SMS used for peacekeeping at Burundi’s Elections
The African Great Lakes Initiative (AGLI) strengthens, supports, and promotes peace activities at the grassroots level in the Great Lakes region of Africa (Burundi, Congo, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda). Here, in our twenty-ninth guest blog post, AGLI Coordinator, David Zarembka, discusses how FrontlineSMS proved a valuable tool for supporting and coordinating peace building efforts during recent election violence prevention in program in Burundi. AGLI... Read More
SMS inspiration: A view from the Central Independent States
Moldcell and Orange - the two main Moldovan networks I’m beginning this week in the small landlocked eastern European country of Moldova, talking to representatives of IREX-supported organisations running telecentres and internet access points across the region. We just had a short session on FrontlineSMS, explaining how it works, and starting to come up with ideas for how to use it. Even though we talk every day about how users innovate way... Read More
ECOCARE Maldives: Project Mobilize
Our twenty-seventh guest post comes from ECOCARE Maldives, an NGO working for the protection and sustainable development of the environment, writing about how they’ve used FrontlineSMS in their environmental awareness programme with local school children. It’s an incredibly simple use case, but it helps them to continue offering the service, and making a difference on the ground… ECOCARE programme participants ECOCARE was introduced... Read More
CityCampLondon: thoughts on SMS and appropriate tech
This weekend has been spent at CityCampLondon, in a fog of coffee and beer, on Brick Lane and at the Kings Cross Hub, thinking and talking about using tech to make London better. I wanted to post a slightly more coherent version of my thoughts here. Mobile Phone chandelier, LBI on Brick Lane At the Mobile in the City panel, I reflected on the UK’s digital divide, which I’ve posted about here before, but took it further to suggest that... Read More
Reminders and MMS receiving: announcing a major new FrontlineSMS release
Today, we’re very pleased to announce a new FrontlineSMS release – version 1.6.16, to be precise – with two major new features: MMS receiving and the Reminders module! 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... 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 change. I’ve spent the last three years working on humanitarian... Read More
Neighbourhood Watch FrontlineSMS-style
Not only established non-profit organisations can benefit from “long tail” mobile solutions. In this, the fourth in our series of FrontlineSMS guest posts, Georgia Popplewell – who manages a community-lead neighbourhood watch scheme in Trinidad and Tobago – talks about the innovative use they found for the software “Blue Range is an upper middle-class suburb of 280 households located at the northern end of the Diego... Read More
The community conundrum. Continued…
Last week I was called up by a Researcher at Berkeley wanting me to take part in a survey. After a conference in February this year, intriguingly entitled “The UN Meets Silicon Valley“, a number of initiatives were now beginning to emerge (I was invited to the conference, but it didn’t really seem like my kind of thing, despite having had the pleasure of working with the organisation recently). Yes, the gathering was over eight... Read More
