Designing for the REAL 95%
As occasionally happens, Ken and I find ourselves on opposite sides of the world at conferences this week. Ken is at Mobile Web in Africa 2010, in Johannesburg, and I’m hereby asking him to tell you all about it here when he gets a minute. \o/ I’m at Design for Persuasion in Ghent, Belgium, with a room full of people who’ve never heard of FrontlineSMS – this... Read More
Your stories are our bread and butter
Friday morning saw me zooming up Portobello Road in west London, cursing the tourists and looking forward to a large flat white with some new acquaintances – I was meeting with a couple of people have just started to use FrontlineSMS for campaigning. This is an increasingly common, and always delightful, part of my job. I generally pepper people with questions, exclaim ‘that’s... Read More
Using SMS in disaster response – and preparedness
A view over Grahamstown from Rhodes U campus A couple of weeks ago I had the great pleasure, and honour, of joining a wonderful panel, including Carel Pedre, Haiti DJ and activist, and Rory Williams of Carbonsmart.com, at the 5th Digital Citizen Indaba in Grahamstown, South Africa. The brief was to talk about digital communication in the context of natural disasters and climate... Read More
Celebrating the ecosystem approach
It was a cold evening last October when I heard from National Geographic that we’d won an Emerging Explorer Award for our work in mobile. Seven months is a long time to keep a secret, but now news is out it will hopefully be the ideal platform to help us spur further development of FrontlineSMS, and increase interest in wider circles around the potential for simple, appropriate... Read More
Ushering in our Project Manager
The FrontlineSMS team is growing. In this Guest Blog post, Laura Hudson – the new FrontlineSMS Project Manager – tells us why she came on board, what she intends to do in her new role, and outlines some of her early thinking. “It’s exciting and a bit nerve-wracking to represent something as revolutionary as FrontlineSMS at the best of times, but two-and-a-half... Read More
Celebrating the art of the possible
Tonight in Santa Clara, California, several thousand people will be standing on the stage with me as I collect a Tech Award for FrontlineSMS. It’s been an incredible four years – the last two in particular – and it’s amazing to think how far we’ve all come. FrontlineSMS stirs genuine enthusiasm and excitement everywhere I go, and people resonate just... Read More
Dilemmas of innovation and invisibility
Northern Zambia, August 1993. We set off from Chilubula – where we were helping build a school – for another village a couple of hours away. They didn’t have a school. They didn’t seem to have much, in fact. As our pick-up approached, children ran out to greet us, throwing themselves onto their knees. Many of them saw us as saviours, visitors from afar who... Read More
The Social Mobile Long Tail explained
What follows is a short extract from the recent “Soul of the New Machine” human rights/technology conference hosted by UC Berkeley, in which I explain my theory of the Social Mobile Long Tail. This video is also available on the FrontlineSMS Community pages A full video of the session – PDA’s and Phones for Data Collection – which includes presentations... Read More
Hope meets phones.
It’s been another landmark day in the short history of FrontlineSMS:Medic. For those of you who don’t know, today saw the launch of their latest initiative – Hope Phones – which, generally speaking, encourages people to dig out their old phones and give them a new lease of life in the hands of a community health care worker (CHW) in a developing country. Hope... Read More
The world according to FrontlineSMS
We’re not far off a year since the launch of the revised version of FrontlineSMS, and great progress has been made on many fronts. One of the challenges we’ve faced is that there’s no manual for what we’re trying to do, so it’s been something of a shot in the dark much of the time. The past, present (and no doubt future) of the software remains heavily... Read More
