Introduction

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.

"If you don't go, you don't know."

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. That's also why, in the first 90 days from our start on 01 October 2007, technical team members were out in the field extensively. From the UNICEF Emergency Operations Center in New York, to the WHO Emergency Operations Center in Geneva, an Urban Search and Rescue Team Communications Center, on a Vietnamese chicken farm near Hanoi, in a Bangkok hospital, and in a Laotian village clinic on the Mekong River, we learned what's really needed and how it has to work.

We will help reduce barriers and build bridges among those who help others.

Our task in all of this is to reduce barriers to information flow in every direction, enhancing collaboration for anyone who wishes to do it. That means helping deep-field reporting of disease outbreaks, helping the aggregation of disease information by national ministries of health, helping analysis and visualization in a central location, and providing decision-support tools that lead to a more effective professional response. With attention to math, science, useful technology, languages, cultural sensitivity, and common sense, outbreaks can be discovered more quickly and the effects mitigated.

We will leverage inspired work from around the globe.

We look anywhere and everywhere for creative and useful ideas, capitalizing on our social networks, our professional partners, and the media in a radically inclusive exploration of helpful thoughts. We are partially funded by Google (and Rockefeller, and others), but we are vendor-agnostic, looking only for the best ideas we can find. We strive for multi-use, multi-platform, and cross-species designs, and we need those tools to be simple, robust, effective, and affordable, meeting all international standards. We much prefer both open-source and free.

We will help improve global resilience to diseases and disasters.

Our ultimate goal is a better global immune system. We know we alone can't truly stop diseases, war, poverty, or climate change, but we think we can help humanity to learn about threats faster, and so respond quicker, and so soften the impact.