InSTEDD: Humanitarian Collaboration Tales

Robert Kirkpatrick is an expert in the design and use of technology to facilitate cross-organizational collaboration in austere field environments, developing countries, and sudden-onset emergencies. He has spent more than 10 years in collaboration technology, supporting the use of ICT for health data collection, disaster relief, NGO field security, telemedicine, conflict mediation, and civil-military cooperation. Robert’s work with technology industry partners, government agencies, and international humanitarian organizations has explored ways that system design may impact trust- building and information sharing behavior across cultural, organizational, and linguistic boundaries. Robert co-founded and led solutions development for two pioneering humanitarian technology teams, first at Groove Networks, and later at Microsoft where he served as Lead Architect for Microsoft Humanitarian Systems (MHS).

While at Microsoft, he and the MHS team designed a set of tools for mesh-based collaboration and low-bandwidth data transport among humanitarian workers in Afghanistan. Following the Pakistan earthquake in 2006, Robert worked on humanitarian relief solutions for earthquake victims in Kashmir, and he later prototyped a telemedicine application in Afghanistan.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Robert spent more than a month working with NGOs, military, and first responders in New Orleans and Mississippi, where he designed a suite of applications for registration, medical treatment, and family reunification. In 2005, as Lead Architect for Groove Humanitarian Systems, he developed the GIS-enabled DPKO SatComms tracking system used by UN Peacekeeping to manage global UN satellite communications. At the onset of the Iraq War, Robert developed the Virtual Iraqi Health Logistics Center, a system used during and after the invasion by both humanitarian and military personnel. He later worked in Baghdad under US Ambassador Paul Bremer as an advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority Executive Secretariat. Robert is a member of the Executive Committee for the Strong Angel series of humanitarian disaster-response demonstrations. In 2006, he directed application integration for Strong Angel III in San Diego, CA, and in 2004 for Strong Angel II in Kona, Hawai’i. Robert holds a B.A. in Greek and Latin from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and has done graduate work in social anthropology at Harvard University.

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Eduardo Jezierski has spent his whole career designing, implementing, and deploying software solutions on a global scale. He originally received an MsC in Informatics after initial work in nuclear engineering, and later worked in Argentina in the areas of GIS analysis, machine learning, and modeling for anthropology challenges. His Master’s thesis was on robotics control, genetic algorithms and neural networks. He spent nine years in software development at Microsoft, first supporting largest enterprise customers, then later as Program Manager and Solutions Architect.

He was one of the founders of a team dedicated to building software assets (tools, practices, frameworks, services, content and information architectures) to improve quality and productivity of Microsoft’s business customers. The usage of these assets and frameworks climbed at its inception from zero to more than a million developers worldwide and adoption in excess of 80% of the target market – including financial, healthcare, military, and manufacturing customers.

Mr. Jezierski also developed a strategy for building communities consisting of academia, software vendors, other technical partners, customers and grassroots participants by initiating new SharedSource approach for engineering at Microsoft. There are now more than 25,000 registered members and hundreds of thousands of lines of source code shared between the participants, while still maintaining acceptable IP protection for Microsoft and other members. A practitioner of agile software-design approaches, he has built and led numerous global teams in producing mission-critical assets in just months, and has presented on software architectures and design approaches for large distributed systems in conferences around the globe. Most recent development arenas include transactional and analytics systems, software systems integration, scalable web services, and user interface design.

He helped found a team at Microsoft dedicated to starting new businesses by providing an internal venture capital model and growing innovation practices and entrepreneurship in the company, working directly with the staff of the Chief Software Architect. He contributed to defining strategy and early execution of the new group and delivered prototypes in the domain of mesh architectures, real-time communications and immersive web environments for long-tail retail. Several of these prototypes were designed, written, and validated in the field in collaboration with Microsoft’s Humanitarian Systems Group.

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