FrontlineSMS comes of age
Two-and-a-half years in the making, FrontlineSMS is finally shedding its Beta status and will soon, finally, be launched to the NGO community as a fully-blown product. Although it’s taken much longer than I’d have hoped, at least we’ve had ample time to listen to the users and got the clearest possible indication of what we needed to add, remove, tweak and improve to make it more useful and relevant. The Beta – proof-of-concept... Read More
When actions DO speak louder than words
Winston Churchill once famously remarked that it was “better to be making the news than taking it. To be an actor rather than a critic”. But there are times when this simplifies, and trivialises, the complementary roles that ‘actors’ and ‘critics’ can play. Half-a-century on, modern technology has empowered ‘critics’ in ways Churchill could never have imagined. In 1984 a BBC news crew, accompanied... Read More
Out of nothing comes something
I don’t usually work on planes, even eleven hour transatlantic flights. But this time I thought I’d give it a go – maybe do something a little bit more interesting than reading reports or doing email. So I plumped for this. I’ve wondered for a while what the FrontlineSMS footprint is, you know, where it’s been used since the launch just over two years ago. So I did the grunt work on the plane and have just thrown... Read More
Considering Africa
During the summer, sandwiched between the end of my first Stanford Fellowship and a trip to Uganda with Grameen, I was asked by the Corporate Council on Africa to give an interview about my work. They were putting together a feature on “ICT innovators” for their Africa Journal, and wanted to talk about FrontlineSMS. I’m always happy to talk about my work – after all, I rely on this kind of interest to get word out about... Read More
The unpicking of FrontlineSMS
Going by the title of this Blog post you might be expecting a little online session for prospective FrontlineSMS users. You know the kind – what it is, what it does, where it’s been used and so on. Well, however useful that might be, this posting is more for my benefit. It’s time for a spot of thinking out loud… FrontlineSMS started life in 2005 as a classic example of evolutionary prototyping – in other words, the... Read More
FrontlineSMS on a Mac?
Bobby, a friend of mine from the Philippines (who I met at a recent Fahamu workshop in Nairobi), has been doing some great work with FrontlineSMS lately and has become a real supporter of the software. Over the next few weeks development of the next version will begin – thanks to funding from the MacArthur Foundation – and hopefully Bobby will be a central player in that. In the meantime, he holds the honour of being the first person –... Read More
Bridging the knowledge divide
A common theme in my work, and in many of my conference talks, centres around a very simple message – appropriate technology. It’s nothing new, and as a concept has been around since the 1970’s with Fritz Schumacher’s defining book, “Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered”. During my recent interview with Nokia’s “New Horizons” magazine, however, it was interesting that the conversation... Read More
