In 2011, the directors of EyeSeeTea came up with the idea of creating a company that intersected our interests of the open source technology and global development. The directors of EyeSeeTea, Ignacio and Adrian, met in the Master Thesis in Telecommunication Networks for developing countries at the University Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid. They specialized in implementing IT in isolated rural areas. By that time, they already were techies and passionate about open software and open hardware. They had previously created some telemedicine devices and we wanted to develop systems to connect them. In this domain, they learned the benefits of re-using someone’s else technologies. From there, they decided to develop their own in the same way.

Time passed, Ignacio and Adrian went their own way, but their interests in the intersection of open source code and global health never went away. When we saw the first opportunity to build the company, they did not let it pass them by.   EyeSeeTea’s first two projects in the domain of web development for DHIS2 (data visualization using D3 library) and Android development (implementing the first Android application fully compatible with DHIS2) were born in 2015. What started as a side project became our main dedication. Thanks to a presentation in Washington, D.C. on the processing of DHIS2 data, our number of assignments rapidly grew. Soon, we decided we needed some extra hands to help out. Then, we created the first two teams (Mobile and Web) of EyeSeeTea.

Despite our branching out, we have never forgotten where we came from: hardware devices and telecommunication engineering. From there, we created the third team of EyeSeeTea to handle a bunch of projects, such as Quality of Service for WiFi-4G networks in Open Source Linux routers, Open Source & Open Hardware routers for community networks, etc. Similarly, our previous experience with computational neuroscience and biotechnology introduced some projects in the web development team. In this way, time, radical openness, and dedication, brought about the current configuration of our team and our company.

After some years of work, we can summarize our main principles as:

• Recycle:We strongly believe that open source is the way and sharing knowledge is the only path to create something useful and valuable for the humankind.
• Diligence:In a world dominated by deadlines, sometimes people don’t pay enough attention to making things correctly. IN this way, a profit perspective does not necessarily lead to a better result. We believe the quality of the software architecture is the most important factor in our work.
• Commitment:We are conscious of being part of a larger thing. Each time an initiative uses our software they need to be sure that we will deliver on time. The key to do that is the huge effort we dedicate to the planning stages of a project. We believe we should deliver our work exactly in the way we would like to receive it from a provider.

Following this philosophy, we have become a recognized contributor to the Web & Android DHIS2 development world, collaborating with the main actors (UiO, PSI, NRC, MSF, WHO, PATH…) and contributing to the open source and DHIS2 communities with our products.