Introduction

The collaboration gap

Effective collaboration requires that responders establish a reliable flow of timely, accurate and complete information.  Yet the information technologies required often fail in the difficult environments where humanitarian organizations work. We'd probably all agree that today's public health and relief workers ought to have access to the best possible information whenever they need it, including satellite imagery, sensor data, media reports and all the rich resources of the World Wide Web.

They should have powerful software and services to help them make the right decisions. They should be able to communicate reliably with headquarters, community leaders and one another at any moment.   Yet, for all its promise, technology to do this still has not reached millions who need it, or sometimes even the few who require it and - worse - what they now have often fails at the moment they need it most.

Our approach

At InSTEDD, we work with governments, universities, corporations, international health organizations, humanitarian NGOs and local communities around the world. Together we work to identify requirements for enhanced information flow, better cross-sector collaboration and more effective collective action. Where solutions already exist, we integrate them. If another technology can be adapted to meet the needs, we re-purpose it. If a genuine gap is found, where no solution exists and no market pressures are driving the necessary innovation, we build it ourselves. Then we give it away, free and open source, and we test, train and deploy it within the areas of the world that seem most in need. From there, we stand back and watch carefully to ensure we've aimed correctly.

We have InSTEDD teams that live in the challenging environments where our potential users live, and we sit next to our users there every day. We want to make sure we understand how they work. We want to watch where they have problems, where they falter, where it's not easy. We then ask them to work with us, every day, designing something that fixes that; something genuinely useful for them. By getting close to our users, living their problems side-by-side, we know that what we build will be closer to what they need.

Our innovation laboratories: InSTEDD "iLabs"

In designing our sustainability strategy in the countries where we have active development programs, InSTEDD recognized that it was not enough to just leave behind the capacity to support our technologies.  Our technologies might meet their needs today, but the world is changing around us, and sooner or later they will face new challenges that could never have been anticipated. Our aim, therefore, was to set the bar higher: to leave behind a capacity for sustainable innovation. Through a combination of training in user-centered design, Agile software development techniques, and creative trans-boundary collaboration, InSTEDD's iLabs serve as a model for how to leave local communities with the knowledge and skills they will need to adapt technology to emerging requirements after we are gone.

The nations, communities and local organizations we assist know best what their needs are, and we in turn need their help to address the unique needs of their countries. In order to support them in taking full ownership of the solutions, we establish and run (or co-develop) local iLabs wherever we work. Here, under the expert mentorship of our international team of software engineers, public health professionals, and disaster responders, the local iLab staff learn the advanced skills needed to serve as a national brain trust, fostering collaborative engineering practices, multi-disciplinary dialogue, cross-sector partnerships and entrepreneurial innovation.

The iLab also serves as a neutral space for organizations to come together and explore shared solutions. Within those  solutions we've found that the local iLab staff can sometimes share their skills with us in ways that better shape efforts, for us and for others, down the road. This building of local capacity, driven by local staff, ensures that the solutions created will be more relevant than when introduced by outsiders, and that such necessary innovation will continue beyond the life of a single project.