Dr. Dobb's Journal - July 2008 - (Page 14)

Strategic Vision by Michael Swaine Find real problems and solve them— isn’t that what engineers do? In Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama describes his visit to a hut in Kenya: “It was a cramped, pitch-black space with a five-foot-high ceiling. The woman told me her family cooked, slept, and kept newborn calves in it. The smoke was blinding, and after a minute I had to leave…” Sometimes the needs of people in developing countries are immediate and immense: a tsunami strikes Indonesia, a drought hits East Africa. But in many villages in the developing world the greatest need is for some mundane piece of technology that we would take for granted in the developed world, like a solar-powered well for an African village with neither electricity nor clean drinking water. Sometimes it’s just a stove that doesn’t pollute the hut. University of Washington Forest Resources Professor (and civil engineer) Susan Bolton took a team of engineering students to Yanayo, Bolivia, to tackle the stove problem: “After a reconnaissance mission to figure out the engineering problem—creating cheap, locally available stoves and chimney-safe roofs—her team returned for four weeks to complete the job and train residents.” Bowen’s project, described by Mike Lewis in a Seattle PostIntelligencer story this spring, was a good example of the work done through a remarkable organization called Engineers Without Borders (EWB). Sustainability is the name of the EWB game: “At any given site…engineers must become clever to build something that can be duplicated and maintained locally.” founded in 1971 by French doctors and earned the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999. Fewer people are acquainted with Engineers Without Borders. EWB is a younger group, unrelated to, but inspired by, MSF. Like MSF, EWB is a secular, nongovernmental international humanitarian aid organization that mobilizes volunteer professionals to solve critical problems in the developing world. Unlike MSF, EWB is an organization for which you probably meet the membership requirements. (That should be a safe bet, given that you are reading Dr. Dobb’s Journal. But if you are one of those orthodontists who subscribed back in the late ‘80s based on the name and tagline and never cancelled and still pick it up in the waiting room when business is slow, all bets are off.) Not only do you probably fit the EWB profile, we’re going to suggest that you might well consider getting involved. Software Marketing Executive Philippe Wagner did. “Great people!” he says, “[A] wonderful organization doing a lot of good to change lives in developing countries around the world. They really care about what they do. Their dedication is only matched by their passion.” The Borderless Worldview Most people, it seems, have heard of Doctors without Borders. Actually, most people outside the U.S. know it as “Médecins sans Frontiéres” or just MSF. , This secular, nongovernmental international humanitarian aid organization provides medical help in over 70 countries, mostly in the developing world, while raising awareness of the plight of the people they help. MSF was 14 Dr. Dobb’s Journal l www.ddj.com l July 2008 http://www.ddj.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Dr. Dobb's Journal - July 2008

Dr. Dobb's Journal - July 2008 Contents Friday Night Fish Fry Alia Vox Developer Diaries Developer’s Notebook Engineers Without Borders Conversations Patricia Tries Event-Based Architectures Graphs Versus Objects Lock-Free Queues Dr. Dobb’s Architecture & Design World Java and the Nokia N10 Internet Tablet Effective Concurrency The Agile Edge Swaine’s Flames

Dr. Dobb's Journal - July 2008

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