how to stop and apocalypse with second hand laptops and open source software

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How to stop an apocalypse with second hand laptops and Open Source Software

32C3 HamburgBy: Emerson Tan (NetHope Emergency Response), Salton Massally (iDT Labs, Sierra Leone)December 30, 2015

ContentIntroduction and outlineBackground: Ebola and Sierra LeoneThe principles of successful interventionDevelopment and implementation of MIS and Payment systems Questions?

Private and Confidential



IntroductionSierra Leone:Roughly the size of Ireland; population ~6 Million6th Poorest country on earthCivil war 1991-2002Rich in resources (diamonds, gold, minerals)

Licensed under Creative Commons

Sierra Leone: Key factsFamous for all the wrong reasons, civil war, blood diamonds, leonardo di caprio moviesRoughly size of Ireland for European referenceVery poorLife expectancy is only 48 yrsCivil war wrecked the education system: literacy rate is less than 25%Lots of minerals, place should be rich

Fighting Ebola in Sierra Leone


I could spend hours banging on about how Ebola nearly brought the countries it affected to their knees. The disease is terrifying, and the images that played across your TVs are nothing on actually watching it in front of you (from a safe distance of 2 meters).

However, these documentary makers showed up and this trailer for their documentary does a pretty good job of summing up some of the impacts to society and individuals that the epidemic had.

How to win the war against Ebola

70%70%


The strategy to get the outbreak under control was at first glance pretty simple.

70% of dead ebola patients buried safely, as recently dead people are the most infectious70% of live cases in treatment in isolation units so they be cared for safely

This gets the curve to flatten out and the situation stabilises, as the system improves to 100% in all categories the epidemic should be ended.

But this is a race against the clock, how to build the systems needed and get them to national scale in a very hard environment starting from a very low base.

Health System Scale Up:18 Ebola Treatment Centers50 Community Care CentersContact TracersSafe Burial TeamsAmbulance DriversDisinfection teamsLabs Were going to need an army

Coordination System:13 Command Centers2 Rapid response teams117 Ebola Emergency Line*Labs result reporting systemVSAT based internet to all key facilitiesMobile Phones, Sat Phones, BGAN


Of course the previous slide is a gross oversimplification, because achieving those simple goals means building a huge amount of infrastructure and employing a huge number of people, in new organizations, who all then have to be coordinated together.

In a country with 30% phone coverage, only 2 paved highways outside the capital, no power grid, economy shutdown, movement restrictions

Ok, this is now sounding much more complicated. I had to do a bunch of infrastructure work to get all this to work, but this was simple compared to the ultimate nightmare

Paying people.



Principles of effective technology intervention in developing world contexts




The Nightmare- Challenges- Solutions- How to work a miracle


Challenge: PressureThere was some pressureProblems with pay led to strikes and civil disorderStrikes and civil disorder lead to bodies and patients in the streetsYou guys have six weeks to come up with a working solution this problem set or the country is fucked. Senior UN official in private conversation, October 2014.


By October, strikes and other disruptions due to failure to pay healthcare workers were becoming a critical danger to the effort to contain the epidemic

Hazard pay introduced to bypass the mess at the ministry of health, some workers hadnt been paid for months as the Ministry of health manual systems collapsed

The policy was great in theory, only the system needed to run it all simply didnt exist at the time the policy was announced

I got dragged into a session where finally how the system was to be built, almost casually. Id been working on getting Satellite internet service to all the treatment centers and disctict command and coordination centers. In the course of the meeting I remember saying what you guys need is an ERP system. I got some very blank looks, finally, someone said whats one of those. After about 10 minutes this turned into you seem to know something, you advise us who to hire and how to do this

Oh shit.

Challenge: Welcome to the nightmare of trying to pay for everythingThe sinews of war are endless money

Paying people is harder than it looks:8 ATMs in the entire countryBanks shut down due to epidemicOne of worlds most corrupt countriesBanking system circulation shutdownATMCredit Cards

Online Payments

Accurate Staff Lists

Patronage!Corruption!


Paying people should in principle be really simple. In the developed world more or less everyone has a bank account and paying people is as simple as

Only it isnt.

No ATMs outside the capital, No Accurate staff lists, There are only 12 surnames in the entire country, Most people cant read and write and many dont even know their own birthdays.

This makes for an administrative and organizational NIGHTMARE.



Hey I know these local guys


Lorissa had known about iDT labs for some time

Sierra Leones only real software development startup since 2013

Everyone was very young, but they has already had some OpenERP experience having built the HR system for Africell, a local cell phone company with about a thousand employees.

So, take the existing HR system, tweak it a bit and scale it to ~30K people.

Thats easy isnt it?

Mobile Money and automated payments to the rescue.


ApproachUbiquity of mobile phones among the Ebola Response Workers, Extension of mobile money wallet schemesA local ICT social enterprise with technical capability in open source ERP, Internet infrastructure implemented as part of the responseA comparatively advanced mobile phone based digital payment ecosystem




Open Source had solutions for most of our key technical problemsComplicationsOpen Source SolutionProblemCant use finger print based biometrics (cross contamination risk)

ODK makes developing enrollment applications very fastOpen source facial recognition framework

No Worker ID schemeMust store profiles, payment histories, generate pay lists, manage issues OpenERP/OdooData RepositoryVery limited variation in names nationwideLots of missing and inconsistent dataDedupe, a python library that uses machine learning to quickly perform de-duplication and entity resolution on structured data1000s of duplicate and ghost entries from Gov lists (corruption)Must be SMS based, and scale to 30K users flawlessly. Must allow interactionKannel SMS and WAP gatewayCommunicationsCorruption is a way of lifeAudit module included and code is available for audit! Transparency win!Leakages, system gaming and patronage


Deduplicating without enough details was a nightmare

Twenty thousand records supplied with no unique ID or adherence to convention and unique characteristics missingImportant fields like Identification, telephone numbers, address etc that we could use to deduplicate were mostly missingExtensive spelling mistakes added several feathers to our hats of frustration

Devops and an appreciation/patience for major scope changes and feature creeps was KeyAbility to respond to how users interacts with the system and the deficiencies in processes that the system was meant to support and data supplied was paramountAlmost daily deployment to opswork for the first two monthslongest streak 29 days328 commit in the first month alone after the system was already in production longest stay in office 3 days without sleep or shower...The gods named Cheap Coffee and yet still Cheaper Energy Drinks kept us going

Deployment Complications SolutionProblemNo power grid, No data centers, No good sysadmins, No infrastructure.

Emerson persuades GoSL into letting the system be hosted at Amazon.

Government demands data hosted in SLHad to be instantly available

99.999 reliabilityOpsWorksAmazon EC2Amazon RDSAmazon Route 53Amazon SQSAmazon SES

InfrastructureMust be robust Berkshelf/ChefDeployment managementConstant scope changeCoffee, Energy Drinks, Camp beds in office, no showers, not enough sleepDevOps


Devops and an appreciation/patience for major scope changes and feature creeps was KeyAbility to respond to how users interacts with the system and the deficiencies in processes that the system was meant to support and data supplied was paramountAlmost daily deployment to opswork for the first two monthslongest streak 29 days328 commit in the first month alone after the system was already in production longest stay in office 3 days without sleep or shower...The gods named Cheap Coffee and yet still Cheaper Energy Drinks kept us going

Open Source Software restored faith in ability of systems to be run honestly


After a few weeks of operation and once people were confident they were being paid on time and with no deductions, strikes stopped completely

We hacked together biometric registration kits from voter registration kits, replacing secure tamper proof parts which wouldnt run our software with laptops borrowed in a hurry from World Vision (an NGO) after some hasty phone calls.

Seeing the team and seeing the technology built faith in the system in the health workers

The real challenge is never technical

Business process development and implementation is much harder than tech in these contexts.


ResultsDuplicate Records Removed through Information Management System3,054

Number of Fraudulent Ebola Response Workers Reported to the Anti-Corruption Commission150

Number of Double Dipping Ebola Response Workers Reported to Anti-Corruption Commission78

Medical Centers reported to Anti-Corruption Commission 3

# ERWs PaidTotal # ERWs in Country% of Total ERWs managed IMSDirect CashDigital MoneyGuinea 1,40023,174N/A78%22%Liberia 1,39311,000N/A43%58%Sierra Leone 21,05827,000100%0%100%


WIN


Questions?

I LOVE ITWHEN A PLAN COMES TOGTHERSalton: [email protected]: [email protected]

how to stop and apocalypse with second hand laptops and open source software

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