Ripples of clouds in Nairobi sky, sent in by Taz during MMS testing

With this release, FrontlineSMS allows you to receive multimedia messages via a standard email account. More complex than SMS messages, MMS can include text, images, video and audio. This is a massive step forward for FrontlineSMS, and opens the door for the first time to receiving photo, audio and video reports, medical diagnostics via MMS…and more user innovations. We hope you will share your ideas, and if you plan to use MMS with FrontlineSMS please let us know!

For the moment, FrontlineSMS can only receive MMS via email, which requires the computer running the platform to have access to the internet. However, most mobile carriers worldwide support sending MMS from a mobile phone to an email address. Read more on our updated help pages.

Another keenly awaited new feature is the Reminders plugin from Dale Zak, which allows you to schedule email and SMS reminders for a specific date range and interval such as hourly, daily, weekly, monthly or by specific day(s) of the week.

The Reminders plugin - click to enlarge

Examples of practical applications include prompting patients to take anti-retroviral medication, reminding parolees to meet with probation officers, and helping special needs populations to live independently. Already, Babakan Sari Community Health Center in Indonesia has expressed enthusiasm for using the new feature for outreach to Tuberculosis patients.

Many of you are familiar with Dale – he is an active social mobile developer who also works as Mobile Project Manager for Ushahidi. The reminders plugin source code has been available on GitHub for some time for those of you with the developer skills to incorporate it into FrontlineSMS. Now we are delighted to bundle it with this official release. It’s still in Beta, which means we want our users to actively test it. Please let us know if you encounter bugs and (as ever) we welcome your feedback and comments on how we can make improvements. We think the Reminders plugin illustrates the heart of the FrontlineSMS approach – by the community, for the community.

We are also happy announce significant interface improvements to the import tool by Morgan Belkadi, to enable you to preview the contacts data you’re importing and to preserve your group hierarchies – check out this screenshot of our beautiful new preview tool:

The HTTP trigger is getting a tweak too – it is now possible to set it to start automatically when you launch FrontlineSMS. And last but not least, we’re very grateful to be including a new Ukrainian translation from Katerina Ivchenko and Aleksei Ivanov.

Click here to go to the download page.

This release has truly been a team effort – from the users who sent in MMS during testing, to our developers and testers all over the world, to the core team and the donors who make this all possible. Heartfelt thanks to you all. \o/

Called FrontlineSMS all the system needs to operate as an effective communicator is a computer, a mobile phone and the text message-based software. The boon of this system is that it works where the Internet cannot reach and is a major benefit to marginalised NGOs and other rural organisations. “At St Gabriel the software is used to coordinate community healthcare workers running over a huge area to check if people are going to be available, when they are due to take their medication, and to mobilise communities when the mobile clinic is on its way,” says Ken Banks of Kiwanja who invented FrontlineSMS.

Hailing from the UK’s Channel Islands, Banks was firmly entrenched in a financial and technology career, which by his own admission was rather boring, when in 1993 he joined a developmental mission to build a school in Zambia. The experience was life changing and a couple of years later he was back in Africa, this time in Uganda to build a hospital. By the time he returned to the UK, he had decided to study social anthropology and to find a way to use his tech skills to benefit the developmental sector.

Read more on the Daily Maverick Website.

A group of companies, including Ushahidi, FrontlineSMS, CrowdFlower and Samasource, collaborated to set up a text message hotline – “Mission 4636” – supported by the U.S. Department of State. The Haitian government collaborated with radio stations to advertise the hotline, and a few days after the disaster, anyone in Port-au-Prince could send an SMS to a toll-free number, 4636, to request help. The messages were routed to relief crews at the U.S. Coast Guard and the International Red Cross on the ground.

Read more on the TechCrunch Website.

The White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood is a coalition of individuals and organisations that campaign to make pregnancy and childbirth safe for all women and newborns. With members in 148 countries, I had thought for a while that FrontlineSMS could be a very useful tool for many of our members, so was keen to “road-test” the software when the opportunity presented itself.

People queue outside the Tattoo Parlour tent

Glastonbury Festival seemed like a great opportunity to do so. For the second year running, we were running a campaign to raise awareness of Maternal Health – by offering people the ultimate way to show how much they love their mum – by coming to our “tattoo parlour” and having a classic “mum” heart tattoo.

In the first year, we were taken aback by the amazing response and the vast number of people that got a tattoo and signed up to be part of our movement. However, this left us with thousands of people’s handwritten contact details to type up onto the computer for our mailing lists, which made it really difficult for us to get back to them quickly and simply.

So, this year, I downloaded FrontlineSMS, bought an old electric pink Sony Ericsson phone and USB cable from the Queensway Computer Market (for any London dwellers, this is a veritable Aladdin’s cave of old phones, computers and parts), and a SIM card, so that people could text us their email addresses instead.

Tattooed Mums outside the tent

I had a couple of hiccups setting up FrontlineSMS with the phone – firstly, drivers weren’t available for, or didn’t work with, Windows 7 – which meant that computer that I’d been putting off upgrading from Windows XP was suddenly my least favourite machine in the office no more – and then the first set of drivers that I downloaded for the phone didn’t allow FrontlineSMS to see the handset.

However, a quick search for the phone’s model number on FrontlineSMS’s forums turned up a link for alternative drivers, which linked the phone up and meant it could send and receive texts perfectly.

Not wanting to risk taking a laptop to the muddy fields of Somerset, I anxiously left the computer in the office running FrontlineSMS with my fingers crossed that it wouldn’t crash and that no-one turned it off whilst I was at the festival.

Happy customers

Happily though, when I returned, everything was still running – and a couple of minutes later, I had exported all the email addresses into a nice .csv file ready to be imported into our mailing list server! Unfortunately, we still had thousands of handwritten signups to transcribe. Whilst I don’t think we’ll ever eliminate this, FrontlineSMS seems like a really effective way to reduce the use of paper, offer easier ways for people to ask for more information about our campaigns, and for us to get back in contact with them.

Perhaps more importantly, it proved itself a reliable tool that I think has the potential to be really useful to our members around the world – and we look forward to introducing them to it and hearing their thoughts and ideas of how they might use it for their own work in support of Maternal Health.

Our new Member Map, from the Ning Community site

FrontlineSMS are a diverse bunch, based all over the world, as our new Member Map is beginning to show. You’re working on projects in all sorts of fields, from safe motherhood, to community cohesion, to citizen journalism, to minority rights activism, and all points between and beyond. And YOU are the FrontlineSMS implementation experts. We know the theory, and of course we know the software, but there’s no substitute for experience when it comes to finding ways around the real world pitfalls and problems that users encounter. So if anything, I’m less an expert myself, and more of a matchmaker, linking people using FrontlineSMS in similar ways; or a librarian, remembering stories of past solutions and pointing them out to people encountering a similar problem.

So where do we find these examples? Well, face to face meetings are probably the richest way for us to find out what you’re up to. We’ll go anywhere! Send us an email and we’ll hop on a plane, train or death-defying local form of motorbike transport and come see you. Failing that,  we often give examples from our guest posts, or from email correspondence with unfailingly generous people all over the world who have millions of things to do, and yet still find the time to sit down and tell us what they’re up to.

We’re also working with a couple of our users to write up glossy, jointly-branded case studies, which get into a bit more technical detail than a guest post can, try to show the impact FrontlineSMS has had, and even list local suppliers. The idea is that FrontlineSMS users should be able to use these documents themselves to explain the SMS portion of their project to their own donors and stakeholders. They’ll also be an invaluable resource for others looking to implement a similar programme. Watch this space for the first case study in the next few weeks.

At a more basic level, we need more data about who’s using FrontlineSMS – we need to know who you are, where you are, and what you’re doing. People like numbers – what, where, how many. For this reason, we added a small tool to a recent version of FrontlineSMS that offers to send back anonymised statistics to us (more on that in a future blogpost, as they’ve only just started to come in).We’ll also be running a user survey in September to try and get a better picture of how FrontlineSMS is being used. Finally, in 2011 we’ll be working on allowing you to register your copy of FrontlineSMS.

Translation Manager (version 1.14 and above)

All this information gathering has three purposes:

1. We find that it’s only when we get to know you that we start to hear what we should be improving, what not’s working, what else we should add. All the new features we’ve added (Translation Manager, Forms, and the HTTP trigger) have been in response to your feedback. And it’s only when you tell us that we know something’s not working – users reported a problem with the software on Monday morning, and we had it fixed and a new version uploaded within a few hours.
2. As I said above, you’re the experts. Hearing from you means we can share more with other users, and help give people ideas for how to use FrontlineSMS in their own work.
3. We can explain to our donors and supporters what FrontlineSMS is achieving in the world, which enables them to keep supporting us, and in turn, lets us keep doing all the things we do to keep FrontlineSMS evolving and keep the community flourishing.

Your stories keep us improving; keep us innovating; and keep the lights on in the office. Better still, they help inspire other users. Do you have a story to tell?

Helping communities report on whether the aid reached them is a good contribution to fixing the broken feedback loop in international development and to reducing waste and corruption. But asking these communities if the aid was working – and how they define “success” – would be even better.

Image by Mark Kelley

I can easily imagine using FrontlineSMS to administer a complaints and response mechanism using SMS; the agency could publicise a number, and complaints could come in from community members by text, even from a village phone provided as a livelihoods element of the programme. The agency could auto-reply to the message with thanks; and where appropriate, respond or request more information by text as well. The list of numbers they collect would enable them to send out text updates on their progress, and perhaps announce meetings and focus group discussions.

Enter PatientView – and complex data management using SMS

But an exciting development from our colleagues over at FrontlineSMS:Medic might allow agencies to take SMS even further in their programmes. PatientView, which is now out in beta, represents a huge step forward for complex data management using SMS. The plugin, which runs on a souped-up version of the core FrontlineSMS platform, can turn a computer and a set of Java-enabled phones into a patient records management system – one which doesn’t need an internet connection.

So what could this mean for humanitarian and development programmes? Well, below I’ll set out some ideas for using a PatientView-like implementation of FrontlineSMS for a cash transfer programme – a key tool in the humanitarian toolbox. A good set of guidelines for this type of intervention is available from the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies – below I’ll imagine how you might use SMS as the medium through which the large amounts of data involved in a cash programme might be passed back and forth.

Registration, markets and monitoring

Imagine you’re setting up a cash transfer programme. Instead of paperwork, which as any veteran of such a project will tell you is an unavoidable part of the process, you would create a new record for each new recipient of cash. Their record would capture all the usual information about them – basic data such as name, number of dependants, gender, and date of birth; up to more detailed information about any special needs, their official identity information, even a photo. (Coming soon: MMS!) Attached to their record could be a separate category (based on the staff records in PatientView) for the programme information, or alternatively, for the staff member administering the cash transfers in that village – perhaps both. Whatever works for your programme structure.

Immediately post-emergency, when blanket distributions are taking place, you might start with relatively little information about the people you’re supporting – perhaps just data about the cash given to them. As the programme progresses, you might build up additional information them as more detailed assessment and targeting teams swing into action. When you need to manipulate the data, you can sort beneficiaries by any of their characteristics.

Even more exciting, as the project timeline rolls on and you need to maintain up-to-date market monitoring, you could imagine enabling community members to update a live database, much as the FAO did in Banda Aceh. They could also query the database themselves, to find out where to sell or buy goods at the best prices.

Don’t panic, it’s easier than it sounds to set up

Mobile phone training for community health workers in Malawi, FrontlineSMS Medic (Josh Nesbit)

If this all sounds a bit technical, don’t worry – users have been setting up and running with FrontlineSMS in the field for many years, and we have a team of developers and experienced users standing by to provide support. In the field, FrontlineSMS:Medic, piloting in Malawi, found that community health workers needed six days’ training over six weeks to be trained to text data in to the hospital – from a starting position in which many weren’t familiar with using mobile phones at all.  Data can be exported from FrontlineSMS as a .csv file, which can be imported into Excel and many other programmes and databases. And in terms of kit, all you need are a computer, a GSM modem, and Java-enabled handsets for your field staff.

FrontlineSMS:Medic have demonstrated immense cost and time savings in their programming, and there’s the added benefit that data entry only has to be done once – no transcribing from paper to digital. The system is forgiving of typos, offering natural language suggestions for staff at base to map incoming SMS to records where no direct correlation is found. And ultimately, you can imagine a future in which FrontlineSMS:Credit, which plans to make all the major banking functions available through SMS, could enable you to carry out the actual cash transfers by text as well.

We’d love to hear whether you think these ideas are worth pursuing – join the conversation below, on Twitter, or on our Facebook page.

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 change. I’ve spent the last three years working on humanitarian policy, so it was a real treat to bring past and current preoccupations together and let them go for a little walk, arm in arm. As ever though, time ran short, so I thought I’d repost the gist of the presentation here.

Thinking through what  to say, I went back to the basics of understanding what happens in a disaster, and what local, national and international organisations, communities and individuals can do to mitigate their effects and help people recover when they happen. I came across this excellent visualisation of the phases of disaster management and response by the University of Wisconsin’s Disaster Management Center, via Özge Yalçiner’s thesis.

What’s striking about this graphic is how little of it is taken up by what we might think of as classic disaster management – maybe a third of it – if you imagine it as a clock face, from about 8 ‘o’ clock to midnight. Even then, the bit that generates most of the donations and media coverage lasts even less – by the time we get up to ten or eleven ‘o’ clock, when the slow, laborious process of recovery begins, the world’s attention has usually moved on, barring major anniversaries and scandals. I think we’re seeing this with Haiti right now. But fully half of the wheel is taken up with understanding and preparing for disasters before they happen. Another big slice represents the critical prediction and early warning analysis in which governments and local knowledge play an essential part.

Sign on the wall of our mobile media workshop - we chose to ignore it

Much of this work, all the way around the wheel, requires community participation – and quite right too. Requirements analysis and needs assessment need local knowledge and community input; reconstruction must be community-led and owned to be successful. Then follow the wheel round to between midnight and 1 ‘o’ clock – there’s a segment devoted to gathering disaster histories and experiences, both to learn and to help plan and prepare for future emergencies. Again, this is a key point of community action. Between 2 and 3 ‘o’ clock, vulnerability analyses bring in community maps, workshops, focus group discussions, and other techniques to make sure that interventions and community support mechanisms reach the right people and places at the right moments. And last-mile disaster preparedness and early warning systems and mechanisms just won’t work unless they are truly owned by the communities who have to enact them.

This will come as a surprise to none of you, given the focus of this blog, but: I think there’s a significant opportunity here to use SMS to help communities to engage with these processes and get their views heard. Complaints and response systems, data-gathering, early warning and evacuation alerts all have and should be delivered using SMS, given its ubiquity in areas that are otherwise hard to reach. Two-way communication using an SMS hub running FrontlineSMS would enable you to send alerts, information about distributions, advice and even messages of support and solidarity; and more importantly, receive information about what’s happening on the ground, invaluable local knowledge, and feedback on the success of programmes, and allow people to express what they are feeling. The Haiti experience has shown that this is possible in an emergency setting, and the important work of evaluating the success of those programmes is ongoing – the next step being to build on this learning to improve our understanding of best practice for SMS in emergencies. And as I write, agencies now experienced in using SMS in the fraught days after a disaster are thinking about how to maintain those links, and forge new ones, as they move into the ‘recovery phase’. But many organisations are beginning to use SMS in the longer-term, more gradual process of helping people to mitigate and prepare for the risks they’re exposed to – we know many are using FrontlineSMS.

DCI participants do the o/

We didn’t get time to talk much about this on the day, but maybe we can carry on the conversation now. What do you think?

I really enjoyed the event and the thought-provoking discussions about digital activism. I’m very grateful to the DCI team for asking us to be part of the day, and to the lovely participants, who very obligingly joined in with a bit of what I like to call FrontlineSMS Pilates.

The recent Technology Salons have been on local and sectoral implementations of mobile technology in development.

Mobile is hardly “new” anymore, but we’re seeing increasing tools for peer-to-peer communications and decentralized development. Instead of SMS reporting for mHealth metrics or election observation (both amazingly powerful), we have Ushahidi and a team of volunteers from colleges and Haitian diaspora communities across the world saving lives in Haiti after the earthquake by synthesizing and translating reports from on the ground into actionable, trustable pieces of information.

Instead of training-and-visit agricultural extension work, we have tools like Patatat which are building group email lists through SMS messaging, enabling farmers (or anyone) to collaborate on their work, market prices, crop diseases, and so on – with increasingly little need for anything at the center. And of course there’s twitter, which, while still “centralized” as a website, enables un-mediated communication amongst basically anyone in the world with a cell phone and a good text-messaging plan.

My favorite technology in this realm of empowerment remains FrontlineSMS. Last year, I cajoled my OLPC XO-1into running FrontlineSMS – combining the XO’s hardy but lightweight construction, full-sun-readable screen, and grid-free capabilities with FrontlineSMS’s ability to run an SMS messaging center without Internet access. These two combine into a completely mobile SMS command center that can be recharged using car batteries or solar panels, moved quickly, and ditched almost instantaneously (presuming you run a “guest” OS from the OLPC’s SD card slot). This applies now to a new wave of netbook computers with even better batteries (though many are not built quite as well as the XO for … let’s say “non-standard” usage).

It took a few decades, but we now have technology which is powerful enough and popular enough to support a global revolution in how “development” happens. It no longer means a visit from a white USAID SUV, or even a health worker motocycling out to check the medicine stocks of a remote clinic. A well-targeted SMS message can reach any part of the world, or just over the horizon to a colleague you want to ask a question of without spending a day and wasting gasoline in transit. More importantly, the “headquarters” of an organization is no longer tied to a central office, or necessarily needs to pay for reliable Internet to communicate with its members/beneficiaries/activists. This enables a renaissance of new local solutions to local problems, and that is exciting impact that has only just begun.

This post originally appeared on Jon’s website. We’re very grateful to him for allowing us to repost it here.

“Jaalaka” means “network” in Sanskrit. In Hubli-Dharwad, FrontlineSMS technology is being used to connect members of the HIV/AIDS population in a widespread rural network to improve service delivery and social support.

Hubli-Dharwad, a peri-urban district in Karnataka, India, has experienced a significant HIV/AIDS endemic. Most of the infections occur amongst the rural female sex-worker population. There is a significant lack of knowledge about STI prevention and treatment amongst these sex workers, which has contributed to the growth in the rate of infections. The Karnataka Health Promotion Trust (KHPT), a government organization that funds and administers public health programs in Hubli-Dharwad, spearheads several programs to combat the spread of HIV/AIDS and other STIs. In order to target the high risk population of female sex workers, KHPT formed a partnership with the Bhoruka Charitable Trust (BCT), a local NGO aimed at promoting health and livelihoods among female sex workers. Since the Hubli-Dharwad region includes over 372 rural villages, BCT employs both professional Outreach Workers as well as volunteer Peer Educators (whom are also female sex workers) to travel to distant villages to educate female sex workers about the risk of HIV/AIDS and to promote safer sex practices.

In summer of 2009, a group of University of Southern California (USC) students, along with financial and logistical support from the Deshpande Foundation, helped launch a pilot program with FrontlineSMS software to improve BCT’s data collection and service delivery. Currently, BCT employs two uses of the Frontline Forms program. Peer Educators make contact with rural female sex workers in the field and complete a Referral Slips via Frontline Forms and the information is immediately sent to the BCT headquarters. The Outreach Workers in the field also completes Daily Reports through Frontline Forms and sends it to the headquarters. By using FrontlineSMS technology as opposed to paper forms, BCT is able to expedite the exchange of information with its staff members in various remote rural areas throughout the district.

As of today, BCT has implemented the program with 37 Peer Educators and 10 Outreach Workers. Both BCT and KHPT have been extremely pleased with the results and are eager to expand the program. Currently, a new team of USC students will be working during the summer of 2010 to troubleshoot technical issues and develop new uses of FrontlineSMS for BCT and other HIV/AIDS advocacy organizations in Hubli-Dharwad.

For more information, check out the USC team’s page about the project.

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the latest release of FrontlineSMS: v1.6.14.

(For a guide to installing the new version of FrontlineSMS if you’re already using an older version, click here)

As you might have noticed, new builds have been fairly frequent since we released FrontlineSMS v1.6! Now that we’ve changed the architecture of our code, and we have two full-time developers, we’re trying to make things move faster.

A new releasing process

Our new work process is simple: we build a release candidate. Then, this version is tested by our wonderful testers (including Aleksei Ivanov in Russia, and Aptivate in Cambridge), and once we’re happy with it, we release it to the public.

Then, we spend our time implementing new features, and fixing any issues you share with us on the community page. When a new iteration is finished, we build a release candidate, and then start all over again.

Now you are familiar with our process, let’s talk a bit about FrontlineSMS 1.6.14 and its new features.

FrontlineSMS v1.6.14

First of all, we’ve fixed some important issues. You can now label fields in the Forms plugin, and send SMS using IntelliSMS once more. We also added a fix to several smaller issues.

But the main change in FrontlineSMS 1.6.14 is the new Translation Manager. This new plugin now allows you to help us translate FrontlineSMS into different languages.

As you know, FrontlineSMS is available in an increasing number of languages, and each has been put together by teams of volunteers. Up until now, incorporating a new language has been difficult, and has relied on support from the core FrontlineSMS team. Translation Manager changes all that, and allows you to create your own translations without needing to work through us. You can edit existing translations in case you find errors, or want anything changed. You can also create brand new translations, and then send us the files so we can include them in future public releases.

Please note, however, that this plugin is still in Beta, and it would be amazing if you could help us improve it!

Now it’s time for you to enjoy FrontlineSMS 1.6.14. Altogether now, arms up! \o/