"InSTEDD is all about humanitarian collaboration through technology innovation. We are looking carefully at the problems faced by those involved in disease tracking and disaster response, and we're moving forward in focused ways to help them."
InSTEDD was born at the TED conference as part of Larry Brillient's TED Prize in 2006. It's original mandate was around early detection of disease outbreaks. They have since built the beginings of a very exciting ecosystem of tools for peer2peer, online/offline, mesh networked, information processing in the most demanding environments.
I became interested in their tools in my desire to understand how/if salesforce.com could be useful in a disaster relief scenario. One of the major stumbling blocks had always been that salesforce.com is an enterprise class data management system with more than enough horsepower, but it was difficult to use salesforce.com in situaltions where client platforms where often offline and were limited to sms for connectivity. That is the reality of data exchange in a disaster in the developing world (or anywhere as we learned during Katrina.)
So, the first tools that caught my eye were Mesh4X combined with SMS Geo-Chat and Contacts Nearby, where X is a variable that represents any client app/platform. A mesh network is perfect for this it allows the best know data to move between any two connected nodes. The idea was to plug salesforce.com in to this network in order to create a highly available node that is like to have the best possible data set. A central "operator" could sit at a salesforce.com console (any computer on the internet could be an Internet cafe "in country" or a cubilcle a world away) and work to conect the dots. Let's say the operator gets a piece of data from the filed that a particular type of expertise is needed to specific problem. The notification of that need could have happened via sms. If the mess network itself could not uncover this expertise, the operator could then work to find that expertise and ensure the connection happens. Additionally, the operator could be sitting in front of a Google map that displayed every changing dots that represented individuals and resources at their last known locations complete with status messages.
Then I heard about their Twitter Bot which is currently labelled as ready for use. (BTW, all their projects are FOSS.) Their Twitter Bot leverages
the Twitter SMS platform to transmit data in short 160 character bursts
to be re-assembled at the receiving end. Brilliant!
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