InSTEDD is an innovation lab for technologies designed to improve community resilience and save lives through early disease detection and rapid disaster response.

Disease and disaster are usually viewed as separate topics, handled by different agencies and specialists. But there is no humanitarian crisis that does not have a health component, or a serious outbreak of disease that does not have a humanitarian dimension.

According to a recent Oxfam report, there has been a four-fold increase in the annual number of natural disasters.

Increased trade and travel, high-volume livestock and poultry operations, a shifting climate and a burgeoning human population have also led to a disturbing global increase and spread of newly identified pathogens (HIV/AIDS, SARS, hantavirus), a resurgence of familiar plagues (TB, malaria, polio), and the emergence of deadly new strains (H5N1 avian influenza, West Nile virus, antibiotic-resistant staphylococcus).

Mortality statistics only begin to tell the story. The costs of a disease outbreak or a natural disaster are devastating for families, communities and countries. AIDS leaves children orphans. Floods, fires and earthquakes destroy homes. Disease outbreaks cripple food supplies and ruin livelihoods.

InSTEDD works with universities, corporations, international health organizations, humanitarian NGOs and communities. Together, we work to identify, or craft, and then field-test capabilities leading to improved information flow, better cross-sector collaboration, and more effective collective action.

InSTEDD looked around carefully and has talked with literally hundreds of humanitarian staff around the globe. We've identified areas that seem to be gaps and we're creating tools - free and open source - that we test, train, and deploy within the areas of the world that seem most in need, watching carefully to ensure we've aimed correctly.

We have teams that live in places where our users are, and we sit next to our potential users every day, making sure we understand how they need to work and having them help us design the tools.

As a result of those conversations InSTEDD has, for example, (1) created deep-field reporting software for cellphones, (2) created alerting tools for laptops broadcasting to cellphones, (3) created mesh software that allows very different applications (like Excel, Google Earth, MySQL) to synchronize information between laptops, and across applications, using only cellphones, and (4) built an information browser that watches many streams of information for warning signs, then helps gather teams together around that warning sign for analysis and collaborative planning. All are being tested extensively by our local teams in Argentina and Cambodia.

InSTEDD has also developed a method for training local populations in the effective ownership of our tools. We know very well that the introducing of a technology can be disruptive - even when the population helped design it - so we try to be patient, careful, and respectful.

Everything we create we make open source and we give it away for free. In order to ensure the people who need it can make our tools their own, we've developed a 400 hour workplan with a 125 hour curriculum, taught in the local language. We find the brightest local lights anywhere in the region, in academia, in the Ministries, as local entrepreneurs, or within local NGOs, and we teach them to become a local brain trust, keeping those new skills within the country, slowing the brain-drain a little. It seems to be working - Cambodians are adapting our tools to their needs on a weekly basis.

InSTEDD is willing to work anywhere that we perceive a need, but we started in Cambodia and the general region of Southeast Asia because we saw Cambodia as one of the most difficult of choices, yet there are those working hard in Phnom Penh to improve the country and its cooperation with its neighbors. Between our receiving support from Google.org, Rockefeller Foundation, and the Mekong Basin Disease Surveillance network, we found it sensible and challenging to start in Cambodia.

InSTEDD’s mission is to buy critical time when it matters. Through better disease detection and response times, outbreaks can be contained and possibly prevented. Through more effective disaster response, more lives can be saved. And we're finding that allowing collaboration across boundaries is an almost universal good.