Thoughts on the launch of InSTEDD

InSTEDD works with universities, corporations, international health organizations, humanitarian NGOs and communities. Together, we work to identify or craft and then field-test technologies for better data collection and analysis, more efficient communications, and more effective response. InSTEDD will, for example, be adapting new social networking capabilities for humanitarian coordination, and testing inflatable satellite dishes able to be carried in a backpack.

InSTEDD’s mission is to discover, develop, test, deploy and share information about technologies that buy critical time. Through better disease detection and response times, outbreaks can be contained and possibly prevented. Through better disaster response, more lives can be saved. Through collaboration better answers can be found. 

Introduction

I was delighted to hear of the public launch of InSTEDD from Dr. Eric Rasmussen , its CEO, last week. The full name of the initiative is admittedly a mouthful to say out aloud and the acronym begs the pun that they should have chosen another instead of InSTEDD.

Jokes aside, in close upon a decade of applied research, writing and embedded work in the field of ICTs  for peacebuilding, (violent) crisis management and disaster response, InSTEDD, in its constitution and vision, is by far the most significant initiative I have encountered.  I have no doubt that we will look back at the launch of InSTEDD this year as a defining moment in the creation of innovative approaches to and frameworks of ICTs to prevent, mitigate and respond to crises – man made or natural.

I have known Eric Rasmussen and some of his team at InSTEDD from our work in the 2004 Tsunami response (download After the Deluge : InfoShare’s Response to the Tsunami for paper on this work) and from our use of Groove Virtual Office in the One Text initiative in Sri Lanka.  Subsequent and frequent email conversations with them on shared interests in using technology to support and strengthen everything from Stability, Security, Transition and Reconstruction (SSTR) and civilian – military interactions to better humanitarian aid systems taught me a great deal.

Team

Eric Rasmussen, Robert Kirkpatrick and Eduardo Jezierski are just three at InSTEDD who between them have more practical, field experience and knowledge of ICTs for crisis management that exceeds collective wisdom of many larger organisations engaged for far longer in similar work, including some agencies at the United Nations (as I have discovered over the past year for myself).

ICTs that really work

InSTEDD already showcases some innovative technologies on its website. Of note is the Directory application they’ve developed atop of Facebook.

As noted on the website,

In the future, we’ll add features, including integration across multiple social networking sites, support for other mapping applications (the current Facebook application uses Google Maps), enhanced access to the service via text messages, and the ability to take portions of your social network within the Directory completely offline. 

This application reminded me of an email I penned to Scott Rechler at the Ashoka Foundation way back in May 2005 in which I said in response to a fundamental problem the Foundation was facing at the time – the inability to locate Ashoka Fellows around the world on a sustained and regularly updated basis,

If you are searching for a technology hybrid that allows you to plot where fellows are in the world, what they are doing, who they are doing it with, what they are using, what they need and most importantly, want fellows to update this system as often as possible, nothing is simpler than using the one device that most fellows will have access to and use far more frequently than their PC’s – their mobile phone.

It is easy to create vernacular (Spanish, Sinhala, Tamil, French, German, Swahili etc) voice menu systems that easily get the information required from Fellows (from toll free numbers where possible) and then give them access to this information through a website that plots all this information in real time if necessary on GIS maps and other ways that help nourish each other’s work by a greater awareness of the Foundation’s impact in a given region or context.

Another idea could be to link this tool with a site such as Dopplr, to which I was introduced to by Dan Gillmor during GK III in Malaysia late last year.

The most exciting aspect of InSTEDD is their emphasis on in-situ, field development.

We have named our lab a ‘Field Lab’ to remind ourselves that InSTEDD will not be sitting back and designing in a perfect world. The people who will use our technology face complex challenges: extremes of temperature, weather, transportation, exhaustion and information overload. Our work will be useful only as long as we stay closely connected to real world conditions..

I only wish more organisations followed suit. It’s not always easy to follow and understand the language of expression on InSTEDD’s technology products site, but what is stated is simply (a long overdue) paradigm shift in the manner in which ICT solutions for crisis response is conceptualise, designed, tested and deployed.

As noted in their site,

We each have some experience in the field, and we’ve all been offered “solutions” that are nothing of the sort. Often those solutions are so fragile they won’t work in the field for more than a short while, and so InSTEDD has banned the word “solutions” from the office

This resonates fully with my own approach to and belief in ICTs for humanitarian aid and peacebuilding as articulated here – Complex Political Emergencies and humanitarian aid systems design

Some concerns with the Facebook Directory Application

Though the Directory application has a clear disclaimer that information on it will not be shared beyond that which is made possible by Facebook, it’s still the problem for me. Facebook is not a platform I trust with mission critical and highly confidential data and though I have begun a citizen journalism forum to complement Groundviews on it, I’m still to be convinced that it is a platform that demonstrates the potential for mission critical applications without compromising information security.

As a recent article published in the Guardian notes,

And does Facebook really connect people? Doesn’t it rather disconnect us, since instead of doing something enjoyable such as talking and eating and dancing and drinking with my friends, I am merely sending them little ungrammatical notes and amusing photos in cyberspace, while chained to my desk? A friend of mine recently told me that he had spent a Saturday night at home alone on Facebook, drinking at his desk. What a gloomy image. Far from connecting us, Facebook actually isolates us at our workstations. 

Final thoughts

Just as with InfoShare’s path-breaking human rights reporting tool, that once we develop it further this year we want to release free to the global human rights community, the essential reason I am so excited about the launch of InsTEDD is capture by Eric’s inaugural blog post as its CEO,

… I look forward to hearing from those who can help us design and build simple, robust, effective, and free tools for the humanitarian community.

I’ve been waiting for someone with the intellectual and financial wherewithal to say that for a very long time.

Galle Literary Festival – Thoughts from the panel on blogging

I was part of the panel at the recently concluded Galle Literary Festival that looked at whether blogs and bloggers can, or should, be taken seriously.

The panel was far removed from what I was asked to prepare for and expected. I thought Nuri Vitachchi took more time than necessary to introduce the panel (well over 10 minutes) especially since it evident to me that it was largely an audience who knew us through our writing. Besides, our mug shots and descriptions were printed in the GLF programme that everyone who attended got a copy of.

I also didn’t get any sense that Nuri had his pulse on the pulse of the Sri Lankan blogosphere that’s rich and varied and hardly of the tame and civil nature that coloured the general demeanour of the panel! It’s one thing to read the blogs of the panelists to get to know what they are about, quite another to place them in the larger context of the timbre of the blogosphere and mainstream party politics in Sri Lanka. Nuri was more or less familiar with our work and writing, but didn’t show a grasp of how we were perceived by others in the blogosphere and elsewhere, such as the media.

This to me makes a very strong case for the GLF organisers to think of a moderator who knows the SL blogosphere, politics and the traditional / new media interplay far better to conduct the panel on blogging next year. I am also disappointed because the tough questions to prepare us for the panel discussion, sent in advance by Nuri, were never asked. Some of them were:

• Blogs can be awful timewasters. But yours is different: Give us an example of a way your blog has changed people’s lives.
• Give us an example of the way your blog has changed your life.
• Blogs are all about the democratization of the media — true?
• How do you see the media changing — will newspapers disappear and blogs
  ever take over?
• Statistics show that more than 99.99 per cent of blogs produce no tangible
  revenues or measurable advantages to their writers. Doesn’t that mean that
  the overwhelming majority of bloggers are wasting their time?
• Blogs have trivial influence compared to traditional media. Newspapers sell
  hundreds of thousands of copies and TV shows are watched by millions. But
  most bloggers get a few hundred or a thousand hits. So why should we blog?
• Many bloggers are moving to networking sites — how do the two relate to
  each other?
• There are now more than 100 million blogs, it has been calculated. That
  means not many readers each! Comment.
• What was your most successful posting?
• Your least successful posting?
• Where’s the future of blogging?

These are questions that I’ve dealt with extensively on this blog (and frankly more than anyone else I know of in the Sri Lankan blogosphere and academia) and in my published research on new media and ICT that I would have loved to have had openly contested in public.

I also felt that, and not just of this panel but for many others I attended with around 5 to 6 people, the time allotted for the discussions was woefully inadequate. The really interesting questions that came at the end – on how we moderate comments, on how articles changed perspectives (or not) and what impact we really had really couldn’t be answered meaningfully. For example, Indi’s take on comment moderation (which is largely to let anything go) is for reasons we simply didn’t have time to go into detail completely different from the reasons behind and the style of comment moderation on Groundviews.

“I also got asked out quite a bit, once I got back to Colombo, and even had a one night stand on the strength of a comment I made on a blog forum. Blogs have made me angry, they’ve made me think, they’ve made me laugh, and they’ve got me laid. Blogs are to me everything that the blog session at the Galle Lit wasn’t. Stilted, boring, one-sided, and in the end, a waste of time, is not how I would describe the Sri Lankan blogosphere.”

David Blacker’s clearly getting more out of blogs and blogging than most of us are – but he does have a point. The job of the blogosphere, I read somewhere recently, is to be outrageously outspoken about everything. Bloggers are sometimes mistaken, but never in doubt.

And as many have pointed out, the panel could have addressed far more the interplay between traditional media and the content on blogs within the Sri Lankan context, since much has been said, written and done elsewhere on this topic. Rajpal Abeynaike, Editor of Lakbima, and his inane comments for example would have been an issue I would have loved to engage with him in public, as I am sure many others would have too judging by the number of times he was mentioned by those in the audience as the epitome of everything wrong with the traditional media’s approach to and understanding of blogs, bloggers and blogging.

All in all, kudos to the organisers for having a panel on blogs at a literary festival. It’s a brilliant idea that I hope will be improved upon and becomes a regular feature of GLF’s in the future.

UPDATE

David Blacker’s post on the event has some interesting discussion debating the pros and cons of the panel. In response to some of the points made there I said that,

Hi David,

It was good to see you again in Galle.

I’m just glad the thing happened and in a way it’s served it’s purpose. I’ve seen far more attention on the topic of the panel after it was held than before it. If the panel wasn’t up to scratch, I apologise as someone who was up there and partly responsible to wake you all up (I was after my second mohito and fifth gin and tonic for the day and all geared up for verbal abuse). But it’s tough to be provocative when the general thrust of the discussion meanders aimlessly, with the moderator a supine servant of inconsequence.

While more diverse views are desirable and should be encouraged for the next GLF, it’s difficult to be really representative without being tokenistic. More importantly, I believe GLF organisers / the moderator needs to look more at how those on the panel are located within the context of blogging and blogs in Sri Lanka than who is really on it.

What I found lacking was that Nuri didn’t really know how our respective blogs and writing was perceived in the larger SL blogosphere, traditional media and civil society – whether we perceived ourselves to be “serious” bloggers or not. Had he pushed us to respond to the questions he himself sent us in advance, or re-articulated some of the criticisms directed against us by fellow bloggers we all know of, I think we would have had a more interesting discussion and also fleshed out the faultlines between some of Indi’s attitudes and writing, my own and others on the panel.

I’m very happy that a literary festival recognises blogging as part and parcel of its proceedings. Having a fringe event is just that – a peripheral affair that is often shafted, literally and metaphorically, to a corner. I think there is merit in mainstreaming blogging into future GLFs. This is not to say that Rohan is wrong – having a parallel event to complement an official session on blogging that’s informal, boozy, with more tech so that people can interact with others not at the event and in real time, is a great idea.

Sanjana

Other posts on the panel:

• GLF : Were we taken seriously?
• Snapshots of the Galle Lit: #1 Bloggers Take Themselves Way Too Seriously
• Can Blogs Be Taken Seriously
• Can We Be Taken Seriously? – Part 27
• Galle Lit Fest