Six months after being made public, EpiSurveyor's online site (www.episurveyor.org) just picked up its 1007th user. This means that it's now the most popular web application for public health and international development in the world -- but since it's also the only web application for public health and international development in the world I guess that's a given.

More than 1000 users, almost 14,000 forms filled out on mobile phones!  Individuals and organizations are using EpiSurveyor to track drug stocks in Ghana, to monitor veterinary illness in Canada, to estimate vaccine coverage in Kenya, to improve maternal-child health in Guatemala -- and without any meetings, MOUs, or high-priced consultants required.

International development has never had a technology platform be adopted so quickly, but many people working in the field still think that it makes sense to pay millions of dollars to have custom applications built and "piloted" in individual countries. Unfortunately, those pilots never blossom into worldwide implementations with thousands of users because the cost of reimplementation in another country is too high.  The model of "it costs $1 million for country A, and then $1 million for each additional country" may be appropriate for physical things like bednets or vaccines, but it is completely off the mark for information.

The advent of the Web has -- obviously -- drastically lowered the cost of scaling software to every country in the world, in every field except international development.

My hope for 2010 is that more organizations follow the example of EpiSurveyor (and, obviously, of Hotmail, Google Maps, Yahoo Mail, and Flickr, among all the other web apps) and think about using increasingly widespread web access and mobile phones to really build capacity worldwide.