Our Modern Toolkit: Free and Open Source Tools for Social Impact

Staff Writer | InSTEDD | March 14, 2012

At InSTEDD, we have been working to make the world a place where individuals, families and communities thrive, regardless of their geography, income levels or culture. We recognize that when dealing with issues around health, safety and development, there are many obstacles and challenges that we must overcome in order to make a meaningful social impact. That is why everything we do is based on a social-technical approach that involves users and local developers every step of the way. We focus on a human-centered design approach that involves listening openly to our partners, the final users, and experts in that particular issue area. We have the final users near us at every step so that we can learn fast, make changes quickly and work together towards developing an appropriate user-friendly solution.

With social impact being our primary goal, we are proud to share our powerful modern toolkit 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.

We believe that everything can be built in smaller, useful parts, delivering value in weeks, rather than years. Our highly skilled interdisciplinary team of public health experts, scientists, and software engineers works closely with our network of partners in Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas. Through collaboration, we are able to maximize our resources and work faster, smarter and more cost effectively...