Latin American iLab established by InSTEDD & Manas

The iLab Latam, built on top of a partnership between InSTEDD and Manas, is constituted with the aim to help NGOs, governments, social entrepreneurs and other organizations in Latin America design and use collaboration technology tools to better deliver critical services to vulnerable populations, while building and optimizing their technological capacities to support their humanitarian work.

InSTEDD, Innovative Support to Emergencies, Diseases and Disasters, is an NGO whose goal is to design and use open source technology tools to help partners enhance collaboration and improve information flow to better deliver critical services to vulnerable populations.

The partnership between InSTEDD and Manas has been running since 2008, with Manas developing the open-source software that conforms the InSTEDD Platform Tools http://instedd.org/technologies/, to support InSTEDD’s vision of a world where communities everywhere design and use technology to continuously improve their health, safety and development.

InSTEDD’s iLabs support the shared exploration of solutions to health, safety and sustainable development problems through an interdisciplinary dialog. The iLabs act as enabling environments for technology transfer and collaboration between software developers, governments, NGOs, universities, private sector companies, local communities and experts from a variety of disciplines.

The iLab Latin America, InSTEDD’s second iLab, was launched after the InSTEDD/Manas team identified specific needs within the Latin American cultural context to customize existing tools and develop new solutions in partnership with local communities.

In addition to providing collaboration technology consulting services to its partners, the iLab Latin America serves as a research and innovation space where public and private organizations across Latin America have the opportunity to proactively channel their questions and concerns in regards to social and humanitarian matters that would benefit from the implementation of information technology.

You can read more about the iLab Latin America in its web page in Spanish.