A Blustery Day

It is a blustery day in gotham. You can never say that you dont have jet - because perhaps one night you seem not to have jet lag, but the next night you do. I, by force of will, can overcome jet lag. Last night I woke at 4:30, looking for my wedding ring and not quite sure where I was. At the moment, Lian is playing 18 musicians and I am resisting the urge to fall off the coffee wagon - sipping some english breakfast from mcnulty.

This morning I logged into the Malawi server and lo and behold the server cannot be located. I am trying to track down the IT guy at the Lilongwe office so he can check on the server. I think we need to change the ip/dns server mappings again so I can log in. The security system over there is sort of labrynthine.

We went live with the system about 1 week after I finished writing it. This is sort of insane, yes. But hey, its malnurished kids, we cant wait. What I am learning about deploying tech projects in Africa, is that you need to map out a detailed deployment plan. People are not used to releasing software products, and so there is no concept of testing/debugging/soft launch. It is great that at UNICEF you can deploy a project a week after you finish. Generally this is impossible because of all the red tape at most organizatons. I believe in rapid deployment and iterative design/testing. I attempted to orchestrate a soft launch with the Ministry of Health - and this week is the soft launch, in 2 weeks is the hard launch. Launching is hard. Like Math and Titanium.

I am now focusing on my tea and finishing the Fate of Africa, an excellent book. However, I wish the Fate of Africa was more analytical and less descriptive, or to use Kant's terms, more synthetic and less analytic.

First post in NYC

So after 24 hours in transit I am home in lovely NYC. I am holding up rather well. My husband however wants to nap - I dont think he has been sleeping well this past month.

Before I left Lilongwe, we finally had a meeting with the Ministry of Health. They finally got funds to go into the field and engage with training. Let me say that this rapidsms system we are deploying is essentially a new system built in 3 weeks and the MoH wants to roll it out without any testing! In the future, I think it is important to build testing time and deployment time into these RapidSMS projects and to help stakeholders understand that this is not a trivial task to build and deploy one of these systems.

I sat down with the MoH and we revised the deployment plan. Rather than start monday and roll out to all 15 sites, they are going to roll out to 5 sites monday. I will monitor from NY - and bug fix the following week. If I am happy with the program - the MoH will roll out to the other 10 sites the following week. If necessary the MoH will also redeploy to the initial 5 sites.

I think this will be fine - all that matters is that the sms messages generate appropriate responses. I am not even concerned with if everything flows properly through the db - although it should. Worst comes to worst, I am logging all messages with the logger app - so we can go a post process the messages later. The most important thing is that the sms service works as expected for the heath workers and the trainers.

I think the travel is starting to catch up with me - my head is swimming -