instedd.org/author/edjez/Author Archive: Eduardo Jezierski
Controlling your Privacy with Health Commons
If you buy into the idea that information about your body is ‘owned’ by you, then it’s obvious you should get to have a say about what happens with that data once it leaves your body. Unfortunately, today there is no clear and easy way to express… Read more »
National Health Systems as a Fabric of Services
At InSTEDD right now we are involved on a wide spectrum of projects. Many of our projects are short and grassroots-driven, such as our recent work with UNICEF using aerial photography to map environmental vulnerabilities in the slums of Rio de Janiero… Read more »
Data: It’s not the technology, it’s about who uses it and how
In the past, we’ve blogged about some of the many lessons we’ve learned when it comes to working on projects that require some form of data collection. As a follow up, we’ve added more of what we’ve learned in the hopes that it will help you better deal with similar situations. Read more »
“If You Don’t Go, You Don’t Know”: What We’ve Learned and What We’re Doing About It
Since our tools are open source and can be used from any location, we saw that people from New York to Bahrain had discovered that when you design for a constrained environment, the result is simple enough that it’s applicable anywhere else, and ready to roll as soon as the need appears. We intentionally combined our humanitarian mission with smart business acumen so that we could set our first iLab on track to scale and become a financially independent social enterprise Read more »
January 11th 2011
As January 12th approaches and with it the anniversary of the tragic Haiti earthquake, I have some hopes:- That everyone in Haiti has a moment of respite and peace to focus on their loved ones, the ones that are here and the ones that are gone.- That f… Read more »
Architecture, Mobiles, and Health: 10 pitfalls
The “eHealth” space (which obviously includes the mobile, mHealth aspects), is a bit too chaotic from the perspective of a common developing country. Imagine you are responsible for ICT (Information and Communication Technology) of a ministry of he… Read more »
Phones don’t change the world, people do
Inspired by the Wired article “Scientists Hack Cellphone to Analyze Blood, Detect Disease, Help Developing Nations” by Dave Bullock there has been a lot of activity under the change.org post “The Cellphone that could change the world” by Nathan… Read more »
For Geeks: Progress on Mesh4x: Cloud Services, Architecture, Adapters, and Adopters
As the year wraps to an end we have a mixed blessing: On one side we have a small but growing portfolio of technology stemming from our organization’s immediate goals to improve disease detection and public health in South East Asia, being built at a s… Read more »
Thank you to all translation volunteers for Sahana!
After an amazing work on behalf of the volunteers doing the translation from English to Burmese, we have translations for all Sahana strings, which will make a deployment of Sahana in the country reach a broader audience and be useful beyond the few … Read more »
Mesh4x goes mobile with JavaROSA, allows you to sync data on your handset with no Internet
The latest batch of advances in mesh4x and JavaROSA allows you to do forms-based data input and editing on any java-enabled phone and synchronize with other phones or a server. You can define a generic form, load the form definition to any java-ena… Read more »
Phnom Penh Innovation Lab team giving its first steps!
After months of work in the region, our technology team in Cambodia has started their daily work! We had our first standup meetings last week! As part of InSTEDD’s strategy of ‘sustainable innovation’ we are creating a full engineering team that over… Read more »
InSTEDD Presentation at HISA
Here is the presentation we gave at HISA. Brief intro about InSTEDD, An overview of information flow challenges in health we found in Cambodia which we hear are also present in other contexts, How collaboration can help with those challe… Read more »
Mesh4x SMS Adapter: Sync data without an Internet connection
Mesh4x has a new feature that allows you sync data between a local desktop, server or mobile device and a remote computer even if you have no Internet access, by sending and receiving little batches of text messages. Databases, spreadsheets and even ma… Read more »
Improvements to Mesh4x KML adapter (“Mesh4Maps”?)
After feedback from Where 2.0 we updated the Mesh4x KML adapter to Mesh4x to embed all versioning metadata for the items in the file itself. This allows you to have one KML file, send it via email, copy it on USB drives, and have your team do changes… Read more »
Where 2.0
Just returned from Where 2.0, an amazing conference about “everything geo”. Robert and I went there to present some of InSTEDD’s work and learn as much as we could from the geo-demigods in the event, as well as to connect with folks we had … Read more »
Sahana installation poised for Myanmar disaster support
Upon the request from Lanka software, we have successfully brought up a virtualized Sahana instance. You can see it here: https://sahana.instedd.org (Note you may need to ignore a certificate warning to see this until we deploy a new certificate for … Read more »
Build maps collaboratively with new Mesh4x KML adapter
A handful of months ago I met Kersten Jauer, UN Information Officer for the Central African Republic (CAR). CAR is a large country in Central Africa, surrounded by Sudan, Chad, Cameroon, Congo, and DRC; 67% of its population lives with under $1 a day a… Read more »
Mesh4x adds generic database support
First of all — a very heartfelt support to the Myanmar population in this times of crisis. Many friends are either already there or on their way to help as part of UNDAC teams. It’s a tough situation in a tough context, and all my hopes reach out to th… Read more »
Mesh4x: New Open Source Project for Data Meshes
Today we created a new open source project to host InSTEDD’s efforts on data meshes. The goal for the project is to provide libraries, tools and applications that simplify using standards-based data meshes. Our contributions will be based on the requ… Read more »
SMS Applications and Microformats — lots of work to do!
I got a comment at this weekend’s Alt.Net conference — which was echoed in mikel’s blog — about us not using a location microformat in the Friends Nearby and GeoChat proof of concept applications on the InSTEDD site. In retrospect, it would have been … Read more »
Off to Thailand & Cambodia
I’m taking off to Southeast Asia in a couple of hours. Our goals for this trip is to set up the structure for our long-term presence in the region. I’m going with Dennis (our Program Director) to Bangkok to meet with many organizations that we are or w… Read more »
Keeping our infrastructure ‘in the cloud’ and our costs close to the ground
At InSTEDD –like at any other non-profit..or a well-run business– there is a constant evaluation of how we are using our donors’ money, looking for ways we can reduce overhead and anything that doesn’t translate directly into mission-related impact. G… Read more »
Real world results, virtual world visualizations at Life 2.0
On Monday I attended a large presentation about visualizations at a reputable conference. NASA, NOAA, and Sun attendees were active participants. Then someone showed up dressed as a teddy bear. One of the panel members was a little blue cat. When Xanth… Read more »
BarCamp in Phnom Penh, Cambodia..and sustainable technology practices
BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from participants. (From barcamp.org) A group of enthusiasts is now organiz… Read more »
Hello World
This is my first post after a blogging hiatus that started more than a year ago. Much has changed in my life between then and now so I’ll make this post a quick intro of myself, and a catch up for those wondering about me dropping off the blogosphere. … Read more »
