 Vi topper hele vek med oppgjortning til å celebrate de ganske, vi sier ganske, behind the whole Hisp and the DSS2 movement. Og det er Jørn og Arthur, og de faktisk blir 70 år siden. Hei, Ranga. 70 års ganske i en måned i mellom dem. Og det er veldig typisk, fordi vi rememberer når de kom til vår familie, og de ser litt simpelig. Og de har en lang historie sammen, så vi ville egentlig bruke denne oppgjortning, og vi gikk Kalle til å komme, vi gikk Nora til å komme, og de er en team fra veldig, veldig, veldig, veldig, veldig begynning i 1994. Og denne startet som en post-apartement. Så vi alle er kjent til dette starten av partiet, som er faktisk kjent tilbake og kjent til alle ganske og historie, ting vi ikke har hørt før, og du er oppgjort til å kjenne frågor. Alle frågor er fin, og vi har også en Google Doc med frågor fra denne siden, men de har ikke sett det. Men jeg vet at Arthur er denne med planen, så han starter med det hele, og snakker litt. Ork, du starter. Du starter. Du kan si det. Så Arthur, du skal si det. Du starter. OK. Du kan si det. Det er planen. Velkommen alle. Det er en typisk kjortiske, anarchisk, hysp. Det er det eneste reisende at hysp har succedet for de seneste 25 år, fordi vi har ingen plan. Det er ingen kjortiske agenda. Vi gjør bare det. Følgelig er vi instinkt, og følgelig er det nederne som vi arbeider med. Er det lage? Nei, jeg vil snakke at du ikke har planer. Vi har mange planer, men vi har ingen kjortiske. Det er fleksible. Det er det før. Jeg tror at hvis jeg skulle beskrive hysp, fra min perspektiv, det er en masse anarchiske, arbeidt sammen i en kommende reis. Det er en liten achievement. Og det, den nederne arkitekten av den anarchiske, har satt før du her, ledd by Jørgen med hver eneste trade union habit. Kalle, de reprobaterer. Norra, som holder oss alle sammen. Men dette var originally en norwegisk projekte. Så jeg vil hente over til Jørgen til å spille litt om hvor Norway kommer fra. Du må ikke høre det, Ja, det har startet fordi jeg har fått min skolekjef for Pugin. Og jeg var bekymrende til å spille litt for oppvarende places for å spille min fjell, som jeg ville spille i Afrika eller even Mongolia eller hver enn. Og en fin måte å bruke hva som var der i modern teknologiske fjell. Så det var ideen. Og jeg har hatt mye flere places som Mongolia mennesker, og jeg kan også menneske at vi hadde en fjellproposal i Tanzania til å develope en distrikke-basis informasjon system. Men så forstår jeg at det er en fjellproposal for å spille litt for oppvarende places forstår jeg at det var tilbake med Ola's Modern Law-infekt som resided på MBC og deklarete at Afrika ikke var kun å oppvare modern teknologiske fjellproposal og sånt. Og en annen historie fra denne dagen var at de ikke ville oppvarende modern rådverket fordi de driver veldig veldig veldig veldig veldig veldig veldig. Så det er litt sammen, sammen, sammen. Men så efter Mongolia og mange andre places så har vi gott en god kontakt i Norrvisen forholddepartement Arna og og de were dealing with A&C and the South Africa and that was before of course Mandel had come into power so it was dealt by a special kind of secret office in the Norrvisen foreign department and the foreign minister has told how he went to South Africa with a lot of cash on his body and distributed around and so we hope that he would continue that practice also with us and yes, to some extent I just found a letter Arna wrote to us that yes, we have got your funding for a visit to South Africa and that's why we actually managed to come around and I met Olive Chisana who was then health minister in the kind of shadow in what was then the A&C's health department for the takeover of power so that was some other background and I I just discussed with Kalle and I can mention one other important arbitrary meeting with a representative from the Norrvisen foreign department which resulted in Kalle sitting here 30 years later or whatever and that was at some flight somewhere I met somebody who had been party with Kalle in Uganda the day before and he told me that Kalle had got some scholarship or something or planned yes, scholarship and wanted to do a PhD in Africa and then I contacted Kalle and said why not come to South Africa because we were already there so that was actually the second strange meeting with the Norrvisen foreign department that led to where we are and then we started in we had promised from Arne down there and his office was that we should get a project funding for a district based information system but why things took time and it was 94 and this was in March 1994 and then as many will know then the new government came into power in April and Arne's office are the foreign department which is kind of a I think we call it the bilateral kind of organization to deal with South Africa, they disappeared and it was taken over by Norrad and the foreign department generally so suddenly we had to start from scratch on the funding but we had a promise and they dragged their feet for one year and then they said ok we give you funding if you can prove that this is part of RDP that's the reconstruction and development program and we want it in writing and with signatures from the top otherwise known as rumors, dreams and promises there is a lot of rumors and a lot of promises at that time and even starting a she been was actually RDP so that was how it was but then at one point our friends in Western Cape ANC actually managed to get a letter signed by the top office that yes indeed this is part of RDP and I heard that what is this name again one of our friends there he is even having his family here why don't you sign yes so then he signed so that was how we got funding for what was then hisp with two piece that was pp that was pilot project only later did it became a project or program sorry now I have been talking too much after you have a plan I mean then I just saying one more thing leading up to what is happening and that was that in South Africa in the spring Nordic spring of 94 we were there I was at UCT after was at UWC and then they had committee at Western Cape for the RDP for the health reconstruction program and I was representing University of Cape Town after was representing University of Western Cape and then we had a meeting and we met and I remember one thing from that meeting or from the break after I said let's have a beer beer, I mean this lunch what's wrong with that hahahaha what a many beers we shared oh yeah that's the problem with you sitting in front of the this one maybe remember I'm the technical guy okay alright sorry Arthur it will be as some of you know I'm a South African I left South Africa to cut a long story short in 1976 to avoid going to the army and I went back to South Africa in 1994 to go and rah rah rah the Mandela government and see whether I could contribute something and I went to I got a job as an academic which is not my first love but at the University of Western Cape which was a so called colored university yeah hahahaha and and we were looking for some kind of social relevance for the university somewhere it was brand new public health program and we didn't have any way to teach our students so we thought well let's start in the district in which the university is located and help the newly formed district management team to manage the district they went to them met them and said how can we help we said we don't know what the hell is going on in our district what do you mean you don't know what's going on we discovered we did a bit of research and there were 14 different organizations working in one district there was the colored affairs there was the provincial hospital there was the regional services 14 different all collecting data art of the district so we sat down and said well how can we help you we just said every single report that goes out of the district must also come back in to the district health management team and we organized this and after lots of negotiations we finally organized everything to be photocopied and then we had this wonderful thing called Lotus123 and we I'd been using it I'd learnt about this in Benin and Ghana and we put it all into Lotus123 and we proudly had six months of data for the district based on what was already being collected I was really happy with this then this funny man came in to have his eyes done and he had laser surgery to his eyes he opened his eyes and saw for the first time without glasses looked at my excel spreadsheets and said I won't say what he said but Arthur have you never heard of referential integrity this isn't a health information system this is a bunch of hacked spreadsheets or some words to that effect and I said okay I don't know anything but can you make us a database that's what he said, the way he said it was a solution and that's how DHS1 was started Kalle coming out and looking at this what we thought was wonderful and saying it won't work he started this whole strange concept of free open source software I had never heard of it before the two of them introduced the Norwegian participatory design to the process actually involving and speaking to the people in the district and well the rest is history I think we had to break a lot of rules in order to get his going one of them, a small one was the Norwegians who thought we were supporting local government when we were in fact supporting health and Norwegians didn't support health in those days anyway but there were also within the within the provincial administration there was a lot of objection to this breaking down of the barriers of yeah just an amazing amount of pointless bureaucracy related to apartheid and that was the incredible thing to follow we did a little test we tried to follow what happened to the data that was actually collected these 14 different reporting streams and I think every single one of them landed in a rubbish bin somewhere or in a filing cabinet which is the same thing it just disappeared people spent lots and lots of time working on this and they saw absolutely no results and those early days we had some basic principles on which we worked and I think what is held through the years is this concept of listening to the user and the HISP has always tried to listen to the user and I think that is why we continued to spread through no fault of our own just because what we had was in the land of the blind one eyes king and we gave people a little bit of information that was useful to them because we were listening to what they wanted and I think that is how we have moved on Kallert Så da Nora Nora, hva er det du gitt? Det er det som vi gitt så dette er det første Nå, let meg inn og inn Nora, Nora, fordi det var det i regionen office, det er det som skjedde for regionen office, det var, vi hadde tre piloter, tre piloter men det var i distriks som ikke var yett officielle og når det Diedgeis versen 1 kom rundt, og vi har minimum data setter og sånt faktisk, det pilotdistrikt ikke hadde noe effekt, men vi gikk effekt på Nora, fordi det er noe som kaller regionens kanskjel, hvor alle det var, ja, mer eller mer eller mer ikke fuller hvite var så kallert i Vestland Cape eller hva som kallert og indien, og hva som kallert under regionens kanskjel, fordi det var ikke kallert av natt, vi hadde alle strukturer men en av de strukturer var gøvendt av Nora, så det er fine og de implementerede Diedgeis og, ja, det er der det resten er det er noe, det er velkommen, hva har jeg sagt, min navn er Nora Stoops, og min profession er min Øres og min jobb beskriktion i det nye norske regjene, efter det change, var epidemiologisk og publisk hjelp, og jeg egentlig gikk det jobb, fordi min boss nevnte at jeg kunne jobbe en komputer. wrong reason, men det er det. part of my jobb description was to work with the his WP team that was my jobb description in the government. so I was I then became completely involved in what was this his team doing, and I identified myself with as part of this team because I understood what the vision was. The other thing, I mean not necessarily known, but is that Africa was desperate for change I mean Arthur and Lord speak of bureaucracy, but people wanted something new and this new way of counting and not looking at rest and looking at why you came attracted people because it made sense and that was part of why it could expand because people immediately understood what we were aiming at so I became a gofer I helped organise things, I sorted out things and as his progressed I did the bok Kola started with the teaching and I sort of kept behind him and I did the bok of the teaching and the travelling and the training and things like that, so I became intimately involved in what was going on Kola stand up and be counted these museum pieces so I don't need a microphone as always I don't like microphones No, you know Jørn pointed out one thing a friend of mine from the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs he was nursing his hangover on a flight from London after one of my big parties in Kampala I was doing vegetation mapping of the whole of Uganda in the early 90's and he just mentioned to Jørn that I had planned to go to South Africa to do a Ph.D. on designing information systems for land reform nothing to do with health and then Jørn contacted me and I said yeah, I can help out a little bit he said he needed somebody who is technological strong good to communicate, putting them on the path because they were basically adrift at the time shit creeped out the paddle as we usually call it in English and I ended up instead of spending three months I ended up spending 25 years with this bunch you can a little bit of planning I think for most of you hearing some of the single stories and the tid bits from those days is maybe not so interesting what is more interesting is why actually have we survived because I think all of you know tons of even free and open source software projects that has started up and sort of flared up become seemingly big and then they die again so what are the reasons that the HIST community has actually flourished over these 25 years and I think there are several the first is that the technology we chose and which we developed initially was suitable for at that time South Africa and later neighboring countries and I can tell you when we started the first version of the HIST took about one and a half months to set up and during that time I had a friend of mine my internet service provider actually came and said why don't you use some internet based software web based software instead it was all new and fancy and I said listen only four percent only four percent of the provincial employees even have email a good friend of mine was in charge of a hospital originally a Swedish guy actually applied to the provincial government for a 15 inch monitor so he could do some GIS analysis and some mapping and he was turned down and told that you're trying to build an empire so at those days you know asking for anything better than the old computers the provincial government guys themselves had was just not on so we basically chose then the source very initially it was Microsoft Office that people were already having on their computers that they were used to and I think that was a crucial part of it right it's because I hear even these days I hear people come and say ah the HIST Java old technology it looks like something coming out of the 90s blah blah blah blah and there might be some truth to that but again I would rather have some old Land Rover that actually works on African roads instead of a brand new Tesla that runs out of juice as soon as you're halfway out of the bush right so again it is very much about having technology that fits the environment I think the second aspect is that we have been building a community and people often ask me so you've been charged of DHS development for the first 15 years so this was all your ideas and I said no 90% of the design and the ideas and the issues and the solutions going into DHS has been coming from users coming from the communities so our role was much more to sort of channel that to say well this can't be done relatively this is doable but difficult and this one you know you've got to wait 10 years so it was very much more of a role of sort of managing a large group and then build that community and I know a lot of you I've seen a lot of you before I see a lot of new faces too and again I think that's been typical of this community it's a community where people like they stay right we South Africa too we hardly had turnover right 100 people and you know 70 of them have been with us for years and years and years so again it shows that that community has been working for a large group of people and the third one and it might be a bit more controversial I've never been happy with the amount of support we've had from Norwegian authorities to be honest in fact my opinion is by far the best I call it donors or you know providers of support that's actually been the Americans without support from a large equity project from 1999 to 2002 we would never have, we would have died after the initial his project because Norway just said sorry we're not supporting South Africa and later also CDC particularly and I mean for those who are interested in research I think it's an interesting research topic why have this community actually been very successful in working together with for instance CDC and other major donors right in a way yes it's thoroughly passed sometimes and we fight them for having issues but generally right it has been working and they have overall been relatively happy with us and I think one reason why many American similar organizations have been battling with that is that they have tended to be to shall we say selfish because I know a lot of US organizations that developed also relatively sophisticated software for health but they always ended up holding the source code to themselves because they saw it as a way of getting new projects etc. So again the openness of this community I think has been vital for ensuring that it continues for so long well that was enough sort of broad philosophical perspectives on this I don't know whether this any much more to say except that each rate was saying also about being about being anarchist I wouldn't really say that I would rather say we are kind of 24 7 type of people right and I'm still getting phone calls and Skype messages and telegram messages and Microsoft team messages and all the other platforms that we're trying to track now I'm still getting those messages coming in at midnight 1am and 2am people are sitting somewhere and they need assistance with something and you try to help and again that is part of that community spirit There's something I didn't really mention which I think it's important to realize to right all of us who started were basically long term political activists author was chased out of the country and he got fired from his first job after 3 weeks because he went to the newspapers and told them that his hospital was chasing that kids away he was working at the Red Cross Children's Hospital so he got fired because I couldn't say these kind of things and he ended up going in exile he was an old activist I've been a political activist since I was 11 so all of us came in but it's just important to see that too that's not what drives the community over 25 years but it was critical to understand that the core team here we were not in this for the money we were not in this as some kind of a you you know developing country fling go to Africa and see some elephants and then do something for health we were all developmental activists and that means you're a stubborn bastard and you continue working for 2 years I didn't get paid anything actually in the first 5 years too I was living off my doctor my fellowship I had a doctor fellowship and I'm still busy with that PhD don't ask me details about my progress but the point is that an American sociology professor that I met 15 years ago in New York he sort of listened to a bit of my my story and he said afterwards why have you guys been successful is it because of the products you're producing or is it because of you and he meant the whole group and I basically said it definitely both because you can have a fantastic product if you don't have a team of people and building a community it will just get lost or you can have a great group of people who is just sitting in endless workshops and talking and talking and actually not providing the tools that people can use and again it does so it's a mix of things I know it's the same for most of you I know so many of you right and the work you've done in the countries and it's largely been a similar kind of process you need some champions you need to have some products but you also need to build that community and get that sort of community feeling and that long term commitment one story very quickly about our first interaction with this eastern Cape province I was invited by a maybe you should use this because they're actually I was invited by a district manager to come and have a look at his information system so we spent I think a week going through the we put every single form they had to put it was called the brown paper exercise we put all the forms up on the wall mother and child health here the whole room was filled with the forms and we looked at the forms and said there's duplication do we actually need the things so we came down we had a data set of I think 60 or 80 data elements and we made a data collection form that would collect everything that the district wanted for their use fine we've got this what are we going to do now and I came up with the idea we're going to do nothing we're not going to tell anybody until we get feedback from the provincial office we're not going to send any data we waited six months before the provincial office finally realized that we were not sending data and eventually the lady from family planning Ronelle who still works for his she was the provincial information officer she said hey, where's my data I said oh that's nice that you've actually worked on that that we haven't sent you what would you like to know we can give you analysis of your family planning by type by age by long acting short acting family planning all the information here but you didn't send it to us because we never get feedback she climbed into her little car and came driving down to Berkeley East and saw that all the nurses the entire district health management team knew about everything because they had done their own analysis of their own data in their own place they hadn't bothered with this bloody problems they knew what was going on and that was what was important next week we had a cavalcade of the provincial information officer and the whole team and all the programs and and that was what John Roddy heard about this he also came and that was when he asked us after that he asked that was why he was invited to our closing down ceremony and that was how he started funding a new problems just before all these things I didn't know the two people involved stole Jenny and Ronell stole work for his today also this was 1990s sorry I think this was 1997 we were making waves already before we had gone to the province I just wanted to say something about the technology we were using now we have a web based approach one simple server and you change something and everybody get it at that time Kalle was sitting in his his house in was it rose bank it was at that time in Cape Town and I remember when we were actually out in the first implementation province wide in eastern Cape we had to implement they came five regions in eastern Cape they came with their computer and we installed and we trained and then Kalle said then we reported bugs and Kalle said okay okay I changed you have added the table and then you have to change the table change in all the installations during the training and all that so that was how it was at that time and I remember also we were in Umpata and had the training and we couldn't install because we were in the 10th or 6th or whatever floor and it was an old building and then we put I mean the CD writer on the CD reader on the floor kind of the bed on there and then it worked so yeah that was how it was at that time Laura you had something this is very personal working with his learning by information systems working with people like Arthur, Jaune and Kalle is the best thing that has ever happened to me in my life I did my a master's in public health Arthur was my interviewed me for the wanting to do the course and from there I almost want to say the rest is history it's the best ride ever and I just can't say how much this work means to me thank you