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.
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.
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
An important aspect of InSTEDD’s work is that we work with the people who will actually be using the tools we create every step of the way. We don’t build anything in isolation and we involve the end-users every step of the way. When we spoke to the people at these rural health centers.
“If You Don’t Go, You Don’t Know”: What We’ve Learned and What We’re Doing About It
Part of the challenge of scaling technologies that use SMS text messaging is how quickly the costs adds up. With this in mind, we knew that in order to reach large numbers of people, we had to develop relationships with mobile operators that could help us keep our costs low.
“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
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.
In Her Own Words: Channe Suy Attends OpenMRS Implementers Meeting
This past October, Channe Suy, product manger at iLab Southeast Asia traveled to Rwanda to participate in the OpenMRS community’s annual Implementers Meeting for five days of collaboration, sharing of implementation experiences and working together to improve OpenMRS.
Dynamic Resource Mapping
iLab team started working on project “Dynamic Resource Mapping” . This project is aim to provide mapping of any facility or resource and be able to update and query the resource availability via SMS, Web interface.
Video: How ‘Watchfire’ Helps the Red Cross
From the time we’re notified to when we’re on the scene is less than 1 hour… One of the first steps we need to take is initiating our volunteers to get out into the field. How do we communicate that?