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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 »
Our Modern Toolkit: Free and Open Source Tools for Social Impact
With social impact being our primary goal, we are proud to share our powerful modern tool belt with the rest of the world. InSTEDD’s suite of open source tools is a collection of technologies that have been used to support our focus areas of maternal/child health, infectious diseases, emergency management and local innovation/leadership.
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Data Part 2: It’s not the technology, it’s about who uses it and how
Last week, we 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 to the post last week, we’ve added more of what we’ve learned in the hopes that it will help you better deal with similar situations. Below is a continued list of our lessons learned and how we have been able to work around the problems we’ve faced in the field.
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Data Part 1: It’s not the technology, it’s about who uses it and how
Over the course of working on a variety of projects that require data reporting, we’ve learned many valuable lessons. One such lesson is that the data collection system needs to be directly addressing the issue at hand, and often times the group running the project has to be coached up front in order to design the data collection system that deals with the real problem. In order to properly design a system for collecting data that is actionable, it’s important to understand the why, the who, the when and the context in which the data will be used. Read more »
Rio 2.0 Demo Alley Conference: Building Technologies for Social Impact
Early this month, InSTEDD was fortunate enough to have participated in the USRio+2.0 Demo Alley event held at the Stanford University, Graduate School of Business. Demo Alley, also known as “speed geeking,” follows a similar format as the well known “speed dating” concept where the purpose is to encourage participants to meet a large number of new people and be exposed to a variety of innovative ideas that help bridge the gap between technology and sustainable development. Read more »
One Man’s Trash is Another Man’s Catalyst for Innovation: How a simple toilet paper roll led to the creation of the Reporting Wheel
Although the Reporting Wheel 1.0 wasn’t very impressive to look at, it represented something much bigger than the sum of its parts. The most important thing about this experience was the fact that all you needed to create innovative solutions was a good idea and the willingness to try something unexpected. Ideas are easy to come by, but the iLabs provide a great way to try them out and see what works and what doesn’t faster than anything else we’ve seen. Read more »
Part 2: “If You Don’t Go, You Don’t Know”
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 »
Part 1: “If You Don’t Go, You Don’t Know”
Experience had taught us an important lesson — if you don’t go, you don’t know. While going to the source is important, individual knowledge is not enough. Everyone at InSTEDD had extensive careers and had developed domain expertise as they worked around the world, but what was really needed was to look at things from a unified, not just domain specific, perspective. The world had to be experienced through social and technical lenses simultaneously. Read more »
2011 Reflections: Technologies, iLabs and Accolades
It has been quite the year for our team here at InSTEDD and our innovation labs in Southeast Asia and Latin America. As we prepare to enter the year ahead we wanted to take a moment to look back over a few of our highlights from 2011. Read more »
