ubuntu-ngo team mailing list archive

[Brad Crittenden <bac@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Last Friday I went to a new conference called SwitchPoint held outside of Chapel Hill, NC, in an old mill town called Saxapahaw.  It was sponsored by IntraHealth International, an organization that works in the developing world, mainly Africa, India, and Southeast Asia, with public health workers.

As expected, the conference was more TED than PyCon as the talks were non-technical case studies about the successes and challenges working in international public health.  About 70% of the attendees were from the public health sector with about 20% being technologists.  Most of the health workers had significant experience working on the ground.

IntraHealth is interesting to me because they develop and deploy their systems on Ubuntu and are long time users of Launchpad.  They develop a suite of tools to provide health worker human resource management.  It doesn't sound very sexy but as they explained you can bring in the most modern equipment and drugs but if there isn't a healthcare worker to administer or use them then no healthcare actually happens.  Their software is in use throughout Africa and there have been several instances where countries independently ran their own trials and deployments.

Through talking to their developers I came to realize they are not taking advantage of the new features of Launchpad.  They have some PPAs but aren't using them as part of their installation story, which is a complicated mess of instructions requiring downloading tarballs from Launchpad and manually managing dependencies.  In the coming weeks I hope to work with them to get them using build recipes and creating proper packages.  If a packaging expert would like to work with me I'd be grateful.

I also talked to a very energetic woman from Kenya named Jessica Colaço who is a TED Fellow.  I think she is of Brazilian descent and reminded me a lot of Kiko -- in a good way.  She mentioned her work with Ushahidi and the difficulties of deploying it to the cloud, which was a perfect chance for me to introduce her to Juju.

Another discussion I had was with an M.D. who works with medical schools in Africa and talked about starting a new project to provide resource management geared towards their specific needs.  She is initially calling it the "Dean's Dashboard".  I told her about SchoolTool and she was excited to learn about it and was going to investigate its applicability to her problem.

I learned about MapBox, an open source map creation tool utilizing Open Street Maps.  I haven't gotten to play with it yet but it looks quite nice.

While most of the discussion was on mobile technology and software systems, one of the most interesting low tech solutions was the Embrace infant warmer, which is basically a little sleeping bag for premature infants that includes a reusable, wax-based heating element.  The Embrace costs a fraction of an incubator, doesn't require constant electricity, can be used at home and provides temperature regulation for up to six hours between warmings.  It was exciting to hear from the creator of such a simple solution that is helping to save lives now.

It's neat that Ubuntu is used to power Instagram but it is much more rewarding to see how our work is enabling efforts that affect people's lives in the developing world.  That realization and the knowledge I was able to share made the conference worthwhile.

--Brad


http://www.switchpointideas.com/
http://www.intrahealth.org/
https://launchpad.net/ihris-suite/
http://ushahidi.com/
http://mapbox.com/
http://medicmobile.org/
http://embraceglobal.org/