InSTEDD.org - Saving the World Through Technology

How do you plan to save the world? If you took to the theme like InSTEDD you’d set up a network for collaboration and technological innovation to aid in times of disaster, disease, and misfortune. You’d design a platform where researchers, developers, scientists, and experts could come together and create better methods to respond to disasters, to find technological solutions to serve under the harshest conditions, anywhere, any time. InSTEDD works with universities, NGO’s, corporations and public humanitarian groups. Together they collect field data, analyze solutions, test technologies for improved communication, and share information about crucial breakthroughs that could buy time and save lives. The Mekong Collaboration Program, for example, endeavors to prevent and respond to emergent diseases in southeast Asia. They’ve developed a tool allowing you to connect a cell phone to your computer and use it for receiving and responding to SMS with a map as the main interaction tool. There’s a directory allowing relief workers and researchers to coordinate activities in the field during times of crisis. They’ve got forums for posting ideas and discussing real solutions. Sign up to contribute today.

“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.

We will match needs with good ideas.

We're reaching out to colleagues and contacts in academia, industry, governments, NGOs, UN agencies, and everyone else we can find. We're looking for the best ideas, and we'll then introduce those with needs to those with good ideas and step out of the way.

We will develop new approaches where needed.

If there is nothing that addresses a problem effectively, we'll try to develop something ourselves. We will use the "agile" development method of close involvement with end-users and testing by rapid trial followed by speedy reworking. Then, when we think we have something useful, we'll take it to the field for user testing and stability assessment. When it is consistently stable and field-proven, we'll give it away as an open-source "Release" for free.”

InSTEDD has a lofty but noble goal. Improving disaster response and prevention requires time and dedication and a good deal of coordination. InSTEDD provides the necessary platform allowing experts, researchers, etc to communicate and share their ideas easily.

How is this funded? Will they add more tools on the site to facilitate project management, idea sharing, collaboration and communication?