InSTEDD Team Blogs

Hello World

admin — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 12:11:10 -0600

This is my first post after a blogging hiatus that started more than a year ago. Much has changed in my life between then and now so I'll make this post a quick intro of myself, and a catch up for those wondering about me dropping off the blogosphere.

At the time, I was an Architect at the Microsoft patterns & practices team, shipping content, frameworks, and tools to help folks be more productive when building large scale applications. I then became the architect with the Microsoft working on prototypes and designing approaches to foster of innovation within the company. But then...

I met Eric, InSTEDD's CEO, during Strong Angel III, a big civilian-military disaster preparedness exercise. Later in 2007 I was partnering with Robert Kirkpatrick (now in InSTEDD too), Ted Okada and Nigel Snoad from Microsoft Humanitarian Systems working on one of our prototypes that was being deployed in Afghanistan to help evolve open standards for data synchronization.

When last October InSTEDD took its current shape with Eric and Robert on board, I was presented with a great opportunity. Although I was working with smart folks across a successful company with an amazing team on pretty cool stuff, I had a longing to work in the humanitarian and health space full time. I wanted to bring in the best of technology to communities that really need it worldwide and to those who work with them. The choice was clear: I took the plunge and joined InSTEDD to lead the engineering arm, so... here I am.

Some of the things that excited me about joining InSTEDD besides the mission and the people, was how we wanted to go about things:

Contributing to disaster and health information flow by reframing it as a collaboration problem. I believe in the ability of technology to augment human capability - and its proven ability to get in the way!
The opportunity to create a field lab. Taking the notion of "If you don't go you don't know" and "design for the wild", mix it up with agile engineering to build and integrate technology so that can continuously adapt to the needs of communities.
The ability to work in a space where platforms are just a means to an end, and cross-platform interoperability part of everyday life. Our scorecard is based on improved livelihoods. We can use Linux, Google, Eclipse- you name it; contribute to stellar open source projects such as Mono or Sahana, and participate in the technical community with a strong emphasis on long term sustainability.

If you are reading this coming from the humanitarian or health space, you can infer I am a new on the block, so please be patient. I appreciate any and all guidance, feedback, recommendations, warnings, and advice you might have. If you come from the technology space, well, there is so much to be learned from what happens in the toughest environments, and I hope to share the lessons as we find them (or they find us).

Right now some of the things we are working on include:

How to develop better situational awareness of "who's doing what where" and how to use that awareness to accelerate the process of people building relationships.
How information flow can be improved "up & down": from the far field where SMS barely works to headquarters and back, with visualization and analysis, as well as between communities finding their own innovative approaches to deal with problems, and "between" the silos of human, animal, and environmental health.
How to take information typically consumed individually to create customized group collaboration environments.
What is a good mix of existing and new software, services and devices for the problems above? What is the simplest architecture that can keep it all working together in an interoperable, reliable and secure fashion?

Do any of these spark an idea? Please come and share it. It is up to us.

Where 2.0

admin — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 12:11:10 -0600

Just returned from Where 2.0, an amazing conference about "everything geo".

Robert and I went there to present some of InSTEDD's work and learn as much as we could from the geo-demigods in the event, as well as to connect with folks we had crossed paths in other forums (such as Erik Hersman - aka WhiteAfrican -pic below, of http://ushahidi.org fame).

Many folks we wanted to meet were over there and had some great dialogues about how InSTEDD approaches projects. My takeaways: communicate what we are doing more often, and have clear channels to participate in design. We are taking the feedback and this week we re-opened the InSTEDD online forums on our website and a collaborative design group for GeoChat. One of the challenges with having such a great team is that things happen fast for example, Mesh4x over 2 weeks, the KML Sync work in 5 days) and we need to consider this when working with a community of folks whose insight would make the stuff better and who could imagine new uses for the technologies.

In that spirit we started an open discussion about the direction for our technologies. The GeoChat work attracted a lot of attention. Jonathan Thompson was particularly engaged giving scenarios about position updates via Thuraya satellite phones and email. Not only he embarked with us on some interactive design there-and-then but also started contacting his buddies in the far field to ask them for feedback on the scenario. Awesome! For some reason the code in the Google Code project has fallen behind the tree we check-in to, we'll be fixing it next week.

One of the demos was about our KML Mesh4x adapter (a preview of the type of things you can do with Mesh4x). We got some good feedback on getting the versioning info embedded into the KML file, making it equally functional but more elegant. Play with it! See how you can sync one or more local maps with each other or with a cloud-based service, for example, setting up the N-way topology below (I was saving this sweet pic for another blog post but what the heck)

The morning of our talk Mikel Maron and Jesse Robbins gave a new variation their "Disaster Tech" presentation (eTech presentation from them on similar topic), and did a great job of describing the tensions that exist when high-tech stuff meets high-risk environments.

We had the honor to have our batch of talks presented by Tim O'Reilly himself. I was humbled by the reaction of the crowd to the Sahana localization to Burmese for Myanmar Nargis relief crowdsourcing effort. With the smarts, expertise, and experience in the audience, better and more efficient approaches can be invented. Here are our slides, without the associated bobbing heads:

Last but not least, this event was particularly well-put together for speakers. The O'Reilly staff was super friendly and the backstage folks very professional. I've spoken in countless events of different magnitudes, with audiences of dozens to thousands, and was positively impressed.

It's impossible to record every interaction and some things are worth blogging by themselves but hopefully this gives you an idea of what's been going on the last days.

Sahana installation poised for Myanmar disaster support

admin — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 12:11:10 -0600

Upon the request from Lanka software, we have successfully brought up a virtualized Sahana instance.

You can see it here: https://sahana.instedd.org

(Note you may need to ignore a certificate warning to see this until we deploy a new certificate for this server)

Learn more about Sahana at: http://sahana.lk

Juan was instrumental in getting the Debian virtualized image running well on our Red Hat host OS, thank you! The compressed Sahana VM is about 300mb, which will allow a quick re-deployment of a hardened configuration in Myanmar as necessary. I think this VM would be a good asset to keep around, allowing anyone running Windows or Linux to bring up a running Sahana server with little to no effort.

Volunteer-based Sahana localization effort

There are over 30 volunteers across 4 continents working on localizing Sahana to Burmese. We ran into multiple issues, most stemming from the lack of Unicode standardization of Burmese. We are using Google Spreadsheets to coordinate the work (the embedded live chat is an amazing feature for live coordination) and folks are using mostly MS Word to do the translations, which we accumulate on a Google Groups page. Many thanks to all involved, I'm afraid to start mentioning folks by name because I'll mess things up or miss key individuals. Jesse Robbins blogged about this in O'Reilly Radar, and Bill Behrman from Stanford has worked his rolodex though which helped us get additional volunteers. Many folks at the NetHope summit had the chance to refer folks as well. Thanks!

Google Groups for localization

Translation is hard - especially for the fonts and encodings to work together. See the awesome burglish site to see what I mean... the translated docs end up having strings like tcef;u¾rsm; which is really encoded Wwin_burmese, which would look like this with Padauk

Burglish project

One of the main issues with the localization is that it isn't just about translating strings- there is also a need to accept input in the right format. This isn't trivial with all combinations of fonts and input methods people use, and especially not trivial on a web page that has to work in multiple browsers!

There is also ongoing work on InSTEDD's GeoChat system with usual suspects and new volunteers, preparing for a potential use in Myanmar, which is topic of another blog post entirely.

BarCamp in Phnom Penh, Cambodia..and sustainable technology practices

admin — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 12:11:10 -0600

BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from participants.

(From barcamp.org)

A group of enthusiasts is now organizing a BarCamp in Phnom Penh, Capital of Cambodia. Check out the website and Google groups discussions. If you are using Twitter we have a channel #BarCampPhnomPenh which you can follow here (hashtags allow you to see at a glance all 'tweets' that contain that keyword).

http://barcampphnompenh.org/

Thanks to Beth Kanter and Tharum for hookup and helping us contribute, respectively!

InSTEDD's support right now is around facilitating the conversation with technology firms who might want to sponsor the event, and finding attendees for the event. If you want to chip in contact us or jump straight into the discussion list above! Even if you can't attend, useful computer materials and sponsorship are always welcome. And of course - Can you spell "swag"?

Cambodia has a quite energetic ICT community. And as InSTEDD ramps up its work in the region we hope to become a part of it.

InSTEDD will be building a small engineering team in Phnom Penh late this year (lots of details TBD, like how we'll work with local partners in setting this up), so maybe we'll meet some candidates in the process leading up to BarCamp, too. I think that will help us build technology with sustainability in mind.

.."Sustainable technology"?

The notion of sustainability - as in sustainable agriculture, sustainable manufacturing, sustainable architecture, etc - applies to technology as well.

It is possible to throw money at a problem with the best of intentions and have very little impact in the long term, or leave things even worse than at the beginning. But one can build a structure of skills, knowledge and capital that folks can use to grow initial efforts into greater, unexpected things. Sustainable technologies can continue to exist for a longer period of time beyond an initial flurry of activity without drawing more from its environment than it gives back.

Technology ventures have many ways of becoming sustainable. From the economic sustainability perspective, for example, one way is to become a commercial product which attracts enough revenue to maintain a team that keeps the product alive and relevant to its users for enough time. Another way is to 'release' the products into open source and allow an open community influence or take over the direction. At InSTEDD we are publishing our work as open source and free services because it makes sense as a long-term strategy to serve the regions we work in. I think there's a knowledge base to be shared amongst non-profits and their beneficiaries about building and deploying technology with sustainability in mind, a library of patterns and case studies about what works and what doesn't in the long run.

I believe that being a 'good neighbor' and participating in the local IT community helps create products that work better, accelerate discovery of related local work, and provide opportunities for folks to get involved with the systems that are being used to improve their own countrywide health.

We'll be posting updates, and discussing topics that we expect will come up as BarCamp takes shape.

Hope to see you in Phnom Penh!

Real world results, virtual world visualizations at Life 2.0

admin — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 12:11:10 -0600

On Monday I attended a large presentation about visualizations at a reputable conference. NASA, NOAA, and Sun attendees were active participants. Then someone showed up dressed as a teddy bear. One of the panel members was a little blue cat. When Xantha Oe (the little blue cat) spoke, we all listened, as it explained the approaches its team had taken to visualize stock market trends -using floating shapes of volumes and colors one could fly around.

Where was all this taking place? The conference was Life 2.0 and the venue Second Life, one of the most popular virtual worlds engines and services available today. In Second Life, you get to create your virtual avatar, and given basic rules of physics and some construction tools, create buildings, clothes, vehicles..and environments where information can be visualized and played with in novel ways.

How does a conference work in Second Life?

This particular session was interesting to our work so I logged into the 'grid' on a side monitor, teleported my avatar into the conference area (I had registered as a Life 2.0 attendee before) and sat at one of the chairs in the auditorium. I turned on the video and audio streams which allowed me to hear the presentation as spoken by the panel and see the passing slides on huge screens. There is a common chat session for everyone in the area (when you 'talk' others in the amphitheater can 'hear' you). The best is that all of this infrastructure can be put together for free - an interesting approach to hold a meeting for non-profits who have tech-savvy members.

The Talk

The talk was divided into five 10-minute presentations ranging from visualizing stock prices to mathematical models and statistical analysis applied to chemistry. My key takeaways:

All visualizations basically work by consuming data in some external web service (it is possible to script Second Life objects using LSL to make HTTP calls and get/post information from arbitrary services). There was only one example of a visualization using in-world data held in "notes" - Second Life's version of a sticky note. Some visualizations consume data in proprietary stores designed to serve the required information of their particular domain (e.g. the chemistry data), but others are more general purpose and take data from RSS feeds. I found it innovative that one of the visualizations actually took a Google docs spreadsheet URL and got its data directly from there. Maybe a pattern to follow for other graphing/analysis toolkits?
Many of these visualizations are available as open source with real examples in-world of how they are used. There was at least one commercial venture building products in the area. (as the example above from Green Phosphor)
The intrinsically collaborative environment of Second Life is a good place to visualize together. I was happy to see folks paying attention to building visualizations to support conversations between multiple people and using them to lower the bar of shared understanding (as opposed to making the super-specialized visualization only one expert will consume on his/her own).
There is a growing amount of work in the area of visualization related to geography and real-world physical structures. Examples of building design and architecture were given, where layouts were optimized as a result of overlaying heatmap visualizations on virtual models of real areas (e.g. airports, highways) . One project of interest was "Second Earth" an open database of shapes and imagery that can be used to create realistic globes and maps in second life and add data on top, such as animated weather simulations. They are even working on a KML importer so you could consume in-world the same visualizations. For rigor I'll mention there are other similar efforts. This could support scenarios beyond collaborative visualization to hybrid 'augmented reality' applications where geo-tagging and field logistics blend in information from the virtual world onto images of the real world.

One thing I was sorry about is that due to a previous appointment I missed another whole session of Life 2.0 dedicated to nonprofits and humanitarian work sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation. If I can chase down one of the presenters and get a recording I'll post it here.

All in all, I'm a skeptic optimist when it comes to these applications of virtual world technology.

On one side I think it takes a lot of work to deploy useful technology in second life - especially on the perception side, explaining to the last adopter why they would ever want to learn to control an avatar, helping them beyond the perception that virtual worlds are for foolish purposes, and showing how this can be used to do work that otherwise is harder or impossible. And obviously the technologies are still maturing, adding some hurdles to the implementation. It's still hard but not frivolous.

On the other side, seeing this ongoing work and its outcomes means that the area will be constantly improving, and that there could be breakthroughs in how people visualize and understand information together. And if it's what it takes to get there, I'm willing to take the advice of a little blue cat.