Andrés Monroy-Hernandez is a researcher doing his PhD at the MIT Media Lab. His focus is on social computing. He analyses and designs social software that supports collaboration. Andrés holds a MS in Media Technology from MIT and a BS in Electronic Systems Engineering from Tec de Monterrey in México.

Andrés is the co-founder of two social software applications: the Scratch online community and Sana. Scratch helps kids and novices learn programming while creating interactive media. On the other hand, Sana makes professional medical help available to developing countries where medical services are stretched thin.

e27 managed to grab a quick phone interview with him to hear more about his social entrepreneurship endeavors.

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Sana, The Next Billion, and cancer screening in Zambia
Sana started as a very simple project for a class. We were taking a class at MIT and at MIT there’s this initiative called The Next Billion Network. This initiative organized a class called The Next Lab and the idea of the class was to develop technologies for the developing world and the organizer of the class puts students in touch with organizations around the world that needed some kind of technology.

My colleague Leo Celi and I were partnered with an organization in Zambia who was in charge of doing cancer screening in the country. The organization is composed mainly of nurses who go around the country to do cancer screening for women. They were taking pictures of suspected cancerous tissues, using a digital camera, and bring the pictures on a USB drive to the capital for diagnosis.

What we did was to partner with this organization to develop a simple solution so that they don’t have to come to the capital to bring their photos but they could use the mobile phones to take the pictures, collect the medical information, and send all that through their mobile phones to a central server in the capital.

We developed this prototype for them and went to Zambia for a few days to do a pilot program there with the nurses. This was how it started, just Leo and myself working on this project.

Later on, what happened was that organizations outside of Zambia thought that this was a very interesting idea and they asked to connect Sana to this popular medical records system called OpenMRS so that when you get information on your phone, you can upload it to this existing piece of server software that people use to store medical information. Hence, we connected Sana to OpenMRS and did a lot of improvements attracting a lot of interest from people and organizations.

Leo is from the Philippines and he has a lot of contacts there so he started a partnership with one of the hospitals there, in this case it was not for cancer but for respiratory diseases.

Sana’s funding model
Right now the application of Sana is mostly in pilots in about three or four countries. Each pilot might involved a couple hundreds of people. There has not been a full deployment so far, as a lot of things in the medical world moves very slowly, but there has been a lot of interest from the pilots and there’s hopes that in the next few months or sooner there will be a  more established effort to deploy Sana in a bigger environment.

Basically we work alongside non-profits or hospitals in different countries. So the countries’ government might give funding to the non-profits and the non-profits are the ones who start using Sana as part of their pilots. So Sana is indirectly funded by the governments. There are also some grants from the Vodafone and other institutions that will allow more people to work on Sana.

What’s on the frontier of social computing
“The main area of research that I am doing is a field called social computing. Basically the field seeks to analyse and develop systems like Sana and Scratch to allow large number of people to collaborate and cooperate online. I am interested in looking at systems, like those that I have helped create, and others, like Facebook and Twitter, to develop a set of  guidelines for the design of social software that can help practicioners, entrepreneurs and organizations to leverage the power of human cooperation using technology

For example, one of the phenomena that I have been studying recently is social innovation through remixing. This is the creating something new based on something that already exists. This is how most inventions we have today have come to be and something that the social web has facilitated enormously. because remixing is something that happens in a lot of these spaces. The concept is that you might see some object like a video image and you want to download that and make changes to it, creating what I call a “remix” which is a derivative work of different projects.

For example, some people may see a song they like, and they see a video that they find interesting. What they often do is they download the song and the video and they combine them to create a new object. This is something that is happening online in a lot of different spaces. So, I’m interested in looking at how people and these systems allow and support this type of social creation.”

Kids’ programming app Scratch
I’m part of the group called the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. For the past 25-30 years, people from this group have been working on the creation of tools that empower people to be creative and to develop their own products rather than consuming other people’s content.

About six years ago, we started this project of developing a new programming environment for kids and novices, basically people who don’t know how to program or who have never programmed before, based on the idea of Logo, which was a programming environment for kids in the 70′s, to create a new environment that allows people to create interactive media.

Scratch lets people create their own animations, interactive art and video games. One of the things we noticed was that a lot of the kids were really interested in software like (Adobe) Photoshop for example. However, Photoshop does not allow you to do much programming so what we thought of was to combine the attractiveness of Photoshop, in terms of being able to edit and manipulate images, with programming. Hence, the idea of Scratch came to be. One of the things we thought it was important to have was the ability to introduce music and images, combining all of this to create interactive media.

One of the ideas of Scratch was to help people learn programming, but it is broader than that. Another idea was also to help people be creative and express it. Another thing that we saw was that a lot of the tools for novices around, in terms of learning and education, are often focused on the idea of pushing information, telling people what to do. We wanted to do something different by letting people decide what they want to do by giving them the tools that allows them to create things that they care about. So, rather than creating instructions and materials on how to program, we wanted to allow people to just get the tools and decide on what they want to make.

Who uses Scratch?
We released Scratch in May 2007 but we were beta testing Scratch for a few years before we went public. There were a couple of hundred users during the beta testing stages. By the time we released the site, we started to receive more attention and now there are more than half a million users on the website and even more people who have used Scratch on other spaces.

There are two types of people who use Scratch, people who use Scratch on the website and people who use Scratch outside of the website. This is people who download Scratch on their computers in schools or at home and may never register an account as well as people who uses Scratch on the XO laptop. The XO laptop is part of the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) initiative which provides cheap computers to kids in developing countries and a lot of these machines comes with Scratch pre-installed.

There are millions of these machines around the world that has Scratch so you can think of these people also as Scratch users. So I’ll say that maybe there are more than 2 million people using Scratch around the world. One of the difficulties is that it is really hard to measure people who are using Scratch that are not on the website. So we see a lot of activity on the website, which is really great, but there are also a lot of activity outside of the website.

Scratch 2.0
With Scratch 2.0, we are taking Scratch to the cloud. We are working on even better integration with the web. We want Scratch to be the programming language to mashup online media and to make it easier to collaborate with others. The next version of Scratch would allow people to create projects on the website and also allow people to remix media that is online. For example, using a program on Scratch you can use a variable storing scores of a game. The idea is that maybe in the future you would be able to store this variables on the cloud so that people who come and play the game multiple times they can store their scores online.

Also the idea of pulling data from the cloud. So for example, you can have a game that gets data from Facebook or Twitter so that your game or your animation is not only using media or data you produce but also media and data that leaves on the cloud on other sites. So when you are playing a Scratch project in the future, you will be able to use images from Flickr or videos from Youtube. So the idea is really making Scratch a very powerful environment for mashing up media that lives online, on the cloud. That is one aspect of Scratch that we are really interested in exploring and this is something that is actively being developed in what we call Scratch 2.0.

Scratch’s funding model
Currently there are no plans to make it into a commercial endeavor and I believe that part of the philosophy of Scratch and part of the appeal of Scratch is that it is free. There are of course some interest in partnering with companies that might be interested in supporting Scratch. So far we have a lot of success in that model with Intel, LEGO, Microsoft, Nokia and Google having given funds to continue Scratch. We believe that this model works pretty well for the kind of project that Scratch is and in the future I believe that that could be one of the most likely paths that Scratch would work.