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.

Thank you

Robert Kirkpatrick

CTO, InSTEDD

http://www.instedd.org

+1 650 796 5709

kirkpatrick@instedd.org