTEDD site. Please continue to follow our blog at this new address.

Hans Rosling at the InSTEDD iLab!

2010-02-22T13:50:00.000-08:00

Just a quick note to mention that Hans Rosling, one of the most interesting medical statisticians alive, came by the InSTEDD Innovation Lab on the day of our Buddhist Blessing Ceremony to offer a few thoughts about Cambodia to our iLab staff.

Hans, a medical doctor out of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, has developed a set of tools for visualizing data in a simple, intuitive, and informative way, and he ruptures a lot of myths in his moving bubble diagrams. His work on HIV, on investments in the developing world, the relationships between education and child health, and more, has affected thinking - and policy - at national and international levels. He's a phenomenal teacher, and to have him spend two hours at our iLab, talking about Cambodia to our Cambodian staff (and lots of visitors for the occasion), was a wonderful stroke of good fortune.

You'll get the idea below that his work with his software, Gapminders, visualizing data from statistical databases at WHO, the World Bank, and elsewhere, was engaging, thought-provoking, and a real kick-start to the Dynamic Resource Mapping capabilities we're just now moving out into the world (see the Dynamic Resource Mapping blog below). Great timing for us, explaining why REALLY knowing what you have out there is critically important.

To get a flavor of his hours spent with us, I recommend any one of the talks that Hans has given at TED. You can see his most recent, at TEDIndia last summer, here. Other TED talks include a little sword-swallowing. He's an interesting man.

Thanks, Hans. It was a terrific day.

Prince Mahidol of Songla, Magic Wheels, and the iLab

2010-02-17T16:53:00.000-08:00

The second half of January was a blur of collaborative activity around the earthquake in Haiti. As many of our readers know, InSTEDD, with a collection of competent, attentive, and collegial partners around the world, had a team on the ground at the Port au Prince airfield within about 72 hours after the quake. We accomplished some significant and continuing good and I’ll discuss that elsewhere. February, though, began in Bangkok.

Prince Mahidol of Songla

Each year the Prince Mahidol Award Conference selects one or more global leaders in public health for recognition of their lifetime achievements. The ceremony, in Thailand, serves as a useful opportunity to hold one of the better Public Health conferences of the year. More than 1,000 attendees from dozens of countries converge on Bangkok for three days of presentations and conversations, and this year InSTEDD had a very strong presence.

Press Conference

The week began with a separate Press Conference led by the Thai Health Promotions Foundation. They were describing our new SMS shortcode for GeoChat-based reporting and alerting everywhere in Thailand, and included recognition of our implementing partners in Thailand (Change Fusion and OpenDream), our most prominent funder in the Mekong (Google.org) and our new relationship with a Thai communications company (DTAC).

We've spent a lively and interesting few months shaping a business relationship with DTAC around SMS messaging in humanitarian support. In January we all found some common ground and implemented a good first step at lowering the financial thresholds for disease reporting and outbreak surveillance. Our goal is to provide a free SMS shortcode for GeoChat use everywhere in Thailand and we’re getting there. We’re now confident that we can continue to refine our new relationship into a model for other areas of the developing world that need a reporting and alerting capability for emergencies.

Based on the later media coverage it was apparently a very successful press conference, conducted mostly in Thai, with DTAC explaining what they've done with our partnerships, and Change Fusion demonstrating a few of the new capabilities in GeoChat. I’ve just heard this week that InSTEDD and our partners made it to the front page of the newspapers in Bangkok, and I’d already seen video from television broadcasts of the event. Although it’s all in Thai, I’ll share them here at Thai TV Video 1 and Thai TV Video 2.

Channe Suy

A day or so later Channe Suy, InSTEDD’s Product Manager from our Innovation Lab in Phnom Penh, presented to a large Prince Mahidol audience our ideas around InSTEDD’s Innovation Lab concept, and specifically why we have one in Cambodia. She touched on the value of the open and shared space for innovative technical work that we’ve provided since 2008, and she spent some time describing our focus on capacity building, local teams working in local languages, interoperability, integration with existing workflow and tools, and how InSTEDD works toward an intersection of grassroots needs and national priorities. Channe gave a terrific talk, well delivered and well received, and I heard great comments about it throughout the rest of the conference.

Magic Wheel

One topic Channe addressed was our Magic Wheel – a physical object – that helps minimally-literate Community Health Workers report disease outbreaks in a consistent, reproducible, error-correcting fashion using a tool we’ve designed that looks a little like a circular slide rule. It received rave reviews for its simplicity, clever, intuitive, and robust mathematical structure, and its adaptability across languages. We'll talk more about it when the field testing is a little further along.

Policy and Tech

I, too, spoke at the conference. My topic was policy and technology in Health Information Systems and I spoke about the need for better guidelines around cloud computing, the challenges between transparency (public safety) and privacy (personal safety) in an emergency, a little about interoperability (as always...), code-escrows, telco contracts, capacity building, and deliberate exit strategies that leave new capabilities properly in the hands of responsible agencies. I was drawing on our work in Haiti and elsewhere (with photographs for illustration), and it was probably a bit much for a 20-minute talk, but you can judge for yourself here.

A few days later in Phnom Penh, we were all able to reconnect in the iLab, getting together as the largest single gathering of the InSTEDD team in a year, and sharing in a gorgeous and moving Buddhist Blessing Ceremony for our place and our work. It was a nice moment in the history of the lab and I think it bodes very well for the coming year.

The Innovation Lab

We had several days in Cambodia, and it was great to see the new faces as people join us, and to watch how well the iLab has moved forward to address concrete problems identified by local staff. It’s a terrific model for developing a local brain trust within a neutral space, addressing local cross-sectoral problems, and it’s getting better constantly as we learn.

We intend to adapt the iLab idea to new sites and new needs over the coming years, and we’re watching now for locations where this capacity building might be most useful. Suggestions are welcome! Drop a note to me at Rasmussen@InSTEDD.org or, if you're really excited about a possibility, call me on my cell at +1-360-621-3592.

The Economist (again!), Fuse, and Chris Blow

2009-06-09T21:41:00.000-07:00

Once again the Technology Quarterly section of the Economist has selected a focus on InSTEDD and our work in Asia, this time for sensors, sensitivity, and the use of mobile devices for data collection. The pleasant face you see on the GeoChat screenshot that opens the article is our Vice President for Engineering, Eduardo Jezierski, working within our Innovation Laboratory in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. More on the Lab below.

The article (which you can find here) quotes several informed and articulate sources, including staff at MIT and Path Intelligence, regarding the usefulness of mobile devices in general and our approach to data collection in particular. From my reading it's a fairly nice validation of our design and methods.

Incidentally, speaking of design and methods, many of you know we have a mesh synchronization tool called Mesh4x. It's getting used all over, from African medical clinics to the US Centers for Disease Control, but it's a programming tool, not really usable by ordinary folk.

However, we'll soon be talking more about our new Mesh4x interface client, Fuse, that will take our mesh synchronization capabilities and make them visible, intuitive, and usable by anyone who knows where their data resides. Mesh4x, our code library, works beautifully (we find a minor bug every few months and fix it) but it's been a developer's tool. Fuse will change that. Soon anyone will be able to specify an Excel spreadsheet here on my laptop, an Oracle database there on your server, a Google Earth KML layer on that PDA, a Microsoft Access table over in Atlanta, a MySQL database on your website's LAMP stack, and then press the Big Red Squishy Button that says "SYNC" and they'll all synchronize with each other across applications and across devices. I've watched pieces of that happen today and it's lovely to see. Even better is that, if access to the internet is broken or missing, it all can happen just over a stream of SMS text messages from a cellphone connected to a laptop. No internet at all.

This is very useful magic.

The Fuse synchronization interface design has to be very simple. Like all magic, that simplicity will mask a daunting complexity. One of the very talented people looking over the design of the Fuse interface is the remarkable Chris Blow. Chris has done beautiful work for our valued Ushahidi colleagues in the Open Mobile Consortium and he's now working within our Innovation Laboratory in Cambodia. Chris - a very impressive intelligence indeed - is just visiting InSTEDD, but while he's with us he's helping the Cambodian lab students learn techniques that will let them design user interfaces that make sense for their Cambodian customers. Take a look at his blog here.

Days like this are a part of the reason I love this organization. Yes, we're doing very good humanitarian work, using free and open source information tools that really surpass anything I'm seeing in the commercial sector, but what's really happening is that networks of truly remarkable people are forming around seriously hard problems facing the planet. Smart, passionate, selfless, creative people are finding a rewarding outlet for their need to be of service to humanity. Nice example of the Buddhist goal of "Right Livelihood".

InSTEDD in a very brief TV interview on Fox

2009-06-09T20:39:00.000-07:00

This morning started very early, with a live Fox Business News interview about InSTEDD that you can view here. The interview was done within the fascinating Computer History Museum just off the Google Campus in Mountain View, and really, really early in the morning.

Fox was apparently pleased with the few minutes and the producer of Fox Business, Gary Kaye, came up afterwards to request a little more interview time in the future. He said he was surprised to see such an effective combination of tech and humanitarian support and wanted to know more. Stay tuned.

(Again, the link is here.)

Eric

A brief (but useful!) Fact Sheet about InSTEDD

2009-05-29T14:09:00.001-07:00

Wow. Over the past few weeks, interest in InSTEDD and in our tools: GeoChat, Mesh4x, Evolve, and the Innovation Lab, with a slew of additional integration requests to our advisory staff, have each really taken off. We find we're receiving about a four requests a week for some sort of work somewhere in the world. Over the past few days, for example, we've had conversations about opportunities in Israel, Pakistan, Georgia (the one next to Belarus, not the one with peaches), Italy, and Tajikistan.

To get a jump start on some of these conversations, and to wrap our description into a neater package, we've developed a Fact Sheet. It's brief, just a two-pager, plus a page around a few of our achievements. To keep it brief we've minimized some of the very cool work being done by Taha Kass-Hout in Atlanta, and the separate work being done by Romdoul Kim and the Innovation Lab team in Cambodia, but it's enough to get the flavor of our skills.

Please feel free to download the Fact Sheet here, and don't hesitate to contact me, or anyone at InSTEDD, if there is some project you think might be interesting for us to do together. We're always watching for useful humanitarian support opportunities and we enjoy the conversations.

You can reach me, as always, at Rasmussen@InSTEDD.org, and on my direct cell at 360-621-3592.

Eric

New H1N1 Swine Flu Citizen's Guide Update

2009-05-09T14:30:00.001-07:00

The new Pandemic Influenza Citizen's Guide, edited by Sarah Booth and Kelsey Hills-Evans to incorporate information around the recent H1N1 (Swine) flu outbreak, is now posted here.

Using InSTEDD's Evolve for Tracking and Collaborating around the 2009 H1N1 Flu Event:

2009-05-01T12:09:00.000-07:00

Last week, InSTEDD stood up a workspace to further aid experts and responders collaborating around emerging reports related to the 2009 H1N1 pandemic influenza event.

The workspace is based on InSTEDD's Evolve, an online application which allows a team to collaborate around multiple streams of information to assess, characterize, and respond to an event with the assistance of automated services.

Our Evolve Space offers a comprehensive set of collaborative features, including

commenting,
tagging,
mapping (both user generated and automated),
the relating of multiple alerts to each other,
searching and filtering (by keyword and by location),
specifying a time window,
adding attachments,
subscribing (currently in the form of a web-friendly format known as GeoRSS and through an email subscription),

and more.

The Evolve Workspace is also equipped with an intelligent process (sometimes referred to as a machine-learning algorithm) that "learns" from anything provided by human experts (e.g. adding a keyword or a tag, or correcting the incorrect mapping of an item). This intelligent process quickly and accurately learns to follow advice from expert humans and we're showing a 95% confidence level for the automated selections based on previous tests. The system soon starts suggesting tags, as well as correcting itself, and gradually offers even better results over time.

Have you an H1N1 alert or item you like to share with the community? You can easily contribute that alert by clicking the "Add Item" feature on our Evolve H1N1 workspace.

If you have a background in public health, international relations, diplomacy, social work, or emergency response and are interested in contributing actively to this effort please contact us at info@instedd.org.

For low volume announcements, you can follow us on Twitter. As I also mentioned in an earlier blog, we're following very rapid news events related to H1N1 epidemiology through Veratect on Twitter at www.Twitter.com/Veratect .

Related Links:

Collaborative Analytics and Environment for Linking Early Event Detection to an Effective Response

Best Poster Award for Improving Public Health Investigation and Response at the Seventh Annual International Society for Disease Surveillance Conference

InSTEDD Citizen's Guide to Pandemic Influenza (the Flu Manual)

2009-04-30T14:56:00.000-07:00

InSTEDD has been very happy to host the Flu Manual on our site for the past year or so.

The manual, called "Pandemic Influenza Preparation and Response: A Citizen's Guide", is widely considered the best of its kind and has been reproduced in at least five languages across the globe. You can find it here. It's currently being distributed within NASA, the NFL, the Los Angeles Federal Executive Board (the largest in the nation), WebEOC, Verizon, and quite a few other locations that we're hearing about second-hand. There have been more than a thousand downloads of the Guide since the outbreak began last week and we're very pleased it's found such wide acceptance.

Although this outbreak is an H1N1 variant from Mexico and not the H5N1 avian influenza from Asia that we've all been worried about for the past few years, it's still spreading very rapidly and it's killed quite a few people in Mexico. Fortunately, that level of lethality is not yet being seen elsewhere in the world but, from our point of view, preparation is easy and sensible and we should simply do it. It's good public health practice.

The information in the current Guide is very solid for that kind of preparation. It's been designed for any pandemic influenza (not just swine or avian). It gives a great look at:

the lessons of past pandemics,
what the stages of a pandemic look like,
how to prepare for social isolation techniques,
how to care for a sick family member,
how to prepare oral rehydration solutions,
what to stockpile for an extended period at home,
how to volunteer within your community,
what measures the CDC recommends,
where to get current information as the pandemic unfolds,
how to prepare a home medical record of care

and much more.

The historical viewpoint you can gain from the Guide is particularly helpful. These first weeks have always been a very difficult period in an epidemic as public health staff try to sort out who, what, where, how much and all the rest. In my opinion, the World Health Organization response, as well as that of the US Center's for Disease Control in Atlanta, has been as thoughtful and as measured as anyone could hope for in the current communications age. The avalanche of information is very difficult to sort and verify, yet it's difficult to have systems in one place talk to systems in another place, and it's always really hard to get information from the developing world. The public health professionals who have not slept in much of a week have our admiration and our thanks.

Although we publish it, the Guide is not an InSTEDD creation. It was written by two Stanford University students, Sarah Booth and Kelsey Hills-Evans, with guidance on medical issues from several physicians including David Heymann, MD (then Assistant Director-General of the World Health Organization in Geneva), Professor Dennis Israelski (previously Director of the Fellowship Program in Infectious Diseases at Stanford University Medical Center) and Grattan Woodson, MD.

The Guide is free and can be distributed to anyone without limitation. It's covered under a Creative Commons license and we encourage reproducing it anywhere and everywhere.

At the moment, WHO has established Pandemic Level 5 (out of a possible 6), though the absolute numbers of patients and their level of illness appear to be realtively mild throughout much of the world. Patients associated with Mexico seem to have had a more severe clinical spectrum and we'll watch to see whether that greater severity appears anywhere else.

Internally we're following the notifications on Twitter from Veratect (www.Twitter.com/Veratect) and reading the really exceptional work that Janet Ginsburg is doing on TrackerNews.net. Don't miss her hair-curling blog on factory farms and their infectious disease risks at www.TrackerBlog.InSTEDD.org.

It's an interesting time to be involved in outbreak response. We're doing quite a bit, but we've been asked to keep it private so we will. I'll mention though that, as for so many within the outbreak response community, there has not been much sleep within the InSTEDD team over the past week.

Eric

InSTEDD in the news...

2009-03-26T00:58:00.000-07:00

We've had an exceptionally good month due to the release into beta of our software tool called GeoChat. We're testing it with users in Asia and in Africa and so far it's been well-received.

As a result of the news percolating out, InSTEDD has been covered, one way or another, by the local affiliate's ABC Evening News, by CBS Radio, by Business Week, Lancet, Nature, New Scientist, and more than thirty blogs.

For those who might like to check out a sample of what people are saying about GeoChat, a free and open source SMS and mapping-based tool designed for group messaging under stressful conditions, here you go: You can see the ABC Evening News television broadcast here, the Nature article here, the CBS Radio article here, and the New Scientist article here.

A Brilliant Transition

2009-02-23T21:25:00.000-08:00

Tonight I learned that our inspiration at InSTEDD, Dr. Larry Brilliant, is stepping down from his position as Executive Director of Google.org.

From INSTEDD's perspective there is quite a bit of history in that event. Larry's TED Prize led to the formation of this organization, including our odd name (an inside joke during the TED acceptance speech), and our admirable charter to use technology to improve detection of, and response to, crises. He hired me as CEO in 2007 and, for the past 18 months that I've known Larry, he's been one of the most kind, intelligent, intense, and creative men I've ever had the pleasure to know. I'll miss his voice at the helm of Dot-Org.

It's valuable to remember that Larry's TED Wish, for "Better Early Detection, Better Early Response" against emerging infections and natural disasters, has sparked ideas all over the globe, including the suite of capabilities we've introduced here at InSTEDD.

Larry encouraged us to look very closely at the problems he was worried about. He had spent years in India and knew well that nothing much could be designed to help villagers report diseases unless someone with a technical background went out to LIVE there, helping them understand the art of the possible while immersed with them in the reality of the day. Naturally enough, ideas for other people work best when designed with those people. We need to fit our suggestions into their needs, their culture, their workflow, and their desires. Users need to own the process, the design, and the result. He has never let us forget that and his concern has paid off handsomely.

He recognized that, to be effective, we needed to share the problems of unreliable power, dangerous insects, dirty water, leftover landmines, cross-cultural suspicion, illiteracy, cold, heat, and all the rest. But he also knew we'd find in those villages courage, and intelligence, and discipline, and sacrifice, and a passionate desire to do the best possible job, even when resources are maddeningly scarce and lives are lost for truly stupid reasons. A small scratch becomes an abscess. A mosquito bite carries Yellow Fever. No gasoline for the ambulance. Tires buried in mud. No aspirin. No chlorine. No clean gloves. No toilet. No soap. A thousand little events no longer seen in the modern world but that can make a trivial problem fatal where we work.

At InSTEDD, being true to Larry's TED Prize Wish, we've worked hard on determining just how Larry's "Better Early Detection, Better Early Response" could be achieved. As we researched the problem in Geneva with the World Health Organization, in Atlanta with the Centers for Disease Control, in Cambodia, Bangladesh, Ghana, Peru and elsewhere, we found one constant, ubiquitous, and overwhelming problem: Collaboration. People with information couldn't share it with those who needed to know. Either it was too hard to report that sneezing chicken, or some system couldn't read that file type, or the message was buried invisibly in the morass of other things people had to read and was lost before a team of experts could think about it.

We looked around carefully and saw that plenty of people were doing open-media analysis. We saw that many others were doing cellphone-based communication. We recognized that we needed to stitch it all together and make sense out of it all. We needed to link community health workers to everyone that needed to see their information. We needed to translate that information between all of the systems where experts were trying to keep track and couldn't. We needed to help those experts get together to think about that one small "something" that didn't look right.

And that's what we've done. GeoChat, Mesh4x, and Evolve are in beta and in use in useful corners of the world. We now have health workers talking amongst each other in Mongolia and in Cambodia and in Ghana. We have world-renowned epidemiology software for the first time able to pool information from different locations by forming a "mesh", measurably improving the statistical power of the analysis. That mesh synchronization is working for HIV Clinics in Africa as well. We have global monitoring offices in world capitals using our analytical techniques to watch information pouring in, spot anomalies, and notify the real humans that something's wrong, while automatically generating a set of ideas about what the problem might be. It's really good stuff.

We've also developed a work plan and a curriculum to teach what we know. We've made sure anyone working with us can take full ownership of our tools by making them free and open source, and by carefully training our users in software languages and techniques so that they can alter the tools whenever they like to meet their changing needs. We've noted, happily, that we're slowly reversing brain drains and beginning to build little Brain Trusts.

We've also discovered how much useful science and technology is invisible to the humanitarian community and started a website to make those links more visible. The site is at www.TrackerNews.net, and even NPR has taken note of how valuable the site is becoming.

And from work stimulated by Larry Brilliant's original TED Wish, our conference poster describing our new tools for analysis won First Place in the global competition at the International Society for Infectious Diseases last December. It's a nice achievement.

So, with much gratitude to Larry, we're taking the spirit of his TED Wish, his intelligence, and his humanity, mixing in a few genius engineers of our own, and adding a staff deeply committed to science, common sense, and social justice to make "Better Early Detection, Better Early Response" a reality.

Thank you, Larry. Your vision has shaped our work. We're quiet, of course, (like all good public health and disaster preparedness efforts), but it's going very well, we're very grateful to you, and the world is again a little better off through your efforts.

Eric

Introducing TrackerNews.net

2009-01-07T22:30:00.000-08:00

Over the past few months, InSTEDD has quietly launched a new website that focuses on humanitarian and health technology: www.TrackerNews.net. It is ready now for a little noise!

As we've worked on research & development over the past year, we've found ourselves at once delighted and daunted by the amount of interesting and useful information on the web – most of which isn’t available through news feeds. We decided to create an aggregator that would add a layer of context and go beyond RSS feeds, weaving together stories about humanitarian work, science, technology and “one health” (human, animal, plant and planetary – it is all of a piece).

TrackerNews is the result and it’s designed for the kind of humanitarian work we do. Now, we know that there are plenty of very good news and technology aggregators and we have not added another (in fact, we link to several aggregators in Tracker's Resources section). Rather, we're using TrackerNews to highlight ideas, innovations and developments that can – or could – make a difference, and we do that with a little background and perspective
.

We take to heart science fiction author Robert Heinlein’s words of 40 years ago: “Specialization is for insects.” We understand that very few people have much time to read outside of their specialties, but we think we have created TrackerNews as a resource that delivers a much-needed breadth of perspective. We hope it becomes a place where serendipity is a regular feature; a place where specialists routinely discover relevant work in other fields, and where "need" and "know-how" intersect.

Science journalist Janet Ginsburg took the lead developing the site and now serves as its editor and blogger (http://trackerblog.instedd.org). Janet designed TrackerNews with intelligence, experience, and a contact list that's terrific at helping us assess the world’s humanitarian, technical, medical, and scientific developments.

TrackerNews has a few twists. For example, headlines are not organized by topic, nor is there a standard navigation bar. Rather, a story on a single topic (whether news articles, research papers, blog posts, websites, book reviews, e-books, software downloads - print, audio, video) is grouped with background material in a single silver box to offer context and explain significance. This makes for a somewhat eclectic mix on any given day, but it’s designed to provide readers, especially those who tend to select themselves into “silos” of expertise, with a multi-disciplinary perspective.

Take a look at this Flickr slide show to get a sense of the range of subjects covered on TrackerNews: Slide examples. I think you'll agree we're covering some fascinating stuff, and that much of it you've never seen elsewhere.

Although groups of links tend to be driven by news events, in general TrackerNews is not for reporting “this-just-in!” stories. Nor are stories on Tracker ranked by popularity, which we think tends to create a self-reinforcing skew. Links are selected for their bearing on a particular subject and for their utility. Academic papers are sometimes included in groupings to make it easier for interested readers to see original research and find contact information.

Headlines start either in the green bar banner at the top, or at the top of the left column. They snake through the columns over a couple of days, exiting off the lower right and into a searchable archive. Research articles and other special content sport a red “carrot.”

Scroll down “below the fold” for the Resources section. This is, and always will be, work-in-progress, but even at this early date, there are hundreds of links. Whenever we find an aggregator that goes into more depth on a topic, we link to it and give a prominent position in the category. The mission of our TrackerNews site is to connect you to the information you need.

We also have a “Custom Tracker” tool in development. Here is a link to a rough sketch. (Custom Tracker example) Basically, it is a DIY site map for the collective knowledge of a group or an event. The back end user interface is both WYSIWYG and drag’n’drop (think iGoogle homepage edits).

I'm really pleased that TrackerNews, even in this very early version we’ll call v0.1, has already generated some positive discussion on the value of the crossover dimension. People working emerging infectious disease surveillance are commenting on rapid disease detection technologies developed by electrical engineers. Human rights advocates are looking at communications tools developed to combat wildlife smuggling. The cross-pollination is working.

As most people reading this know, at InSTEDD we're deeply interested in improving collaboration and information-sharing through free and open source tools that we design with close input from our users. We apply that bedrock approach in everything we do. Please take a look at www.TrackerNews.net and let us know what you think. Send feedback to Janet at editor@trackernews.net.

On behalf of everyone at InSTEDD, we look forward to hearing your thoughts.

- Eric Rasmussen

InSTEDD introduction in Asia

2008-09-04T13:16:00.000-07:00

I usually watch my very bright and articulate colleagues post blogs, but it’s been a great few weeks, with a collection of significant public efforts, and some of the efforts need notice. Let’s try a few photos this time.

My last blog was related to the Myanmar cyclone and our work on Sahana translation into Burmese, and, in the background, a very little about the Sichuan earthquake in China. I need to catch up a bit and put some other recent events in context.

Here at InSTEDD we’ve done a few things over the past three months that would be worth describing in detail but this blog would be excessively long. I’ll keep it more brief by just mentioning that we’ve:

1. Had useful meetings with the Gates Foundation,

2. Given a nice presentation at the Pacific Health Forum,

3. Hosted an interesting dinner at the Pacific Health Forum on "Ethics in Information Dissemination within Low-Resource Environments" (with WHO, PATH, Gates, Veratect, Grameen Bank, and a dozen others),

4. Chaired a useful workshop at SciFoo Camp on “Discovering Emerging Infections”,

5. Had some good conversations with HealthMap at Harvard on integrating our complimentary toolsets,

6. Presented at Kofi Annan’s Global Humanitarian Forum on using collaborative tools for climate change monitoring,

7. Had some fascinating and helpful discussions about design with IDEO,

8. Written a White Paper for the Rockefeller Bellagio Conference on “Collaboration in Emerging Infection Epidemiology”,

9. Co-chaired a track at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference on “Technology for Peace”

And more. It’s been an incredible summer. I’ll also mention only briefly that we received a lovely gift from the Chinese government for our work with the Yunnan Center for Disease Control after the earthquake.

Let’s stay more current in the discussions below, but any reader can feel free to ask me about anything above.

Just looking over the past three weeks:

Partnerships:

Grameen: Dennis Israelski and I just spent a week in Bangladesh with both Grameen (Led by Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize, 2006) and BRAC, the largest NGO in the world. You’ll see a selection of photos below. Starting with Grameen, Dennis and I met extensively with the director of Grameen Solutions, Kazi Islam, had lunch with the Grameen Solutions Board of Directors, and took a trip to rural central Bangladesh as guests within a neighborhood Grameen Bank microfinance meeting.

We also visited one of the Grameen Health Centers where disease monitoring is taking place by sending staff from these centers to a network of villages each day, then reporting the conditions in the villages to a doctor in this center.

Those who run the Health Centers are asking for GeoChat on a model very similar to what we intend for the MBDS cross-border sites.

These ladies are a part of the network developing for village disease reporting because they are, of course, already a network.

Grameen neighborhood microfinance meeting, three hours north of Dhaka (Dennis and I were the guests of honor):

Grameen Microfinance loan family in Tangail village:

Grameen Solutions, Grameen Tower, Dhaka:

Grameen Health Center entrance (woman in pink coming out). Counter is the Grameen pharmacy:

Grameen Health Center clinic room:

A woman from Grameen Health Center who goes to six villages every day for health reports. This is our GeoChat use-case:

Shafqat, the CTO for Grameen Solutions. Ed and Robert wrapped into one, plus a beard, cap, and thobe. Speaks gorgeous British English, native Bengali. Smart, cheerful, very impressive man. The smile was constant. We saw a lot of his work.

BRAC: BRAC is, to my understanding, the largest NGO in the world. They work generally on primary education, children’s health, and gender-based microfinance. They have recently started a school of public health on a model that is considered one of the best in the world.

Dennis and I met with the Dean of that School, Professor Mushtaque Chowdhury, for a discussion of an Innovation Lab linkage between that school and the Cambodian School of Public Health, the topic to be “collaborative public health epidemiology and informatics”, teaching our methods and our tools sustainably in a format that gains credibility and academic rigor.

Professor Chowdhury (who is also a full Professor of Epidemiology at Columbia in New York) liked the idea very much, as did the Cambodian National Institute of Public Health, overseers of the School of Public Health in Phnom Penh. We’re working now on a proposal to link the two, since BRAC wants our tools for their school, Cambodia wants the BRAC curriculum model and our tools, and we want to ensure sustainability for the collaboration meme in public health informatics. How better than to embed it carefully and responsibly in the educational systems?

MBDS: Dennis and I then joined Ed Jezierski in Phnom Penh for the Mekong Basin Disease Surveillance Network (MBDS) Regional Forum, the Coming Out party for our tools and methods within the medical and public health providers for six nations in Southeast Asia. Photos below. Dennis, as co-chair of Information and Communications Technology (ICT), spent a lot of time at the podium and leading ICT workshops. We were (and are) only technical advisors and NOT technology implementers (Very Bad Idea) but Dennis had a decent bit of responsibility regardless.

We also, at this meeting, hosted a mini-conference for the demonstration of our tools. It took place on a Tuesday evening from about 5pm to 8pm. Photos below. We had a remarkable turnout – 73 registered attendees – and we had a TON of questions, comments, people trying GeoChat submissions in real-time to the number we gave them, and lots of post-event crowds around each one of us.

Despite our groaning internally about the somewhat clumsy delivery process we used for our message, and more technical difficulties outside of our control than we really wanted to endure (broken cables, failed phones, loss of hotel internet halfway through, etc) we were apparently a pretty good story anyway. We have a page of requests for collaboration including WHO’s WIPRO office in Manila, the Ministry of Health in Laos, the Yunnan CDC in China, ProMED-MBDS, US-CDC in Asia, RAND Corporation, and a dozen others. We were hot.

There will be a trial of our stuff around a dedicated ICT meeting in Savanakhet, Lao, probably in early November. At that point we will have Stung Treng and Champassak already explored in September (I hope), and we’ll arrive a day or two early in November and try linking – for the meeting – Mukdahan (Thailand) and Savanekhet (Lao PDR), and Savanekhet and Quang Tri (Vietnam). They are already rather tech savvy and have been cooperating with each other so this should be a small step for a trial. That will give us trials of cross border links in Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand before the end of the year. Not bad.

Dennis co-chairing ICT. He did an outstanding job on short notice, gently encouraging participation. It was gratifying to watch and very carefully and respectfully done:

Ed choosing phones for our workshop:

The MBDS InSTEDD Coming Out Party – GeoChat in real time from the audience:

More attended than we expected. We’d had a little warning that day so we shifted the workshop venue to the plenary hall.
(note the GeoChat submission in progress in the foreground)

Post-event discussions – we were pretty popular:

Tools

GeoChat: Now available. This week it grew from weak as a kitten to perhaps the maturity of Baron Rojo, Ed’s very large puppy. It’s not a mature tool yet, but it’s clearly no longer just embryonic potential. We used it in Phnom Penh with strangers on the fly and it worked well. I used it at Burning Man this past weekend. We’ve been asked to have it available for hurricane season, and we’ve been asked to introduce it to the WHO regional office, WIPRO, in Manila for their field staff.

OK, good stuff. We’re getting out there effectively. This one hit the mark.

GeoChat, the day before the MBDS demo:

Riff: Riff, our collaborative decision support tool, works well, and just as designed within the internal architecture, but it needs, I think, deeper exposure in the field to optimize the user interface. I think, to start, I want to start using Riff daily beginning this coming week within my own office.

As it happens, we had a PERFECT Riff problem appear in India while we were at the MBDS meeting and - disappointingly - we all wound up discussing it on a series of disjointed emails around the world. Riff is designed to help with precisely this problem - teams of people around the world collaborating quickly around a news item with a number of bots and automated services to help users make informed decisions with context. Unfortunately we were only a couple of days from having it ready. We’re there now, but we missed that brief window. Rats.

We are also making sure GeoChat messages go into Riff seamlessly and show up on a map module that we can then annotate for GoogleEarth through Mesh4x. We will be very sure our creations gracefully understand one another.

In Riff we really need to transform a complex set of capabilities into a look that is clean, intelligent and intuitive and I'm not sure we're there as well as we could be. This may be a place to ask for help:

If there are bright designers out there who would like to help with some open-source humanitarian software UI design that we give away for free for use in Very Bad Places, please drop a note to Info@instedd.org or write me directly at Rasmussen@instedd.org. I’m looking for clever, creative ideas for helping Riff be a better interface on top of the already superb capabilities built into the features and modules. This tool has to be effective in helping users collaborate when they're hot, filthy, exhausted, a little scared, badly overburdened, and responsible for lives.

Below is an older version of Riff (perhaps three weeks), one view. It looks quite a bit better than this now, but it’s still in process. Note that the function really is quite decent. Its only the interface that is not yet intuitive.

Mesh4x: Mesh4x, though the most technical of our products and the one with no user interface, is probably our most successful beast to date. It’s now been built into the OpenROSA effort called JavaROSA and will be introduced in Tanzania within the next month as a part of OpenROSA / OpenMRS and will have genuine use in the field. To quote Mulan, “our baby’s all grown up and saving China” (overstating somewhat and getting the geography wrong).

Mesh4x does a lot of linking from one thing to another, is fluent in several important computer applications, and plays very well with other communications devices.

Mesh4x is also, curiously, the easiest story to tell: Bad disaster, lots of tents on the hillside where humanitarian staff are working, assessments happening everywhere and being saved in Excel or Access or GoogleEarth, so lots of people collecting lots of information in stovepipes. Very inefficient, and maybe unsafe.

So then (socially) we agree to share information and bits of interest, then (technically) we introduce Mesh4x. Now, with Mesh4x helping, I move my pushpin on Google Earth in my tent, your Excel spreadsheet in your tent changes, we’re all sharing information in crisis, it’s efficient, with less redundancy, better use of donor dollars, and it’s all over SMS with no internet, using freely available libraries. Easy story. Great utility. Interesting idea. Perfect.

RNA: RNA is a set of tools (modules) within Riff for analytics and they are better than I thought it would be at this point. It might be the best of the Riff module set and has surprised a few people with it’s accuracy both in diagnosis and in defining relationships.

RNA is a distinct tools set, even though within Riff, and so we look at it separately. It’s apparently going quite well, using a team led by Dr. Taha Kass-Hout and involving Nico in Argentina and some interns from Trinity College who turned out to be excellent (or well-led? Or both?). We’ll keep this going. You can read about it on Taha’s blogs.

Tracker: Tracker is our web aggregator for health and humanitarian technology stories. We kept finding such great stuff buried in obscure places that we thought we had to build something that would allow us to share the new discoveries and capabilities with the entire humanitarian and global public health communities. It will be up for us this coming week.

Tracker, I’m told by reliable people, will be informative, well-designed, appealing to look at and interact with, and effective to use. We’ll know very shortly.

I’m pleased to note that, on Tracker, we’ve been involved with the humanitarian blogging community, UN relief agency staff and former staff, news organizations, NGOs, and others making sure content and form are aimed well. The feedback has been very positive and a number of sites are watching for us. I suspect we’ll get known pretty quickly.

Here is a screenshot from two days ago. Looks very encouraging. Clean, smart, interesting. We’re populating the resource databases this weekend:

As a last thought, my special compliments to the Clarius team working so closely with us in Argentina and in Cambodia. Daniel, Nico, Laura, Miguel, Luigi, and the rest are truly among the very finest coders, testers, QA staff, designers, and teachers I’ve ever run across. They’ve been doing consistently outstanding work, under great pressure, across a 15 hour time difference, and across really challenging communication systems, in at least five countries.

All of their work has been done with care, cheerfulness, competence, and flexibility and the result has been a stunning output, with four major efforts ready for release from a small team in about eight months, starting from zero. It's a remarkable accomplishment.

Let me here, publicly, convey gratitude and admiration to each of them from all of the staff at InSTEDD.

Eric

InSTEDD and the Myanmar Cyclone

2008-05-08T12:08:00.000-07:00

I don't write often but I wanted to let everyone know what InSTEDD is doing in the Myanmar Cyclone response.

1. We have a long-standing working relationship with the open-source disaster management tool called “Sahana”, developed and managed through a group in Sri Lanka. We received a request from them for help early yesterday after Sahana had, in turn, received a request from inside Myanmar. That request was asking for Sahana as the disaster response coordination software to use for the humanitarian response, starting immediately and probably continuing for several months. We agreed to help, of course, and we’ve installed Sahana on the same system we use for our own website at Rackspace and it’s up and working now.

2. We heard late last night that we needed to localize Sahana into Burmese so that we could engage local staff in the response coordination process. We have now located some translators (not enough) for the 3500 words and phrases, and built tools to help break up the phrases into manageable chunks and then weave them back together again. Those translators are within our Google partners, our Mekong Basin Disease Surveillance System contacts in Asia, Stanford, World Vision, and more. An excellent example of crowdsourcing and networking and all happening literally overnight.

3. We’re also talking with the IBM Crisis Response Team that are trying to get into Burma and making sure we have the ability to link the peripheral Sahana server they'll have in Myanmar to our central Sahana server here in the US. We have a request pending with Google engineers, working with our own dev team, to help use our Mesh4x sync tools (used to connect databases to databases and systems to systems) to link center-to-edge in Sahana, making sure bandwidth is optimized in Myanmar and those outside Myanmar have a large pipe for access onto our hosted server at Rackspace.

4. We’ve had a request to push our internal GeoChat tool out early, really before several important features are established, and we’ve agreed in the interests of time and urgency to let that happen, even with a little risk to our reputation. GeoChat allows SMS messages to appear interactively on a map in any system (GoogleEarth, Visual Earth, Google Maps, GeoFusion, ESRI, GeoRSS feeds, KML feeds) and has proven so useful, even in current form, that the teams in Myanmar consider it worthwhile to take this relatively immature version even if only from a safety standpoint. It still works, very well, but it's neither elegant nor robust. But it will soon be both.

We still need Burmese translators for localizing Sahana, so please drop a note into Contact Us if you think you might be able to help.

This is a remarkable disaster, made very complicated by the communications restrictions placed on international responders by the Myanmar government. We hope those restrictions ease soon or this is going to be a very difficult response with excess deaths that will eventually be quantified and published.

I’ll keep updates going here.

Eric

New Staff at InSTEDD

2008-01-28T01:47:00.001-08:00

We have two new members of the InSTEDD team and I couldn't be more pleased. You'll see their bios appear on the Bio page but Olaf and Suzanne are just as remarkable as the rest of the team, have both been working around us for a while, and will fit right in as full-time members of the staff.

Olaf Conijn - a Dutch development star

Olaf is a stunning coder, considered "incredible" by our director of engineering, Ed Jezierski (and Ed himself was considered a "force" at Microsoft, leading the "Patterns and Practices" group before joining InSTEDD, so one star is apparently able to recognize another...) . Ed's known Olaf for a while and has watched him develop software for several years. Olaf, though, is modest about his achievements, noting only that, as a teenager, he found he "liked writing computer programs". Only when pressed does he mention that he was teaching coding to world-class professionals (some at Microsoft) when he was 17. He's now all of 25 and living in Amsterdam. He'll be working on platform development and tool integration for our deep-field cross-border reporting systems, and helping national Ministries of Health meet reporting requirements for the new International Health Regulations that came into effect in June of 2007.

Suzanne Jul - a perfect match for InSTEDD

Suzanne is a PhD computer scientist and disaster maven with a Masters in Computer Science from the University of Washington and a PhD in Human-Computer Interface from the University of Michigan. She then got interested in disaster response tools, became a Red Cross Disaster Services volunteer, took courses in disaster response and International Humanitarian Law while consulting for Cisco, worked in the Katrina response and in disaster exercises for the State of California, then showed up on our radar after working at the ISCRAM Conference in the Netherlands last year (Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management). I talked with her during a meeting at the Technical University in Delft and was impressed with both her career achievements and her pragmatic intelligence. Lots of common sense, and a huge desire to put all of that careful training to use somewhere that matters. So she started at InSTEDD last week. I've seen her portfolio and she's perfect for the interface design problems we've seen all over the humanitarian support space.

The team is looking at shortcomings in humanitarian tools

About that interface design problem. Suzanne is particularly important because so much (not all, but most) humanitarian software has been either designed for other tasks and adopted simply for ubiquity and access, or it was designed precisely to meet a perceived need by someone who DOES that job, but isn't trained in software design, quality assurance, or interface optimization. Now InSTEDD has the luxury of staff trained in all three, PLUS experience in the field and a near-constant exposure to real field conditions because we test our stuff in places like the Mekong Delta, Olympic National Park, and the Costa Rican cloud forests.

Nothing is ever guaranteed, but this is shaping up fairly well.

Eric

Seoul and Water Disasters

2008-01-28T01:05:00.000-08:00

I’m in Seoul, Korea attending the UN’s “Second Meeting of the High-Level Expert Panel on Water and Disaster” and I’ve learned a great deal in just a few hours. Participants around me are from Bangladesh, England, UNICEF, the Japan Water Forum and a dozen others, and the opening speech this morning at 9am was delivered by a man who was, unexpectedly, named Prime Minister of South Korea at 10:30.

I’ve been uncharacteristically quiet today, listening to the problems seen in Cyclone Sidr in Bangladesh, and the arguments for including slow-onset events under the label “water disasters” (like groundwater depletion and river contamination in southern India, for example) so that they can get the attention they need. It's a small room at a nice hotel (made smaller by a LOT of media cameras) and the participants seem to know each other fairly well. The conversation has been structured, but informal, and I've noted the remarkable range of problems we face globally that are rarely considered in the West. After one long description of the consequences of livestock loss in hurricanes, there was an extended discussion from Colombia, for example, on how to make Disaster Risk Assessments as much a part of development and reconstruction as an Environmental Impact Statement. And how to make disaster risk reduction as ubiquitous an effort within a population as seatbelts are for injury avoidance and safe sex for HIV transmission reduction.

I spoke on the place of InSTEDD and our partners in the aftermath of acute water disasters like floods and typhoons, including some of the tools we’ve found or built that might be helpful there. The talk was apparently very well-received and we’ve a new set of conversations underway with colleagues we’ve just met this morning. One discussion included a nice idea for linking a regional disaster response planning team in Central America using VSee (www.vsee.com).

After my talk (which was on requirements for effective response to disasters in general, not just disease reporting) I heard that peasants in Colombia, a country riven by violence from narco-trafficking, still consider floods a greater threat than anything else in the nation. And that India now gets 50% of her daily water from underground aquifers - water that’s been percolating slowly downward for millennia, is now being withdrawn at a far greater rate than it’s being replenished, and is clearly a disaster in the making.

One of the most interesting items I heard was that the Netherlands has a very clever initiative for improving global water and sanitation called AKVO (www.akvo.org). They are using tools based on Wikipedia, Ebay, and RSS to help link local communities, trusted local partners, lenders, and donors in a mesh of small-scale funding that is directed to clean water and sanitation provisioning. It's efficient, and transparent, and a decent model for linking those who have to those who need. It’s a nice idea and I wish them great success.

My presence at this conference, requested by a respected colleague from the Canadian Foreign Ministry, is not directly related to the immediate efforts at InSTEDD, but the attendees apparently found what I talked about worth discussion and inclusion, and I’ve now learned a lot about topics I’ve never examined before. It’s just an extra overnight stay as I pass through Seoul since I’m on my way to Bangkok to join the team in Thailand for a few days.

We'll meet up in Thailand and, after talking with some members of the Mekong Basin Diseases Surveillance consortium in Cheng Mai later this week, we'll migrate into Cambodia for some deep-field epidemiology assessments near the Lao border and a large set of conversations with people and organizations already working in the region.

I'll leave Seoul tomorrow, but if anyone has thoughts regarding support to clean water and sanitation needs after disasters, please drop a note into the forums and we'll make sure your ideas get to the conference coordinators. Be sure to tell us if it's ok to have them contact you and how they should do it.

Eric

Looking around at the beginning

2008-01-13T22:20:00.000-08:00

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.