I think between the two of us — bold folk unafraid of long comments — we have made this one of Paul’s longest posts ever…

And I am mightily relieved we are in a good groove because you are smart and experienced and write a blog I’ve come to admire. You are someone with whom I really want to have long meandering sparky conversations.

To respond more or less in order to the points you raise:

– I am a HUGE fan of conferences. In fact, my old bureau chief once almost literally fell out of his chair when I burst into a weekly editorial meeting late, announcing breathlessly that I had been to “Waste Expo.” He observed that I would go to anything that ended in “Expo” and he was right. From the Halloween Show (no laughing – second most profitable holiday after Christmas – the seminars on running an haunted house are worth the press pass right there…) to ICAAC (pronounced ICK ACK – an infectious disease conference), I am a veteran, happy to don a badge, listen to lectures and wander endless miles of trade show aisles. If you want to understand an industry, go to the shows.

If the Tracker model works, I would love to do a TrackerConferences. It is a world unto itself.

- Re Peter “Road to the Horizon” Cassier — he somehow found Tracker and wrote to me last week. What a wonderful series of blogs and feeds he maintains! And I am very pleased to say he sourced a recent post from the Tracker Editor’s Blog. Web echoes are fun.

Which segues – out of order — to the “too much” on Tracker point. I want to give the layout more of a run, but it may very well turn out that it doesn’t work. Some people are really loving it. It puts others off-balance. The basic architecture was inspired by the Drudge Report, which gets an average of 10 million visits per day.

When Drudge started, there weren’t a lot of graphic rules to the website game, and readers quickly got on to the logistics of the format. I know I need to add more content more often to make it easier for readers to understand what’s happening.

But your point it well-taken that this format may be overkill for someone working in the field.

Which brings up a real to-the-heart issue: Whom is Tracker for? Aid workers are a very important part of the mix, but *part* of the a mix. It may turn out that in Tracker’s big contribution in the greater scheme of things is as more of tip sheet for policy-makers, researchers, journalists, students, companies, foundations, etc.

Aid Work Daily, along with this blog Cassier’s blog warren, Sanjana’s blog and several others I’ve come across, are far better aimed directly at frontline aid workers and techs. But the flip side of the coin is that they play to a tightly knit group. I would be thrilled if Tracker became a sort of scaffold, making it possible for the stories you cover to be seen by people who otherwise probably wouldn’t see them. Tracker may fill other roles as well – we’ll see. I am also very interested in weaving in the One Health angle.

TrackerNews has got a long way to go, but some interesting things are already beginning to happen.

- now back to our regularly scheduled order.

re GATR — The SAIII’ers were comparing the “beach ball” with huge satellite trucks that guzzled diesel and made a racket. The BGAN units you mention look very cool indeed.

Re Google maps – your right that Google Maps was up and running by Strong Angel, though pretty basic. The magic at SAIII was in the collaboration of at least a half dozen mapping companies with Google and with each other. It was an early stage of adding layers of data and making it all real-time relevant.

You are also right about the mixed reviews to SAIII. I really was the only one there whose job *was* to get a sense of the whole thing and even I couldn’t get my arms entirely around it. At the end of the day I don’t know exactly how you evaluate such a large scale, organized chaos event. Reports were written and filed, but I don’t know they meant that much. The more enduring legacies were in the sparks of ideas, the continuing conversations and the unexpected connections (are you beginning to see a theme with me here?)

In other words, the stuff that can make the most difference is the most difficult to quantify.

re Skype: love it. a lot. It’s elegant and simple. And I am in sync with your sentiments about practicality, although I have a weakness for “dreamer” ideas for the inspiration they deliver.

Finally – because I can hear Tracker calling, hungry for more content – I think you might like the new post on the Editor’s blog (http://trackerblog.intedd.org).

All best,

Janet

p.s. you’ve got my email address on that mass email Paul sent out — if you want to continue more directly…

Sorry for the rant.

Janet – Welcome to the fold. Looking forward to see where Tracker goes.

Cheers,

Jon

First off, let me just say that I applaud anyone that is trying to effect positive change and I appreciate what you are trying to do with Tracker. On that note please let me know if I can assist you in any way or connect you with field people that have a wealth of knowledge.

I am aware of Strong Angel but have never attended. I spoke to one of the original Strong Angel attendees back in 2004 and he gave me his thoughts on it. I also heard mixed reviews of Strong Angel III from attendees. There are many excellent conferences that should be better advertised. I met Paul at a humanitarian technology conference in DC back in 2005 which I thought was very well run. Esprit-de-tech has been around for quite some time. Paul has been at it since 2001, Peter over at ‘The Road to the Horizon’ has been at it since 1996, and numerous other heroes have been sitting in the bush twisting wires for countless decades stretching back to the early comms folks at MSF.

In regards to GATR I am taking the $50,000 price tag from the Popular Science article which you can find here: http://tinyurl.com/6hzdhx I cannot find the price advertised on the GATR website. A C-Band dish installed in Indo is about $10,000. An Inmarsat BGAN is around $2400 not including the rate plan which is $4-8/MB. I am having a hard time understanding how the person quoted can claim that it “cost a fraction of a traditional dish”. Also, the carrying cases in the PopSci YouTube video are much larger than any BGAN case and you can charge a BGAN off of a small solar panel.

I am sorry but I don’t understand the bit about Strong Angel III inspiring Google Maps. According to the Google Maps Wikipedia entry it was launched Feb 2005 while by your own account Strong Angel III took place Fall of 2006. Please clarify.

I am glad that Google.org created InSTEDD. I have enjoyed working with Eduardo and hope to see his hard work pay off and land in the hands of field workers. I am looking forward to post reviews from some of my former co-workers. However, until it is released I think we should also focus on the few tools that we actually use and how we can make them better.

I use Skype as a prime example. I believe Skype has probably indirectly saved more lives than any other software application out there. I estimated a cost savings of approx $1500/day for one organization. That’s a lot of vaccine.

By focusing on tools like Skype, Excel, Thurayas and BGAN units I hope to route some information to folks that might be able to use it. New technologies are great fun to read about but let’s focus on those technologies that are most relevant.

Lastly, Tracker tracks too much. They are all great stories but if you are going to cover humanitarian stories you have to understand that in our fast paced lives we have little room for extraneous information. In an emergency everything slows down and your focus becomes extremely narrow. By posting too much information you may be inhibiting the uptake of information by the people that need it most.

At the end of the day it all boils down to numbers and how many lives you saved that day. I learned that lesson my first day on the job with MSF in Ethiopia during a meningitis epidemic when I learned how to calculate vaccination rates. That is why aid work is so beautifully simple – you only need ask will I save more lives if I do X or Y? I try to use that mantra every day and when I decide which articles to post and which ones to ignore.

While I may come across as a bit coarse you have to understand it only because I know that right now there is someone like me baking in a desert a long way off. Good ideas are nice as long as they deliver.

All the best,

Jon

Paul – Let’s get out of these little boxes! Trying to write in a 2×4″ square is maddening!

Jon, I just wanted to clarify the GATR reference. The article about The Humanitarian Technology Review was background for what was termed “an idea-in-progress.”

It was in a section about Strong Angel III, a large civilian/military disaster preparedness exercise that took place a couple of years ago:

“….Can tech provide some of those answers? My job at SA3 was to try to see the forest and the trees. I was the only one of the nearly 800 participants able to step back from the clocking-ticking immediacy of a specific project to see the exercise as a whole.

Winning and losing ideas quickly sorted themselves out: small, adaptable, sturdy, and platform neutral routinely trumped big, specific, fragile, pricey, and platform-limited.

- Sahana’s disaster management system was lauded for its egalitarian open-source roots, while Microsoft was rapped on the knuckles for software that barely played with Linux and was oblivious to Apple.

- A computer-filled minivan for medical surveillance, outfitted with a small satellite dish strapped with a bicycle rack to its roof drove literal rings around a gas guzzling two-gallons-per-mile RV decked out with tons of medical gear.

- A parking lot full of satellite dishes, each with its own truck and crew, was bested by a “beach ball”: a lightweight cloth satellite dish set inside a 8’ cloth globe that cost a fraction of a traditional dish, used a fraction of the power and packed up into a couple of boxes that could be shipped anywhere overnight by FedEx.  

Technologies ranged from the simple genius of a wind up flashlight with a port for recharging a cell phone, to the breathtaking potential of software able to transliterate spoken Arabic broadcast on Al Jazeera into print, then translate that into English.

With my particular interests in biology and biosurveillance, I began to imagine all sorts of mash-ups:

a cheap portable satellite dish
+ a solar refrigerator
+ rapid diagnostic tests
+ cell phones and computers (powered by micro fuel cells)
+ a digital camera set up (Gigapan?)
+ transportation (of any kind, including hooved)  
= one superior field lab.

Researchers would be able to collect and store samples, do on-the-spot tests, gather information, take highly detailed panoramic photographs and send data back to a central lab. Wow….”

best,

Janet

To clarify the water jug anecdote, it was told by Eric Rasmussen, who saw the whole sad chain of events unfold as a Navy doctor working in a camp in Somalia. (the reference was in the previous paragraph – the article is on a sitewith a masked url, so here’s the direct link: http://web.me.com/jaginsburg/germtales/archive_by_date/Entries/2008/3/18_Technology_for_the_Greater_Good.html

Eric is now the CEO of InSTEDD.

Paul is right: this was an illustrative anecdote that helped kick-start not just Lovin’s charette, but conversations that continue to this day.

Although there was a certain amount of “do-gooders get together” going on, there was also a lot of idea exchange and cross-disciplinary networking – the benefits of which are difficult to quantify, but potentially quite significant. The same thing happened at Strong Angel III, where I witnessed some of the early collaborations that led to what we now take for granted as Google maps.

There was enormous esprit-de-tech in the immediate aftermath of both the charette and SAIII, which was predictably difficult to sustain, particularly across disciplines. The idea first for HTR and then TrackerNews was to try to find a way to make it easier for people working in different though related fields to gain a broader awareness of developments and issues in those related fields. Yes, it’s a big bold audacious goal. (but then I am from Chicago, where audacity, especially of the hope-ful variety, is in the water…)

TrackerNews is very much v.1. That can’t be emphasized enough. We wanted to get the boat in the water to see how it floated so we could then figure out how to make it a better boat. It is important to view Tracker as a prototype.

The bones of the design can be seen in The Drudge Report, which was one of the first news aggregators, and one that still draws about 10 millions visits per day. Drudge focuses primarily on politics, climate and celebrity. Stories cycle in from top left column and snake through to the bottom right, giving readers a few days to catch a story. He has a good nose of sparky stories, and draws a mix of readers, which means that people who might not otherwise read about certain subjects, read about them – or at least read the headlines.

I don’t expect TrackerNews to draw anything near Drudge-like numbers, and I think it will take a little while for people to get a sense of how it works. It is also going to take some time for it to be discovered — and to get good at what it does. Tracker’s big contribution may be as a “tip sheet” for policy-makers, researchers and news organizations. In other words, a smaller readership, but an influential one. Much to my surprise, I am finding that even in its early days, TrackerNews is a bit of a hit among university students.

It is also going to take some time to reach its potential as a tool. As the database grows, and as more strands are added, it’s going to get more useful and interesting (although we need to improve Search, which is currently key-word driven).

The blog is going play an important part and I’m just getting up to speed with that, too. The design / programming phase was pretty intense and this is a very small operation.

I am also interested in seeing the Custom Trackers tool develop. To go back to Mikel Maron’s story about the two search and rescue missions…What if his team were to put together a Custom Tracker – an uber site map for Search & Rescue mapping information? It would have a unique url, so could be linked to easily. It would be archived on the Tracker site (another way Tracker gets better as it ages: it builds a reputation as a good early-search reference source). It could be updated. And because the Custom Tracker is curated and its links vetted, it’s a more efficient way to collect quality information than a Google search. It doesn’t by any means preclude a Google search. It just gets you off to faster, more focused start.

Re design: Is there too much on the page? Is it too eclectic? That’s certainly possible. I want to see where this goes for a while first. Several people have raised the issue of a TrackerNews RSS reader, which is a great idea. Another item on the To Do list: reformatting for hand-helds.

re Alltop: It is a very useful site – I’ve linked to several of its pages in the TrackerNews Resources section. But it is a very different sort of thing. Alltop is limited to its feeds and skews toward breaking news. Tracker routinely links to sites without feeds (e.g. research journals) and can link for context more readily. It’s got a certain nimble-ness.

re Paul’s point about whether aid workers will read Tracker. I think formatting is a big issue that needs to be addressed. However, although I am very interested in making TrackerNews useful for aid workers, they’re not the only audience. The other day I received an email from someone at the American Society for Microbiology who was pretty excited about Tracker. ASM’s membership is huge. These are the researchers working on vaccines and health surveillance schemes and clever out-there ideas such as using phage (viruses that attack bacteria) to control cholera in water supplies. I want them to be aware of what aid workers are up against and I want their ideas to reach where they’re needed. If TrackerNews can help facilitate that in some way, *that’s* the mission.

Another example: A week or so ago, I had a couple of links about Shawn Frayne’s Wind Belts (micro wind energy — one of the links was to the company, Humdinger, to make it easier for anyone interested to find out more). A friend at IRIN who was exploring Tracker was fascinated by it. He had never heard of it — despite the fact that it was a 2007 Popular Mechanics Breakthrough award-winner and a 2008 Corey Stone finalist). IRIN’s focus and resources aren’t necessarily directed at technologies like this. It was a tip…

All of which is to say is that I think there may be room –and a need – for a broader, eclectic, cross disciplinary approach.

Again, please view TrackerNews as v.1 and as a prototype. If this boat does indeed float, I would like to see sister Trackers in other languages. Not translations, but independent aggregators. TrackerNews has built-in skews due in part to its English-language limitations. But you have to start somewhere….

We’ll see.

******

Now, back to Innovation. The whole top part of my original comment post was about marketing, communications and tech transfer. Any thoughts on those?

cheers & best,

Janet

btw Jon, I think you’ve got a great blog. I read it often and it’s a treasure — in fact, you might see posts linked on TrackerNews…

So true!

I’m sure that the anecdote was meant to be illustrative – I doubt that it was a single event that got Lovins thinking. You’re absolutely right about the real problem – it was bad management that lead to that situation in the refugee camp, not bad technology.

Yes, but illustrative of the fact that that example is not a real world example. Examples like that give aid workers a bad name. It’s a softball. Our problems are a lot more complicated and a lot harder to solve. Folks that haven’t spent time in the field have a very hard time understanding the nuances so they develop solutions that will never hold up. They waste all of our time chasing ghosts and fixing things that they think need fixing. In the mean time all we can do is watch them run around in circles.

On Tracker: I’ll be writing something about TrackerNews this month, although I’ve been talking with Janet about it for most of this year. I would defend TrackerNews as an interesting project that could lead to a really useful tool, but one of my early concerns was simply that I’m not sure that aid workers would use it.

There is no order to the top section of Tracker. I see I was added to the bottom (Thanks!) which has more order but also a truckload of stuff I don’t need. You can’t be everything to everyone. I am not sure of the value of an aggregator that aggregates aggregators. Too many links weaken the chain. They need an editor for the humanitarian sector. Tracker has a chance if it can pick it’s battles and not try to solve all the world’s ills. We learned that lesson a long time ago. You will always lose a few battles, the skill comes in choosing which ones.

But this discussion is not about the latest entry into the field of tech innovation…

The GATR was an interesting case. I originally wrote something quite scathing about it, but held fire. I think I’m angrier about the marketing of it than about the concept itself, which is kind of cool. Is that a big part of the problem?

Has any humanitarian org ever purchased one of these? I highly doubt it. This thing was DOA as far as we are concerned. Sure, if the price point comes WAY down we may consider it. The fact that this was even added to a publication purporting to be THE place to go for humanitarian news shows us that they have little interaction with the humanitarian community.

I see Tracker asks for feedback so I should probably go dump all this over there. You know that if you hang something out there I am going to shake it down. I MUST stop getting baited by you!