Eduardo Jezierski

InSTEDD Presentation at HISA

2008-07-08T19:43:00.001-07:00

Here is the presentation we gave at HISA.

Brief intro about InSTEDD,
An overview of information flow challenges in health we found in Cambodia which we hear are also present in other contexts,
How collaboration can help with those challenges, and concretely, what are the technologies InSTEDD is focusing to help with that collaboration and information flow,
A quick overview of method: Agile practices, trying to be a good OSS neighbor, and the innovation lab we are building in Cambodia to bring the field needs and local creativity into the very first steps of future tech development.

I believe any sustainability planning is at its core an exercise in business modeling. At InSTEDD we think one way we could attain this elusive sustainability is to shift focus from having beneficiaries sustaining external efforts, into creating an environment with the capacity to generate and grow new innovations. It's harder, and there's no silver bullet, but still worth learning to do right.

PD: This first slide always gets folks' attention, by design...

| View | Upload your own

I think some slides had issues converting, if you run into trouble please let me know and I'll fix it.

From the slides you may wonder what is the status of the tech we have been working on?

Mesh4x has been extensively blogged about, with its recent addition of an adapter that lets you sync via SMS messages.
Geochat (Overview, Details and source) we've demoed chunks of it, but after Myanmar and the Golden Shadow exercise we knew we had to go back to the drawing board with the UI and some aspects of the infrastructure. We'll be blogging about this soon, when the UI allows again the end-to-end scenarios folks expect.
Riff allows you to create public or private groups for collaboration around information streams by adding metadata to items, analytics and visualization capabilities. Much blogging needs to happen about this project. We have two interns for Trinity College working on the machine learning aspects of the project under the guidance of Taha Kass-Hout and Nicolas di Tada and the contributions have been fantastic. We even have an early SDK that Olaf put together while working with InSTEDD that simplifies how to build modules that extend Riff. We haven't shown because the UI has big (massive) room for improvement (in other words it's quite terrible right now in relation to the potential of the tool). Mea culpa. But folks who have seen it tell us it will be worth the wait if we do a competent job at the user experience.

On a side note I am off to Foo Camp this weekend under the generosity of Tim O'Reilly, where I expect to learn a lot, and after that I'm straight off to Phnom Penh to continue the hiring process and setting up our innovation lab.

Mesh4x SMS Adapter: Sync data without an Internet connection

2008-06-23T17:57:00.001-07:00

Mesh4x has a new feature that allows you sync data between a local desktop, server or mobile device and a remote computer even if you have no Internet access, by sending and receiving little batches of text messages. Databases, spreadsheets and even maps can be kept up to date using the right adapters. Algorithmic work was done to minimize the number of text messages needed, and the result is having up-to-date information on both ends of the exchange. This data can be in turn shared further with other devices locally and synchronized again to the remote source.

Scenarios

OpenMRS (http://openmrs.org) is an open-source Medical Record Management system used extensively in africa (Tanzania, Rwanda, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Kenya...) and increasingly in the Middle East and Americas (Peru, Honduras and Haiti come to mind). OpenMRS is used to improve patient care and simplify the records management at the clinic where it's used. It is common for these clinics to have just one computer and have no internet connection. Cell phone coverage can be present, ranging from reliable to dodgy for voice (just 1 bar of signal is typically reliable enough for SMS, but terrible for voice or data).

There are two sync scenarios I heard about this week talking with the OpenMRS and OpenROSA teams that Mesh4x addresses. (Note - we haven't planned to do this work yet I'm just using these scenarios as concrete examples of how mesh4x over SMS can help in the context of medical record management)

Scenario 1: OpenMRS to OpenMRS sync

The clinic is updating patient records that need to be kept up to date with the province-level hospital. In this case the clinic has a computer under a desk with a cell phone reliably plugged into it, and periodically, it would sync with a similar setup in the province level. It could also go straight up to central and then down again to the province level, as province hospitals do tend to have connectivity.

Here you can see Vanra Ieng from the WHO/Ministry of Health in Cambodia showing a physical enclosure that makes sure his phones - used in a similar setup, as an attachment to a computer- don't get unplugged from the PC or power, and are used for 'intended purposes' only (people have personal phones and other means of communication as well, and he needs to make sure it keeps running as this is for a pilot on sending disease indicators from key districts to central level).

Scenario 2: OpenMRS to mobile data gathering client

javaROSA is an open source mobile client built in Java that is used for XForms-based data collection that works on lowest-common-denominator phones as well as PDAs. You can fill in the forms and send the data via Infrared, bluetooth, http (If there is GPRS available)

If I understood the conversations at the HISA meetings,they are working on a feature to send data one-way via SMS messages (serializing objects and sending them over a set of messages). With the SMS adapter, community health workers could be taking data on their mobile devices and updating centralized computers, as well as getting the latest information on the device nd updating their local information by querying for the information of patients they hadn't seen before but are facing now, or patients that have visited the clinic since the information was taken. In addition, they could even beam (SMS) information with a colleague directly, phone to phone.

In each scenario, though, how many text messages are we talking about? In our tests, starting with a large up-to-date dataset (a KML map) and added a "pushpin" with a relatively long description. It required a grand total of 8 text messages. This includes all the steps needed to compare versions on both sides of the communication, and send the new pushpin over (see Under the Hood for more details).

If there are more items that have changed, and the larger the items themselves, the more messages are required to transmit them, of course. But we think this is a very low baseline considering the outcome: up-do date information on both sides that can, in turn, be shared with more devices locally using even more economical means such as infrared or bluetooth.

Under the hood

So what does it take to synchronize data over text messages?

1) We need to be able to send/receive SMS messages from a phone via a USB cable. In the code we abstract this behind a provider model, and the default implementation will be based on SMSLib. We envision in a future a server version, potentially using BT's web21c infrastructure to do so.

2) The mesh protocol must be reduced to a bare minimum so it is efficient to use over tiny and unreliable text messages. We do so by combining exchanges that achieve the following:

A collection-level check: is any sync needed?
Item-level checks: which items have been added, updated, or deleted relative to the version information available locally?
Item exchange - 2-way sending and receiving the changed items themselves. Originally we were zipping the data and sending that over if appropriate, now we are using a variation of the RSync algorithms which use creative hashing (math operations on the data) to send the minimal information over.

3) SMS is an unreliable transport and as such there is a layer in the code that compensates for this by managing message batches. A batch allows us to split up a large payload into text messages to reconstitute on the other side, tolerating messages coming out of order, dealing with lost messages, and timing out on operations that have taken too long to complete.

It is important to understand that the goal of this adapter is not only "sending" the data for a new item or "receiving" it - This adapter checks for which items to send/receive and also sends/receives the full versioning information for the item. That makes it possible to keep sharing it with other applications and users while maintaining the ability to reconcile updates and detect version conflicts.

A big kudos to Tondat who has been moving at warp speed with this codebase. The first checkin was on June 9th! The quality of the code is very high, and the ingenious use of gzip, Base91 and Rsync shows . Check out the source.

Next steps

Finish the optimization of the FeedSync protocol (which Mesh4x uses under the covers) in edge conditions (e.g. sharing conflicting payloads).
Implement the SMSLib adapter and test it well with a couple of appropriate phones.
Add this capability into the demo Java application that is used to demonstrate the KML adapter. This will let you specify a phone number in addition to the http URL and the file path in the sync endpoint box.
Further optimize formats, encoding and memory usage.
Pursue collaborations with openROSA/openMRS that resonate strongly with the community needs we are see in South East Asia. If you think of any scenarios where this could help your technology please share them here!

References

http://mesh4x.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rsync

Improvements to Mesh4x KML adapter ("Mesh4Maps"?)

2008-05-24T01:06:00.001-07:00

After feedback from Where 2.0 we updated the Mesh4x KML adapter to Mesh4x to embed all versioning metadata for the items in the file itself.

This allows you to have one KML file, send it via email, copy it on USB drives, and have your team do changes on them anywhere they are. When you get their copy back again, or if they meet each other, they can use the sync utility to make sure changes are merged both ways. They can also use the sync utility to sync to a server via http, by just putting the server URL in the text box.

This week Juan Marcelo aka 'Tondat' worked on some refining touches on the adapter:

One File: You only need to keep track of your KML file now. The sync utility will add versioning metadata as needed to the file.
KMZ: We support KMZ which is google earth's native save format (A KMZ file is really a zip file with KML and additional resources like images or icons inside)
Sync any KML: You can sync placemarks, folders, styles and stylemaps.
Folders and item hierarchies: We sync placemarks even as you move them around in the tree, or change the tree itself. Tondat tells me next week we'll separate placemark versioning from the versioning of where it is in the tree, so moving items around does not create conflict for the items.

We are also starting to update the server-side 'cloud storage' component to allow external applications to drive it. This would make it trivial to make a web app that:

Lets you create 'shared maps'
Lets you download the KML and you can work on it offline
Gives you a URL to sync to with the sync utility
Has an online web page to see the current map
Maybe the page itself allows editing online? For example via the google maps API.

If you are interested in putting something like this together, please let us know.

Thank you to all translation volunteers for Sahana!

2008-05-16T19:19:00.001-07:00

After an amazing work on behalf of the volunteers doing the translation from English to Burmese, we have translations for all Sahana strings, which will make a deployment of Sahana in the country reach a broader audience and be useful beyond the few foreign aid workers allowed in.

FlashCrowdSourcing

We've heard about crowdsourcing (e.g. as supported by Amazon's mechanical turk and other similar infrastructures) but what tools and approaches can help with flash-crowdsourcing (a flash-flood of crowds)? Volunteer management in disaster situations is a big part of relief tasks (there's even a Sahana module dedicated to that), and I wonder if we can take a bit more of advice from the 'real' world volunteer management into the 'virtual volunteer' world.

Our challenges were the need for fast coordination and high-bandwidth communication. We jumped onto Skype pretty often the first nights. It took time and false starts to figure out and describe the job well enough. I was ecstatic when the first translated line came in, and another one volunteers started explaining the task to other volunteers, and the speed picked up pretty fast.

We used Google spreadsheets to co-edit the master list of all translation batches and get a live chat amongst all volunteers, without having to agree on any IM technology. That feature by itself was great as it gave a chance for volunteers to see each others' online status and ask questions of each other. Without it, we would have been caught in the middle brokering every conversation!

The last 20% took a big chunk of the time. As we neared the end, minor issues on collisions and questions compounded with the 24-hour cycle of getting questions asked and answered from different sides of the planet.

Next steps for Sahana

Next steps that various volunteers will carry on in parallel:

Cleanup of work - fixing and editing the odd line and translation here and there
Re-encoding files- different Burmese fonts use different encodings. We chose to have faster translations at the expense of more tech work at the tail-end; which means we have to take the strings as entered by each translator in their preferred font and make it into something common. Coban Tun and other Burmese-speaking brave souls (e.g. from Burglish)are tackling the choice of fonts, encodings, and conversion tools.
Merging files - once converted the files will be able to be merged into the format required to Sahana
Test
Check-in, deploy to the Virtual Machines, which are being made available for download

If you think you can help with any of the above please let us know! And congratulations to all the translators again!

Where 2.0

2008-05-16T10:43:00.001-07:00

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

2008-05-09T22:50:00.001-07:00

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.

Build maps collaboratively with new Mesh4x KML adapter

2008-05-08T10:55:00.001-07:00

A handful of months ago I met Kersten Jauer, UN Information Officer for the Central African Republic (CAR). CAR is a large country in Central Africa, surrounded by Sudan, Chad, Cameroon, Congo, and DRC; 67% of its population lives with under $1 a day and is scoured by constant internal rebellions and gender-based violence.

Kersten spends a lot of the time in the field in CAR, and put together an amazing map of the whole country to support logistics and NGO programs. Roads, provinces, bridges, fuel pumps, it all got captured by hand in Google Earth and saved as KML files. By the time I got it, Kersten's KML had grown to be 11 MB, an amazing amount of information patiently collected and edited, and periodically shared online with all those working to improve the region.

Contrast the map above showing the CAR KML with the map on the right showing the same region as seen by default in Google Earth. What got my attention was a little note in the KML:

If you would like to comment on this file or have suggestions please email to MapsAndGoogleEarth+car@hcpt.jot.com

To add a placemark just email it with a short description to the same address or kersten.jauer@undp.org

Please also check out the maps section on http://hcpt.jot.com

The map was built collaboratively, but imagine the workload Kersten must have had getting little snips, integrating them on the larger map, and then letting folks know of updates. And how would the map be maintained whenever Kersten was attending to some emergency?

Mesh4x KML Adapter

We started building a simple instance of a KML adapter for Mesh4x this week. This adapter would allow a team of people edit a KML file and then 'synchronize' it with all the others. For example, I could add a pushpin saying a bridge is down, and you could be editing another pushpin or moving it around to represent that a logistics truck has moved. When we synchronize, the truck moves around in my KML and the broken bridge appears in yours.

This could be synchronized peer-to-peer (a KML on your disk to a KML on a USB drive or someone else's box) as well as via a 'cloud' web service. Note this is changing the data inside the KML, it is not just 'file sharing'. The adapter knows about KML and keeps track of versions of fine-grained elements (pushpins, placemarks, polygons) inside the same file. It is an example of how a data mesh could be used to synchronize fine-grained data between applications.

We chose KML for this adapter as it is a standard ("OGC KML") that is widely used and supported by Google Earth (of course), Microsoft Virtual Earth, as well as nice tools that work offline and can be used in the field such as GeoPDF.

We have a sample UI (shown here) to let you play around with the basics. The effort is still on the libraries and we don't have a neat UI to let you choose endpoints or resolve conflicts, but all will come in due time. Other restrictions include having to put your placemarks in a "Shared Items" folder in your KML, and styles don't get replicated. We foresee no problems working out these constraints over the coming weeks.

To try it out, make sure you have Java installed and:

Get the sample application from http://code.google.com/p/mesh4x/downloads/list
Double click on mesh4j-KML-DemoApp.jar
Point to a KML or open the sample ones
Edit the location of Sample Pushpin 1 in File 1
Add a new pushpin in File 2
Press synchronize, and after both files should have the updated Sample pushpin 1 AND the new pushpin!

Another advantage of a data mesh is that endpoints can be heterogeneous, as long as you do the appropriate mapping. Eventually you will be able to sync a spreadsheet with columns such as Title/Description/Lat/Long into KML pushpins and back quite easily.

We hope to be showing this at Where 2.0. A lot of the team has been focusing on supporting the Myanmar disaster relief, so progress this week has been a bit random, but we still want your feedback!

Learn more about Kersten's Work in CAR at www.hdptcar.net, or get Kersten's latest epic KML.

See the Mesh4x project at http://mesh4x.org

Mesh4x adds generic database support

2008-05-06T22:43:00.001-07:00

First of all - a very heartfelt support to the Myanmar population in this times of crisis. Many friends are either already there or on their way to help as part of UNDAC teams. It's a tough situation in a tough context, and all my hopes reach out to the communities there so they can recover soon. Unfortunately, it won't go back to "normal" for a long time, if ever. I was in Peru last week and the August '07 earthquake still defines how people live in Pisco. The press and much of the aid has left and the town is still...leveled. Throw in a major disaster in a non-resilient environment, with a bunch of foreign aid with varied commitments to the region, and the long term outcomes are very hard to predict.

This week we made significant updates in mesh4x. One of them is a Hibernate adapter, which allows you to plug into the mesh almost any relational database available in the market

Hibernate Adapter

In our first scenario, let's say you have, or you are quickly hacking together, an application to help enter, analyze and report information. You have a database schema, and you'd like to integrate it with an excel database that field folks are using for data entry. You need to make sure updates and deletes somehow make it out to the spreadsheets, and that folks' updates make it back in. Furthermore, you'd like folks in the field to synchronize spreadsheets with each other directly - thus making it a classic mesh scenario. With the Hibernate adapter, our goal is to allow you to mesh-enable your database by just mapping your entity fields to your database fields.

Hibernate, as most developers know, is an Object-Relational Mapper library for Java. With this adapter you can now integrate into a data mesh any database engine that Hibernate supports, which is an impressive list. By supporting Hibernate as an adapter we allow every user to customize the mapping of the mesh data to their database schema using familiar tools, and get support for a lot of databases. There is still some work to do - for example, as of today the adapter still requires the database schema to revolve around the fact that the rows are being synchronized in a mesh. We expect in the upcoming weeks to remove this restriction and use two separate 'repositories', one for the synchronization information (which you shouldn't care about) and another one for your data.

This will allow you to point to almost any existing database schema and mesh it up without messing it up. (Apologies, couldn't resist).

You can always reach the project through http://mesh4x.org.

Here you can see a list of adapters and suggest your own.

Mesh4x: New Open Source Project for Data Meshes

2008-04-23T23:26:00.001-07:00

Today we created a new open source project to host InSTEDD's efforts on data meshes.

The goal for the project is to provide libraries, tools and applications that simplify using standards-based data meshes. Our contributions will be based on the requirements observed in global health, community development and humanitarian aid.

You can find the project here: http://code.google.com/p/mesh4x/

Our first contribution to the project consists of some libraries that implement the FeedSync specification, an open standard that describes version vectors, and processes for conflict detection and conflict preservation. FeedSync also happens to be one of the underpinnings of Microsoft's consumer-targeted Live Mesh, but could be used happily on any platform as it's based on extensions to RSS and ATOM - an obvious idea is to build a Feedsync javascript adapter for Google Gears).

Because of the project's emphasis on standards, we structured the source tree so it would host implementations in more than one platform and language. 'Mesh4x' has 2 starter source code folders - Mesh4j (Java), Mesh4n (.NET - a large C# contribution done by Clarius Labs and the Microsoft XML MVPs who already had an open source version, unit tests and all). We hope to eventually see Mesh4php, Mesh4r (Ruby) and so on.

It's a start. InSTEDD's work in SE Asia in addition to the input of humanitarian aid agencies and other providers of technology for social good will be the drivers behind our contributions. We expect work in these areas:

Adapters to different stores (e.g. MySQL, or application-specific formats, such as KML), for servers & clients, and the ETL (extract, transform, load) that goes at heterogeneous endpoints. I heard a great idea today for building open-source VMs that run on Amazon's cloud hosting.
Implementations that work on mobile devices (for example, we are currently refactoring the Java library to run in J2ME)
Support for different transports (plain XML over files, or HTTP is a start, but there are optimizations that can be done for low bandwidth, no-Internet scenarios, or integrating with a transport mesh like WASTE).
Integrating implementations with standards-based authentication and data signing approaches.
..your contributions!

Applicability for Humanitarian & Health Scenarios

So why are we at InSTEDD interested in this? Data meshes have some interesting properties:

Symmetrical: They allow data to exist in a concurrent multi-master environment where updates can be applied at any node in the mesh.
Asynchronous: They allow offline updates to information and synchronization with other nodes without requiring data locks, essential for occasionally connected applications.
Dynamic: The synchronization can happen even in constantly changing connectivity topologies. I can sync to a server and later the sync can be done between my client and another client, who could then sync with another server if the first one is there, and so on.

These properties make them very suitable for humanitarian, crisis, and health care environments, where information sharing, data system integration, and technologies that assist politically neutral solutions are beneficial. For example:

Symmetry allows you to have two audiences work on the same data through different applications, with no application being the 'master'. You can also have data sharing of sensitive information between countries or organizations with no country hosting more or less data than the other. See Mary Jane's post about the NGOs in Cambodia, to understand how important this symmetry and neutrality can be. It also allows data to move around a user independently of the device it's been created on.
Asynchronicity allows work to happen in environments where data connections are unavailable, bandwidth is low, or the only 'transport' is a USB stick.
Dynamism allows the field teams to share data amongst themselves and servers as early as possible. Unlike email, there is no need to wait for connectivity to a specific server to let the information free.

One idea could be to add data mesh capabilities to Sahana, allowing any instance running on a server or laptop to edit the information and 'sync' both ways with any other server or laptop. We have also heard scenarios where users of FrontlineSMS could synchronize information amongst themselves. If anyone is interested we'd happily work with you to see how to approach this..

Come and participate - lets share our scenarios, ideas, and code here: http://code.google.com/p/mesh4x/

SMS Applications and Microformats - lots of work to do!

2008-04-21T14:26:00.001-07:00

I got a comment at this weekend's Alt.Net conference - which was echoed in mikel's blog - about us not using a location microformat in the Friends Nearby and GeoChat proof of concept applications on the InSTEDD site.

In retrospect, it would have been nice to have the support for the microformat, and we should have. But it would have not -I believe- been used much, if at all.

Our bad on the omission (easy to add), but I think it would be good to explain why we did what we did, why we'd do it again (with the addition of the microformat support), and why I think a lot of usability testing is still required to make the the conversation about microformats from SMS phones more realistic.

Some background- microformats, like anything that increases interoperability and has the long-term potential of reducing user training, are pure goodness. Microformats specify ways to represent common pieces of information, such as the following for position:

l:lat,lon

...where l is a small L for location, and lat, lon are latitude and longitude. You can also add a location name like so:

l:cityname=lat,long

However in our proof of concepts we accept the following formats, and had to do some extra tricks to work with the input of the non-tech-savvy users. Here are some examples:

latlongmessage	Basic - Lat and long in decimal format with a point, a comma or any (with poor eyesight, when stressed, or in sunlight, it is easy to mix a . with a ,)
32.121 32. 121 32, 121	Weird variations of numeric input for decimal lat/longs. Spaces, commas and points all appear in unexpected spots
32.55.55 32, 55, 55	Weird variations of numeric input for Degrees Minutes Second lat/longs. Many folks had GPSs and copied what the screen showed, which by default is DMS for most devices.
Context-specific funneling e.g. 121.234 to -121.234	We call 'funneling' the act of correcting location using some encoded common sense based on context. If you are reporting fires in California, USA from a truck and suddenly your marker moves to the Yellow Sea right off China, it is quite probable you forgot the 'minus' in your longitude report. For Golden Shadow (which expected activity of people to stay in the area) we just did a blanket rule - we make everyone's location move to the USA. For Friends Nearby and future global apps, we make a hit-test for political boundaries inferred from shapefiles, and feedback to the user the inferred position 'Hope you had a nice trip to Laos' or 'Looks like you are in a plane or a boat'. This gives the user a chance to correct.
Choice of separators	We chose * instead of , ; or # as it was more accessible on all phones we tested, without needing a trip to the symbols menu in most cases.
Geocoding cities and addresses Palo Alto, CASunny! Phnom PenhKh'mim Pain-haa	In an urban setting, lat/longs are a nuisance unless you are in a flood or vectoring a helicopter. We accept addresses or town names and geo-code them using Google's gocoding APIs.
Reduce the need to report location	Assume the sender hasn't moved if no new location is submitted. Reduce the amount of times the user has to go through this complex procedure as much as you can!
Errors and omissions on the above, attempt to resolve automatically AND give a fallback for people to resolve and correct.	Loosing data and bothering the user with 'try again' is more unacceptable than trying to infer the intent of the message, so we did our best. On case of failure, add the last known good position, and log the issue so that a human could correct manually or call up and ask 'where are you?'

Where the rubber meets the road

We did a usability test with CERT volunteers and folks from the local search and rescue team. It was a diverse audience - we had in the same room a range of cell phones (from baby Nokias to Blackberrys) and the people had a range of expertise (some use their phone for email and calendar, others never used SMS before). We assumed we just had one chance to train them so we explained it once, and asked them to start sending messages. The log we got was invaluable as raw input - and informed the parsing algorithms to make them more robust for the actual exercise.

A quickie 1st hand test you can try at home: I have a collection of diverse phones to try these things out on - even phones with Khmer Script input support!. So let me see...it takes approximate 70 keystrokes to enter L:123.45,67.89 in a small Nokia, with no errors. To enter 123.45*67.89 it took me approximately 50 keystrokes. The microformat takes ~40% more key presses (and this particular phone uses the * key for the symbol pad, so that even plays against my point).

I know folks in diverse settings have tried the microformat and it works to communcate position (of course), but I'm not sure it was a representative audience of a broad set of non-tech-savvy users. The breakdown is not in the data itself, but the usability of the format.

Lessons learnt and realizing it's an ongoing effort

The key lesson for me is to make sure we accept the location microformat in addition to more user-friendly formats. If folks know the microformat beforehand (an exception rather than the norm) they can expect 'it just works'.

Alternative paths include applying machine learning feature-extraction efforts to the information, or building a smart client for rich phones that formats message for you (from the GPS?), so the user never sees the location 'wire' format at all. All approaches have pros and cons.

I am also wondering what activity is ongoing in the area of nanoformats, microformats which are slightly friendlier for numeric pad input. It's trivial to invent tiny ways of representing bits of information. The problem is that unless done right they can shift power away from the end user towards the engineers who consume that data. I don't see that as a positive power shift.

To make the effort real these nanoformats would have to get usability testing and feedback from real users in real situations to grow them into something intuitive and easy to enter in different phones.

To do that we (the 'big we') have to continue to experiment with easy to remember schemes which can be trained in one shot, can be context-specific, can be easier to discover, recall and communicate, and works even for a health volunteer who cares a lot about the content and doesn't care about the format at all.

In the end, I believe the best formats, like the best technologies, will be invisible to the end users.

If you are a geo-geek hope to see you at Where 2.0 (InSTEDD is presenting there) in a couple of weeks so we can continue the dialogue!

Off to Thailand & Cambodia

2008-03-30T02:34:00.001-07:00

I'm taking off to Southeast Asia in a couple of hours. Our goals for this trip is to set up the structure for our long-term presence in the region. I'm going with Dennis (our Program Director) to Bangkok to meet with many organizations that we are or would like to be working with in the area such as Mekong Basin Disease Surveillance and Mahidol. From there we go to Phnom Penh and inner Cambodia - where Mary Jane, Luke and Robert have already spent all week.

Here's my rough itinerary

March 31..April 4: Bangkok
April 4..April 15: Phnom Penh

I'd like to chat with folks who work in the technology space, especially in Cambodia. We also have a meeting with some of the folks contributing to Bar Camp Phnom Penh... So if you are in Phnom Penh and you are doing programming, web design, databases, mobile applications or program localization or have an interest in contributing tech skills to our MCP program drop me a comment here, or send an email at edjez-at-instedd-dot-org, and we'll take it from there.

See you soon!

Keeping our infrastructure 'in the cloud' and our costs close to the ground

2008-03-25T12:26:00.001-07:00

At InSTEDD -like at any other non-profit..or a well-run business- there is a constant evaluation of how we are using our donors' money, looking for ways we can reduce overhead and anything that doesn't translate directly into mission-related impact.

Given how much of our focus is on technology, it is natural that this concern affects how we design the infrastructure that supports our work. In this post I share the toolset we use to support the lifecycle of our technology which is effective as well as lean. Perhaps others can take advantage of the evaluation work we did or can suggest useful alternatives..

Our key requirements are:

The tools work with our Scrum+XP (eXtreme Programming) processes
The tools work for an internationally distributed team even when in the field
They are efficient cost-wise as well as adequate for the task and reliable

These requirements led us to evaluate many approaches. Ultimately, we opted for an infrastructure that requires no intranet, and no on-premise servers. That means no extra staff of acolytes & operators simply to keep the things going, and associated savings on power/heat/rackspace management...expenses decidedly not core to our mission.

I'm exaggerating. We do have an intranet. It has a printer.

By using software-as-a-service or software+services we have the advantages of lesser operations and increased reliability. We must also take a hard look at three contentious areas:

Security: Will the hosted service provide us with the level of confidentiality, transport security, and the management of user privileges that we need?
Data Portability: Will the hosted service allow us to import - and even important - EXPORT data to another service? We didn't want to fall into a lock-in scenario with 'trapped data'. Both on and off-premise backups are a must.
Accessibility: Will the service be accessible in the field? How Can it cope with low bandwidth connections? Is it possible to work offline?

In the end, we have arrived at the following list of tools that as a set fare well with our way of working and our needs. You can see the rough cost structure for the services that aren't free (When I say 'Free' I mean gratis/no cost/Free as in Beer.)

Engineering Tools:

Google Code -http://code.google.com/- We use Google Code for the source code control (SCC) of components and tools we release as FOSS . It provides issue tracking, a wiki, and downloads in addition to the source code control features. Free.

CVSDude - http://cvsdude.com/ - We host in CVSdude the source code for projects in their early stages when they aren't open source yet. Monthly fee.

Tortoise SVN - http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/ - Tortoise is the most popular SCC client in the team. CVS & Subversion allow working offline - and managing multiple copies of the source trees on the client, and Tortoise allows you to manage these with ease. Another great feature is that we can keep in the same source tree a mix of projects hosted on Google Code and CVSDude, allowing developers to just do single update and commit operations. This helps us work on our ~~embarrassing~~ early code while keeping the open source projects up to date with no extra hassle. Monthly fee.

Fogbugz - http://www.fogbugz.com/ - We use Fogbugz for our work-item, task, and bug management. Batch updates are easy with its AJAX-based list management. It allows you to create private and shared views, exports data in multiple formats, provides email notification and reports (eg burndown charts) that are useful in agile processes. And - great for testers - it even has a client that allows you to take screenshots, annotate them, and attach them to new bugs. Finally, it has a killer feature that allows me to create new tasks by just typing and pressing "enter" ("killer" because its abuse guarantees my death at the hands of the engineering team). Monthly fee.

Virtualization - Although it is not "hosted infrastructure", virtualization saves on hardware costs. We run most of our work in virtualized environments which include including dev boxes, boxes running demos, boxes for testing or building. Some devs run these from XP, Linux, or Mac OS. We tend to use VMWare, which does a good job of allowing VPCs unfettered access to USB ports and such when working with special devices. Free or not depending on the virtualization product you use and the OSs you are hosting.

The collective annual fee of all the services listed above roughly equal the cost of one moderate-size server with no OS, no software and no support staff.

Communications & Sharing

Skype - http://www.skype.com/ - For voice, video and chat. At crunch times, our team keeps a Skype channel open -- sometimes for hours at a time. It provides a sense of literally being in the same room. We are also looking at ooVoo, vSee and N-way for video. Basic Skype is free. Additional features, such as forwarding calls to a cell phone, are very cheap.

Conference calling- http://www.intercall.com/- We chose a conference call provider that has access numbers in over 50% of the world's countries. Although costs are based on the number and location of call participants, overseas tolls are avoided, which is a significant savings on international calls.

Twitter (http://www.twitter.com) "Micro-messages" are great for ad-hoc communications, especially by SMS users spread across several countries. Within the team we send twitter direct messages by prefixing messages with d as in "d some-name I just uploaded the new version check it out". I use Twhirl as a Twitter desktop client. Free.

Sharedview - (Link) We use this new Microsoft tool for quick-and-easy screen sharing. Drawback: it only runs on Windows. But most of us have some flavor of Windows running - even if it is in a virtual machine on Linux or MacOS. Free.

Google Docs - (http://docs.google.com/) We use Google docs for taking notes and brainstorming during conference calls. It allows multiple users to collaboratively edit a document in real time. Once completed, though, we copy the document into MS Word or OneNote and save in Groove, which makes it possible to access the information offline. Free.

Groove - (Link) Microsoft Groove is useful for team coordination, managing "knowledge bases" of technologies and, most important of all, for tracking user requirements in the field. Since Groove is inherently an offline tool, it shines when Internet connectivity is an issue, but local connectivity is possible. It is not a traditional "cloud" product, but is based on a secure mesh architecture that allows pure peer-to-peer interaction. Unfortunately (hint!), it only works on the Windows OS, it speaks non-standard protocols over the wire, and has no "Web Access"/"Live" component to it. It is a part of Microsoft Office Ultimate. License Fees.

Still needing improvements...

These are some of the shortcomings with these hosted services which we hope will be addressed in the upcoming years:

Offline access: Many web-based tools would be more useful and valuable if they also offered a thoughtfully-designed, well-architected, reliable client for offline usage (and it takes more than just sprinkling Google gears around your javascript to achieve this, but that's a topic for another post).
Unified authentication - The growth in number of sites using single sign on technologies such as OpenID is encouraging but more would be better. In addition, services such as access control and other crosscutting features could be added into the mix (a trend I encouraged at an AOP panel long ago).
Support for Integration - I'd like to see more sites view themselves as 'building blocks' -- as part of a larger solution instead of trying to be the 'one stop shop'. Data, process, and UI integration APIs are always welcome.

So far this mix of products has been working well. The increase in bandwidth, along with tools and standards has allowed us to have core engineering-mission-critical tools online, and "software as/plus services" a cost-effective strategy we use everyday.

Real world results, virtual world visualizations at Life 2.0

2008-03-19T13:26:00.001-07:00

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.

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

2008-03-18T16:37:00.001-07:00

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!

Hello World

2008-03-05T19:57:00.001-08:00

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.