the instedd platform: collaboration technology for humanitarian action and global development
TRANSCRIPT
COLLABORATION TECHNOLOGY FOR HUMANITARIAN ACTION AND
GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT
ROBERT KIRKPATRICK
CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER
Innovative Support to Emergencies, Diseases, and Disasters
WHAT KINDS OF
TECHNOLOGIES WILLHELP US ADAPT TO A
CHANGING WORLD AND
PREPARE FOR THE
UNEXPECTED?
Banda Aceh, Indonesia, 2004
IN OUR OPINION, COLLABORATION MAKES ALL THE DIFFERENCE
WHAT HUMANITARIAN ACTION SHOULD LOOK LIKE
• You and the diverse groups you now need to work with join forces, share your data, and keep each other in sync.
• Information flows rapidly, securely, reliably, up, down, and sideways.
• You work together to analyze the data stream, identify patterns, and synthesize it into actionable information.
• The response is agile, coordinated, efficient, and effective
A FEW REASONS WHY IT SELDOM 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
• How to include the local community?
Open source software for closing the global collaboration gap
The InSTEDD TECHNOLOGY Platform
• InSTEDD Mesh4X: Share Data Across All Boundaries
– MESH4X lets you integrate applications, devices, and information seamlessly into a shared, synchronized, distributed data mesh
• InSTEDD 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
• InSTEDD 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
Geospatially-aware group messaging service for mobile field coordination
GeoChat 1.0 Fully-Inclusive Mobile Comms
GeoChat
Features:
• Create, join, and participate in chat groups using SMS, email, or a web client on the surface of a map
• Location information in messages is automatically extracted, so that you can see who said what, when, and where
• International SMS gateway, Twitter gateway, and local gateway options
• Full SMS command line interface
• Public, private, and anonymous group configurations
• Broadcast alerts to the entire team
• Relay RSS/ATOM feeds of critical data over SMS
GeoChat Ideas for the Future
• Import additional data layers
• Sync structured data onto the map via HTTP or SMS
• Offline client for disconnected operations
• Pluggable encryption
• Sensor integration
• PDA client
• Social Networking
• Integrated Analytics – tag clouds, machine learning, entity extraction, clustering, etc.
• Radio integration? Voice? Video?
A synchronization framework for seamless information sharing
Mesh4X 1.0 Adaptive Data Mesh Integration
Features:
• Fuse diverse applications, data sources, and devices
• Synchronize data automatically between databases, files, websites, desktop software, PDAs, maps, and the Cloud…
• Synchronize via HTTP or SMS
• Detect conflicts automatically
• Available in both .NET and Java
• Open standards: FeedSync, RSS/ATOM, XForms, RDF
A synchronization framework for seamless information sharing
Mesh4X 1.0
Benefits:
• Database, device, application and platform independent
• Make changes anywhere. See the changes everywhere.
• Socio-politically neutral, “masterless” architecture
• Distributed, redundant storage
• Sync without Internet
• Work disconnected
Human Expertise. Machine Learning. Evolve your Understanding.
EVOLVE 1.0 Collaborative Event Detection & Decision Support
Evolve 1.0
Features:
• Create collaborative workspaces, invite colleagues, subscribe to data sources you choose to monitor
• Interact securely with your team to sift through the data stream for emerging events
• Annotate items with tags, comments, ratings, links, locations, files, alerts, and other social metadata
• Autonomous agents perform data fusion, feature extraction, classification, tagging, geo-coding
• Integrated hypothesis formation, visualization, machine learning
Evolve 1.0
Benefits:
• Detect emerging critical events sooner and enable your team to take the right action earlier.
• Allow human experts and autonomous agent-based analytic services to augment one another’s efforts.
• Pattern detection algorithms learn from past events – and your team’s characterization of them – to improve performance the next time around.
• Fully extensible open source platform allows you to incorporate your own data sources, services, and embedded modules.
