News

Two Cities, One Event: SMS to Map – Using FrontlineSMS and Ushahidi to Tell Your Story

Want to know more about using mobiles for social change, crowd sourced mapping, and how the two can combine? Keen to learn more about FrontlineSMS and Ushahidi, and how these software tools can be used together to enable positive social change? If you have questions about these tools which you’ve never had the chance to ask then Monday 7th November is your chance, at upcoming event: SMS to Map: Using FrontlineSMS and Ushahidi to tell your story. This exciting event will take place in two cities on one evening; at the iHub in Nairobi, Kenya, from 6-8pm EAT and then later on at Goldsmiths University of London, UK, at 7-9pm GMT. Both events will host presentations on FrontlineSMS and Ushahidi, and will also hear from some community experts who have used these tools together in action for social change projects in various different countries and contexts across the world.

There is a wealth of experienced speakers contributing to the event, including: Laura Walker Hudson (FrontlineSMS), Heather Leson (Ushahidi), Sharon Langevin (FrontlineSMS:Credit), Limo Taboi (Ushahidi), Anahi Ayala Iacucci (Internews Network), Linda Raftree (Plan International) and Claire Wardle (freelance trainer and researcher, currently working with the BBC College of Journalism). With this agenda the event will have something for novices and experienced techies alike! And if you'd like to come you can register here today!

FrontlineSMS and Ushahidi have been used together in many powerful and inspiring ways; to monitor elections in Nigeria; to map harassment on the street of Egypt; to track incidences of violence against children in Benin; to demonstrate and challenge incidences of human rights abuse in the Democratic Republic of Congo; and these are just a few examples. FrontlineSMS provides users with the ability to send receive and effectively manage large numbers of SMS, and Ushahidi software enables information visualization, interactive mapping and information collection through crowdsourcing methodology. When used together the tools enable people to collect SMS data and then visualize it with powerful results, as the case study examples show.

The aim of this event is to provide a meeting space for the communities of those who use or are keen to learn more about both FrontlineSMS and Ushahidi software. FrontlineSMS and Ushahidi technologies often appeal to similar audiences: those supportive of open source software, and those working for social change in contexts where people may struggle to get their voices heard via other means. We’ve also got a similar ethos towards prioritising the importance of understanding people who use our tools, and being committed to building and supporting our community of users. And as if that wasn’t enough cross over both teams of developers work from the same offices in Nairobi, too! Through facilitating this event we hope to build on existing collaborations and inspire more future uses of FrontlineSMS and Ushahidi together.

The event itself will be co-hosted by FrontlineSMS, Ushahidi, the iHub (Nairobi, Kenya) and Goldsmiths University (London, UK). Many thanks to the iHub for hosting the Nairobi-based event and to Goldsmiths University of London for sponsoring the London-based event, as well as to all others who have helped pull this exciting event program together. We all look forward to seeing you there next week!

For more info and/ or to register now visit: http://smstomap.eventbrite.com/ To follow the event on Twitter use the hash tag #smsmap We will be blogging about the event, and hope to make videos of presentations available after the event too

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Back to the future: 17 things you might not know about FrontlineSMS

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In late October 2005, an early beta - "proof-of-concept" - version of FrontlineSMS was released to the world. It took just ten months for the idea to shape itself into the early stages of what you see today. In this, the second and last of our sixth birthday celebration posts (you can read the first here), we dig deep into our email archives and reveal some of the more interesting early - and perhaps surprising - moments of the project. The idea for FrontlineSMS was conceived in early 2005 with the help of several field trips to South Africa and Mozambique, a bottle of beer and "Match of the Day". All is revealed in this fun, short National Geographic video:

The very first email which specifically references FrontlineSMS was sent on 6th March, 2005 at 0853 to register the domain name.

Prior to that the working title was "Project SMS". The first email to reference "Project SMS" was sent on Wednesday 26th January, 2005 at 12:02. In it, the entire concept was described in just 963 words with an initial estimated budget of just £2,000 ($3,000).

Factoring in equipment and other costs, personal gifts totaling £10,000 were secured on 16th March, 2005 from two former Vodafone directors.

"The potential for FrontlineSMS is very exciting, and I am very much looking forward to working on the project. The potential impact for conservation and development is considerable." - Email to one of the supporters, 3rd May, 2005.

Preparation for the project officially got underway with the purchase of equipment totaling £1,476.09 on 22nd May, 2005:

One month later the timeline for the project was laid out. FrontlineSMS was delivered bang on schedule. From an email on 22nd June, 2005:

"I will begin working on the specification over the next couple of weeks, and will then get stuck into the initial programming phase during August. I have allocated that whole month to FrontlineSMS. As per the original timeline, July will be preparation, and August to September development time, so by October we should have something to trial."

News of FrontlineSMS was first revealed to the media in an interview with the Charity Times in August, 2005. Software development was briefly paused on 26th August so that the first FrontlineSMS website could be hastily put together ahead of the article's release.

"I have very high hopes that FrontlineSMS is really going to open the door to SMS technology to the wider NGO community" - Email to World Wildlife Fund, who were interested in trailing the software. 2nd September, 2005.

On 29th September, 2005 FrontlineSMS was presented for the first time at an internal event at Fauna & Flora International in Cambridge, UK:

On 5th October, 2005, to celebrate its imminent launch, FrontlineSMS buys up 200 pixels on the Million Dollar Homepage, a site which has since gone down in Internet folklore. (Read more on this here).

Email, 6th October, 2005: "Google now gives us around 80 results when searching for FrontlineSMS". Today the number is well over 100,000.

Email to supporters, 31st October, 2005: "The FrontlineSMS texting system is now ready for trial". These nine words signaled our official launch exactly six years ago today.

Email dated 14th November, 2005 from the MacArthur Foundation: "The MacArthur Foundation's Technology Grants Committee is always looking for innovative applications of technology for the NGO sector. I'd love to have a chat with you about your application if you have the time". Two years later MacArthur would become the first donor to make an investment in FrontlineSMS with a $200,000 grant. This funded a major rewrite and a new website.

14th November, 2005: 160 Characters are the first mobile-focused news site to announce the release of FrontlineSMS.

15th November, 2005: We receive an email enquiry from Kubatana, a Zimbabwean civil society organisation. Days later FrontlineSMS had its first official implementation. Kubatana still use FrontlineSMS today.

Today, with fifteen staff over three continents, users in over 70 countries across 20 different non-profit sectors, and approaching 20,000 downloads, the rest - as they say - is history...

FrontlineSMS and Technological Responsibility

FrontlineSMS team members Amy O'Donnell and Flo Scialom are currently helping moderate TechChange's online learning course on Mobiles for International Development (m4d). In addition, FrontlineSMS's Sean McDonald will be a guest speaker on this course in the coming weeks. Our involvement in the course is providing us with a great opportunity to engage with a new group of people who are either working in, or are strongly interested in the m4d sector. The 40 course participants are based over 15 countries and have a rich variety of experience, so there is an exciting range of perspectives to be shared. Whilst helping with this TechChange course it seems like ideal timing to share the below TechChange post on a FrontlineSMS training course held earlier this year: FrontlineSMS Project Design

When an innovator is struck with a new idea for a technology, his or her first thought isn’t necessarily “How can this be used for a humanitarian, development, or peace-building cause?” Rather, it is more often “How can I sell millions of copies of this in the Apple App Store?” or “How soon will I be able to sell this to a venture capitalist and use the money to buy my I Am Rich app".

In early 2011 TechChange organized a training with FrontlineSMS that not only taught people how to use the software, but forced them to confront the issue of priorities. Against our tendency to think of ways to use the technology to benefit ourselves, we designed our own projects that used FrontlineSMS to enable social change. There was a spark of awareness that lying dormant in our creativity and innovative thinking is the capacity to use technology in a more responsible way.

Led by FrontlineSMS gurus Sean McDonald and Laura Walker Hudson, we were introduced to FrontlineSMS as a powerful and simple technology, which uses a computer, a mobile phone, and text messaging to easily communicate with groups of people. The potential uses for this technology are boundless, as evidenced by FrontlineSMS’s sector-specific projects that reach “specific fields such as finance, education, law, and media”. While one organization can use it as mobile healthcare for expectant mothers, another can use it to stabilize markets by providing local fishermen with real time price information. We were presented with numerous case studies all validating the fact that open source technology can help bridge the gap between vulnerable populations and the information and tools they need.

We were then split into groups, given a modem connected to FrontlineSMS, and asked to think of a real world problem to confront. It’s interesting to think that every day we sit in front of a computer or play with our iPhones and all of these technologies have the possibility of answering some sort of global need but it very often doesn’t even cross our minds. It’s not an automatic motive. But at the FrontlineSMS training, we were forced to think of others before self, since that was the assignment.

Thus, we trained a room of FrontlineSMS ninjas – compassionate, philanthropic ninjas. They came up with strategies to connect LGBT populations to service providers and to improve parent-teacher relations, and in the process learned about the technical and more importantly contextual issues that must be resolved to bring about real change. TechChange is planning to host more tech trainings throughout the year. We want to get creative people armed with emerging technologies and collaborating on the hardest problems facing our generation. And of course, one of the best parts of open source is the social and community aspect – there was a very nerdy happy hour afterwards which I wasn’t legally allowed to attend but I hear it gets pretty wild.

The above has been re-posted from TechChange blog with permission. Post by Mariel Bartolome, Technical Coordinator at TechChange and a computer science major at the University of Maryland College Park.

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Six years On: Reinforcing Our Core Values

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It's hard to believe, but six years ago this month FrontlineSMS was quietly released into the world. There was no press release, no fuss, no fanfare and certainly no funding. "Project SMS" was conceived earlier that year, renamed "FrontlineSMS" a few weeks later, and then cobbled together on a kitchen table in Finland over the summer. For a long time promoting and supporting it was simply a hobby as I continued my life as an ICT consultant. It's an understatement to say that I'm surprised at where we are today. Over fifteen staff across three continents, thousands of users in over 70 countries around the world, and a tool which has found a home for itself in almost all fields of international development. None of that was ever part of the plan back in October 2005.

I'm equally as proud of the roots of FrontlineSMS as I am of the tool itself. I've been involved in international development in one form or another for the past 18 years, and have seen at first hand things that have worked, and things that haven't. There's much that's wrong in the sector, but also a lot that's right, and for me personally FrontlineSMS embodies how appropriate and respectful ICT4D initiatives can be run, both on a personal and professional level. There's very little I'd do differently if I started it all over again.

As I wrote earlier this month after news of our Curry Stone Design Prize broke:

Over the past few years FrontlineSMS has become so much more than just a piece of software. Our core values are hard-coded into how the software works, how it’s deployed, the things it can do, how users connect, and the way it allows all this to happen. We’ve worked hard to build a tool which anyone can take and, without us needing to get involved, be applied to any problem anywhere. How this is done is entirely up to the user, and it’s this flexibility that sits at the core of the platform. It’s also arguably at the heart of it’s success.

These core values, built up over six years, remain central to our work. Here's just a few:

Each and every one is important to us: Putting users ahead - and at the heart - of everything we do, striving for a positive interaction with anyone who comes into contact with our work, aiming to inspire others whilst respecting a diversity of views, always reaching for better, fostering a positive "anything is possible" attitude, making sure we continue to put people - and their needs - ahead of the aspirations of the tech community, managing expectations both internally and for our users, and finally - constantly reminding ourselves why we do what we do.

As we continue to grow as an organisation, maintaining and reinforcing these values will be an increasingly important part of not only who we are, but who we become.

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NYT: "A Quest for Hybrid Companies That Profit, but Can Tap Charity"

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FrontlineSMS was featured in an article in the New York Times this week! You can find an extract of the article below, and the full piece can be found on the New York Times website here. "A new type of company intended to put social goals ahead of making profits is taking root around the country, as more states adopt laws to bridge the divide between nonprofits and businesses...

Charities seeking ways to reduce their reliance on donated dollars are increasingly developing programs that could be mistaken for businesses, and for them, such a structure solves a number of headaches. It gives them access to the capital markets, allows them to pay higher compensation levels and provides potential exit strategies, all unavailable to nonprofits...

Frontline SMS ... organized as a community interest company, or C.I.C.’s, the British corporate designation that has inspired many of the new hybrid in corporation laws passed in the United States. C.I.C.’s are required to have a social purpose like health care and their assets are locked, limiting what can be distributed to shareholders, employees and others.

FrontlineSMS was spun out of Kiwanja.net, a California nonprofit whose mission is to develop technology to help nonprofit groups deliver services. 'The value proposition is inherently defined in terms of social benefit,' said Sean Martin McDonald, of FrontlineSMS. 'That reduces a lot of concerns you might normally have from traditional financial investors by making it clear that your mission is primarily social, not primarily about making profits.'"

To read more check out the full article on the New York Times website here.

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Rethinking socially responsible design in a mobile world

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"The Curry Stone Design Prize was created to champion designers as a force for social change. Now in its fourth year, the Prize recognizes innovators who address critical issues involving clean air, food and water, shelter, health care, energy, education, social justice or peace". Yesterday was an exciting day for us as we announced FrontlineSMS had won the prestigious 2011 Curry Stone Design Prize. This award follows closely on the heels of the 2011 Pizzigati Prize, an honourable mention at the Buckminster Fuller Challenge and our National Geographic "Explorer" Award last summer. It goes without saying these are exciting times not just for FrontlineSMS but for our growing user base and the rapidly expanding team behind it. When I think back to the roots of our work in the spring of 2005, FrontlineSMS almost comes across as "the little piece of software that dared to dream big".

With the exception of the Pizzigati Prize - which specifically focuses on open source software for public good - our other recent awards are particularly revealing. Last summer we began something of a trend by being awarded things which weren't traditionally won by socially-focused mobile technology organisations.

Being named a 2010 National Geographic Emerging Explorer is a case in point, and last summer while I was in Washington DC collecting the prize I wrote down my thoughts in a blog post:

On reflection, it was a very bold move by the Selection Committee. Almost all of the other Emerging Explorers are either climbing, diving, scaling, digging or building, and what I do hardly fits into your typical adventurer job description. But in a way it does. As mobile technology continues its global advance, figuring out ways of applying the technology in socially and environmentally meaningful ways is a kind of 21st century exploring. The public reaction to the Award has been incredible, and once people see the connection they tend to think differently about tools like FrontlineSMS and their place in the world.

More recently we've begun receiving recognition from more traditional socially-responsible design organisations - Buckminster Fuller and Clifford Curry/Delight Stone. If you ask the man or woman on the street what "socially responsible design" meant to them, most would associate it with physical design - the building or construction of things, more-to-the-point. Water containers, purifiers, prefabricated buildings, emergency shelters, storage containers and so on. Design is so much easier to recognise, explain and appreciate if you can see it. Software is a different beast altogether, and that's what makes our Curry Stone Design Prize most interesting. As the prize website itself puts it:

Design has always been concerned with built environment and the place of people within it, but too often has limited its effective reach to narrow segments of society. The Curry Stone Design Prize is intended to support the expansion of the reach of designers to a wider segment of humanity around the globe, making talents of leading designers available to broader sections of society.

Over the past few years FrontlineSMS has become so much more than just a piece of software. Our core values are hard-coded into how the software works, how it's deployed, the things it can do, how users connect, and the way it allows all this to happen. We've worked hard to build a tool which anyone can take and, without us needing to get involved, applied to any problem anywhere. How this is done is entirely up to the user, and it's this flexibility that sits at the core of the platform. It's also arguably at the heart of it's success:

We trust our users - rely on them, in fact - to be imaginative and innovative with the platform. If they succeed, we succeed. If they fail, we fail. We're all very much in this together. We focus on the people and not the technology because it's people who own the problems, and by default they're often the ones best-placed to solve them. When you lead with people, technology is relegated to the position of being a tool. Our approach to empowering our users isn't rocket science. As I've written many times before, it's usually quite subtle, but it works:

My belief is that users don’t want access to tools – they want to be given the tools. There’s a subtle but significant difference. They want to have their own system, something which works with them to solve their problem. They want to see it, to have it there with them, not in some "cloud". This may sound petty – people wanting something of their own – but I believe that this is one way that works.

What recognition from the likes of the Curry Stone Design Prize tells us is that socially responsible design can be increasingly applied to the solutions, people and ecosystems built around lines of code - but only if those solutions are user-focused, sensitive to their needs, deploy appropriate technologies and allow communities to influence how these tools are applied to the problems they own.

Further reading FrontlineSMS is featured in the upcoming book "Design Like You Give a Damn 2: Building Change From The Ground Up", available now on pre-order from Amazon.

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FrontlineSMS 2011 Curry Stone Design Prize Winners

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FrontlineSMS is excited to announce that we have been awarded the Curry Stone Design Prize, a prestigious award which recognizes the valuable contributions of social design pioneers across the world. The award "was created in the belief that designers can be an instrumental force for improving people’s lives and the state of the world". The FrontlineSMS team is honoured to be recognised as one of the prize winners. According to Ken Banks, FrontlineSMS Founder:

We're honoured, surprised and excited to win this Prize, particularly when you consider most Curry Stone winners over the years have concentrated on physical design. This Prize, combined with our recent Buckminster Fuller Challenge "honourable mention" and last year's National Geographic "Explorer" award, see us taking FrontlineSMS - and the mobile-for-development sector in general - into new territory.

There's a growing realisation that socially-focused mobile tools can be part of the socially responsible design world, particularly if they are user-focused, and built around appropriate technologies which allow communities to build and design their own solutions to their own problems. This is an approach we have been championing for years, and it is wonderful to receive such recognition.

Warm congratulations to Hsieh Ying-Chun, the Grand Prize Winner, as well as Atelier d’Architecture Autogérée (AAA), also winners of the prize along with FrontlineSMS - we are honored to be recognized alongside them.

For further details about the Prize, and the other winners please see below press release, published today on the Curry Stone website:

The 2011 Curry Stone Design Prize Winners were announced today with an official presentation ceremony to follow on November 7th at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Hsieh Ying-Chun is the Grand Prize Winner; he will receive $100,000 from the foundation with no strings attached. Hsieh is a leading Taiwanese architect who for over a decade has deployed his talents in rural areas decimated by natural disaster. Hsieh works throughout Asia, training villagers to build locally appropriate dwellings in response to devastation such as the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, the 1999 Nantou earthquake, and the 2009 Morakot typhoon in Taiwan. Through Hsieh’s hands-on education process, villagers reconstruct their own community foundation, knowing they will live in buildings with greater safety, structural integrity, and sustainability.

Two additional 2011 Winner Prizes, of $10,000 each, will be awarded to Atelier d’Architecture Autogérée (AAA) and FrontlineSMS.

Atelier d'Architecture Autogérée is a collective of architects, designers and social scientists who transform urban spaces through collaborative endeavors. Based in Paris and founded by Romanian architects Constatin Petcou and Doina Petrescu in 2001, AAA has become an engine for engaging citizens in shaping their own cities through building, farming, and artistic intervention. AAA acts as a creative instigator, empowering local communities to carry out and sustain their own ideas for urban regeneration.

FrontlineSMS was founded in London by Ken Banks in 2005 to enable effective communications channels for communities in the developing world. FrontlineSMS leverages the ubiquity of mobile phones and familiarity of text messaging to turn an offline laptop into a communication hub. The simple innovation empowers villagers, aid agencies, and news services to exchange information easily among groups.

The Curry Stone Design Prize was created to champion designers as a force for social change. Now in its fourth year, the Prize recognizes innovators who address critical issues involving clean air, food and water, shelter, health care, energy, education, social justice or peace. Nominees for the Curry Stone Design Prize are selected by an anonymous, rotating group of leaders representing broad fields of design, as well as humanitarian advocates from related disciplines. A jury reviews the nominations to choose one Grand Prize Winner and two Prize Winners. Emphasis is placed on emerging projects and ideas that may not have yet been taken to scale. The Curry Stone Design Prize was founded by Clifford Curry, an architect and recognized pioneer in senior housing, and Delight Stone, a historic archaeologist and social justice activist. Dr. Louisa Silva and Gary Feuerstein serve as board members.

Grand Prize Winner, Hsieh Ying-Chun establishes a cooperative network of designers, contractors, and residents that supports local needs. His simple designs ensure that every villager can have a hand in building their own home. His work has generated job opportunities and environmental awareness, while protecting local diversities and cultural traditions. After completion, he makes the design plans available in creative commons. Hsieh’s work has helped thousands of people. http://bit.ly/qH6FqA

Prize Winners:

Atelier d’Architecture Autogérée (AAA), Paris, France Collective Urban Architecture http://bit.ly/nnSbii

FrontlineSMS, London, England Community Solutions Through Mobile Technology http://bit.ly/qiXnQz

CURRY STONE DESIGN PRIZE FESTIVAL, Harvard Graduate School of Design

Prize Ceremony & Presentation: Monday, November 7th, 2011 6:30-8:00pm Harvard GSD, 48 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA RSVP events@currystonedesignprize.com

Three Workshops at the GSD: Tuesday, November 8th, 2011 12pm-2:00pm, CSDP Prize winners Hsieh Ying-Chun, Constantin Petcou and Doina Petrescu, and Ken Banks will each lead a workshop.

The Curry Stone Design Prize Festival is presented in partnership with the Loeb Fellowship and the Department of Urban Planning and Design, Harvard Graduate School of Design. For more information on the Curry Stone Design Prize, Events and Winners, see: www.currystonedesignprize.com or Twitter @currystoneprize.

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“Africa’s quiet digital revolution” FrontlineSMS:Radio featured on BBC

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FrontlineSMS:Radio was recently featured in an article written by Jane Wakefield for the BBC’s technology page. Below is an extract and you can find the full article here. “For many in Africa, getting information still comes from a very low-tech device – the radio.

Ken Banks hopes to unite the power of radio with his already well-known FrontLineSMS, a text service that has provided key information to people caught up in emergencies such as the earthquake in Haiti.

Now he wants to see the project more embedded into daily lives, offering listeners to radio stations in Kenya and Zambia the chance to really engage with the topics discussed on their favourite radio stations.

'Clearly rural radio and mobile technology are a potent mix. Independently, both are making significant contributions – both directly and indirectly – to the communities they seek to serve. Together there is every chance they could achieve yet more,' he said.

Listeners will be able to text in to radio shows, allowing stations to aggregate content, identify the trends that are concerning people and build shows around specific topics.

Ida Jooste, who works for Internews, a non-governmental organisation that trains many of the DJs who run such radio stations, thinks it will be an invaluable tool.

'When texts are read on air they may not be representative. SMS Radio will aggregate material around themes such as poverty or cholera and allow the DJ to know what the concern of the day is,' she said.”

To read the full article on the BBC News website please click here.

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UN uses FrontlineSMS to help manage aid response in East Africa

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em>By Lisa LaRochelle, FrontlineSMS Project Assistant FrontlineSMS is being used for social change in many different ways across the world. Common use case examples include election monitoring, provision of health information, and agricultural support –  these kinds of use cases have direct positive impact on people’s lives. Yet here at FrontlineSMS we have seen increasing numbers using FrontlineSMS for organisational management, which has indirect benefits for people which are

far harder to measure and demonstrate; helping organisations to work more efficiently, communicate more easily with their staff, and move information around more swiftly. Examples include using FrontlineSMS for monitoring and evaluation, data collection, and internal communication. It is this latter kind of FrontlineSMS use case that we recently discussed with Sanjay Rane, Information Management Officer at the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Kenya.

Mobile phone penetration is high in Kenya, and the UN OCHA staff members that Sanjay works with all have their own mobile phones. The convenience and accessibility of SMS appealed to the team, and FrontlineSMS is a low-overhead way of managing text messages to and from groups. “For the last couple of months we have been using FrontlineSMS as an in-house communication tool,” Sanjay explains “and it has certainly helped foster better information sharing among the OCHA Kenya team.”

SMS offers an immediacy and intimacy that can be seen as unique from other methods of communication. People always have their mobiles close to them, and generally read messages quickly. This has certainly shown to be the case in OCHA’s experience. They have found that using SMS helped them to reach staff, especially during an emergency occurring in off hours, when most of the staff do not check their emails. OCHA Kenya can use the tool to send out urgent updates to the team.

One of the major benefits of using FrontlineSMS is the ability to manage SMS more easily than using a simple phone handset. When trying to send out messages using a handset, Sanjay found it difficult and time consuming to add and delete people’s contact information, send messages to multiple contacts at the same time, and maintain groups of contacts. FrontlineSMS offers a simpler solution: the ability to sort contacts into groups so that, for example, an emergency alert text can be sent out to a large group of staff at once. It is also possible to set up key words and automatic replies with FrontlineSMS, so the system can automatically send people important advice and information.

The OCHA Kenya team had such success with their experience that they decided to implement FrontlineSMS to facilitate communication with a larger group of humanitarian partners in Kenya, as a preparedness tool for the referendum in 2010. They are now exploring the possibility of using SMS to help coordinate with agencies responding to the current East Africa drought. This is an indication that FrontlineSMS is enabling improved communications management in a way that was otherwise not possible.

It was the capacity to manage data in combination with the popularity and simplicity of SMS which led Sanjay to FrontlineSMS. “At OCHA Kenya, using SMS for internal communication is very popular, as it is a familiar communications tool. We have found it really valuable to use SMS for communicating with colleagues on important humanitarian developments in Kenya,” Rane says. Organisational management, although behind the scenes, can provide huge social benefits by enabling those working for NGOs and INGOs to communicate more effectively and do their challenging jobs more efficiently

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Climate Information Alerts for Poor Farmers

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This article was originally published on allAfrica.com and is reposted with permission.

There are few greater challenges facing rural farmers in the developing world today than climate change, as the current drought in the Horn of Africa demonstrates so clearly.

In this post, Riedner Mumbi and Polly Ghazi explain how mobile technology is being increasingly used to get crucial information out to poor farmers in Zambia, helping mitigate against climate risks and improving food security.

By Riedner Mumbi and Polly Ghazi

A herder shepherding his animals in Zambia’s Eastern Province winds up a solar-powered radio and crouches down to listen to a local FM station. The news broadcast includes a warning that a severe storm is approaching his village. The herder reacts instantly, finding shelter nearby for his animals, which later emerge from the storm unscathed.

Such a scene may be played out increasingly in the future across Africa, where the livelihoods of rural inhabitants are critically dependent on weather and climate. Most are peasant farmers who depend solely on rain for their crop production. A single extreme event such as a major flood or prolonged drought can not only cause loss of life, but also economic setbacks equivalent to years’ worth of development.

As climate change intensifies, bringing more extreme weather, as well as seasonal and longer-term changes, effective adaptation for rural regions of Africa will depend on timely and accurate advance information. Early warnings will enable farmers to shelter their animals and protect their income and families. In addition, the collection and distribution of local rainfall information can help smallholder farmers to adjust their crop production methods to changing seasonal precipitation patterns.

The Zambian government has been one of the first in Africa to recognize this need. Through its RANET (Radio and Internet for the Communication of Hydro-Meteorological Information) Project, the Zambia Meteorological Department is tapping remote communities across several provinces to collect climate information. In the past four years, some 3,060 farmers have been provided with rain gauges to take rainfall measurements which are then fed back to the meteorological service’s local weather stations through mobile phones. Farmers are also encouraged to report other local weather observations. To motivate farmers taking part, RANET periodically recharges their phones with free airtime, and project managers are now testing the FrontlineSMS software to help minimize the service cost. This would enable rural participants to send SMS – text messages – to the RANET centre free of charge.

The results have been so encouraging that the Zambian Met Office is now considering providing automatic weather stations and rudimentary meteorological training to rural farmer cooperatives across the country.

In order to help remote rural areas receive (as well as collect) timely weather and climate information, the RANET Project sends weather alerts via SMS text and has also been assisting rural areas to establish community FM broadcasting stations. These pick up regional climate information from satellites, translate relevant weather information into local languages and are then used to broadcast timely warnings over extreme weather, such as storms, as well as seasonal climate information.

So far the project has helped launch five stations, with two more in the pipeline, and is cooperating with another nine. Each station can broadcast information to farming communities within a radius of 40-60km. RANET has also installed 49 digital radio satellite receivers to enable the FM stations to access satellite-based weather and climate information.

The project provides communities with solar wind-up radio receivers to access the broadcasts, 3,000 of which have been distributed across rural regions to date. The stations also host programs that help educate citizens on the effects of weather on their crops. Reinforcing these messages, RANET also provides climate information to agricultural extension workers who can interpret it for farmers and help them apply what they learn in their daily farming activities. In Mali, similar weather forecast bulletins, broadcast every 10 days, have helped low income smallholder farmers to increase yields by providing vital information on when and what to plant, depending on the climatic conditions.

While community radio broadcasting struggles to survive commercially, and therefore depends on government and non-governmental organizations to sponsor their programs, this is worthwhile investment. Quite simply, radio broadcasting is the most cost-effective and cheapest way for information dissemination and education, and can play a valuable role in societies facing climatic extremes.

Not content with radio and cell phone networks, RANET, with support from the USAID Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance, is also piloting the deployment of an innovative communication device called Chatty Beetle. The device is both a terminal and a system designed to provide emergency weather alerts and instructions to remote locations with limited means of communication with the outside world. It sends messages and short status reports (of 160 characters or less) via a small screen between emergency managers and warning authorities, as well as notifying communities of potential hazards. Since speed is critical when warning vulnerable communities of the onset of disasters such as cyclones or major floods, the Chatty Beetle, which transmits even faster than the Internet, shows much promise.

With more than three quarters of the world’s population now served by mobile networks, and additional efforts underway to reach the rest, the RANET approach to climate and emergency preparedness information has huge potential for scale up.

Current RANET funding and technical partners include the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), National Meteorological Services, First Voice International (formerly World Space Corporation), Free Play Foundation, UNDP, SNV, GTZ, DFID, World Vision, Africare, the Red Cross, and many others.

The World Resources Report 2010-2011 will be published in August and can be read here.

Riedner Mumbi is a consultant on the RANET system. Polly Ghazi is a writer and editor at the World Resources Institute (WRI).

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M4Data: FrontlineSMS Launches Data Integrity User Guide

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By Cathryn Paine

We were excited to join colleagues and friends in Washington, DC, on Tuesday 9th August to release the first edition of our User Guide on Data Integrity, a tool that will help FrontlineSMS users around the world better understand the flow of information into and out of the platform, the risks and vulnerabilities to that data, and simple ways they can mitigate those risks.

To kick off the discussion around the new guide, we hosted a panel discussion at Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies, where FrontlineSMS' Sean McDonald joined Jon Gosier of metaLayer, Development Seed’s Paul Goodman, and Internews Vice President for New Media Kathleen Reen, who moderated the event. This research effort, based on FrontlineSMS user input and research by Kristina Lugo and Carol Waters, focused not on mobile system security, a critical issue better addressed by others, but more on the ways that contextualized program design and implementation can improve data quality and reduce user risk. Above all, we learned through the process, context is key. Understanding the needs and norms of the target population, and the goals of the project itself, is vital in determining the proper tools and approach to designing a FrontlineSMS workflow that can achieve those goals.

The panel discussion centered on these key points, especially the role that stakeholders play in the reliability and integrity of project data. Issues from misinterpretation, to unconscious bias, to lack of corroboration can creep into an improperly designed data collection effort, polluting the entire dataset in the process. To mitigate these threats, Jon emphasized focusing on localization and usability in project design—understanding the users or beneficiaries of a project is the best way to minimize human error and maximize data integrity.

Paul contextualized these points with insights from mobile projects in Haiti and Benin, focusing on the process of implementing new technologies—from design to training to implementation. Particularly, the panel discussion focused on assuming that program data would be made public, in an effort to design projects that achieve important goals while minimizing risks associated with data sharing or system compromise.

Throughout the conversation, the discussion kept coming back to the importance of user-focused, context-aware approaches and resources in ICT projects. No matter how complicated the technology, an informed and engaged community of project staff and participants is really the best tool for safeguarding quality data. All in all, a great discussion that we hope to keep going through the forum and ongoing interactions!

You can now download the FrontlineSMS User Guide on Data Integrity from our website here.

Making the most of our time - growing pains and ticking clocks

a href="http://www.frontlinesms.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Toggl.jpg">FrontlineSMS is growing fast - we have more than quadrupled the size of our team in the past few years, and we now have staff based over three continents, with offices in the UK, US and Kenya. Funding our work in new ways and providing new services to our users means getting better at tracking how much time we spend on things. We also have the happy problem of trying to stop our staff consistently staying up late and getting up early, and working weekends to get everything done - or at least trying to make sure we don’t all do it all the time.

We’ve been experimenting with a time-tracking service called Toggl, which lets you manage a team and assign common projects and tags so that you can monitor time spent on the same tasks by different people. It’s web-based, but has mobile apps and a desktop tracker which monitors which software you’re currently using and helpfully makes a suggestion if it thinks you’ve drifted into doing something other than what you’ve indicated you’re doing.

It’s a habit that you have to get into, but so far it has proven very useful. Our staff are distributed across continents and timezones, and we often put together different teams for different projects - Toggl allows us to correctly allocate costs to the right project and monitor whether a particular task is taking as long as we thought it would. A major challenge for any modern organisation is how to account for - and minimise, to a degree - time spent on catch-all tasks like email. Things like team meetings, staff catch-ups, and email aren’t easily assigned to any one project and yet eat a horrific amount of time. Looking back at Toggl I clocked up over twelve hours on email last week alone! Being more aware of the time you’re spending on particular things encourages you to be more disciplined, and at least highlights the problem of email overload, even if we still have to figure out a solution.

The complicated business of setting up a company and supporting a team to deliver the work we want to do could be completely preoccupying, and something we’re conscious that many of our colleagues in the ICT4D sector, and beyond, are also going through. Time tracking isn’t the only issue like this on our minds - we’re also grappling with company structure, tax efficiency, human resources requirements, and getting someone to water the pot plants when we’re all travelling. If you think this stuff is useful and interesting to hear about, let us know in the comments and we’ll oblige with more whinging about the price of organisational growth.

In the meantime, as the complexity of internal resource allocation starts to become an art to rival the science of software development and programme design in terms of the brain power it consumes, tracking our time will be an important tool... Although, which project should I file this blog post under? Hmm.

For more information on Toggl visit: www.toggl.com

Online Discussion: Using Mobile Phones for Citizen Media

img class="alignright" title="Newtactics2" src="http://www.frontlinesms.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Newtactics2.png" alt="" width="213" height="70" />New opportunities are increasingly opening up for citizens to actively share information, produce media and participate in journalism. Later this week, from 27th July to 2nd August, FrontlineSMS will be taking part in an online dialogue hosted by the New Tactics in Human Rights project on the subject of “Using Mobile Phones for Citizen Media.”  We would particularly encourage any FrontlineSMS users interested or active in this field of citizen media to participate in the discussion during the week to share your insightful contributions. FrontlineSMS team members, Amy and Sean, are looking forward to taking part in this discussion as they join a plethora of resource practitioners to share ideas about how to open opportunities for citizens to actively participate in journalism. In particular, FrontlineSMS are interested in how citizens are able to contribute to the media by utilising tools which are likely to be already in their hands: their mobile phone. We hope to draw on the experiences from the many FrontlineSMS users who operate in the media sector in order to share examples and case studies with the forum. Examples we have heard of include collection of SMS news tips at BreezeFM radio station in Zambia, journalists already reporting via SMS in Indonesia and the use of SMS to contribute to a TV series which tackles HIV in the Democratic Republic of Congo in a project called Rien que la Vérité (Nothing but the Truth).

This discussion is very timely, given the recent announcement that FrontlineSMS will soon be developing tools to enable digital news gathering using mobile phones, made possible by a $250,000 grant awarded through the Knight Foundation's News Challenge. Over the next two years we will be developing two key products for journalists and broadcasters: one to facilitate participatory journalism, interaction and collaboration from community members and audiences, and one to enable journalists to use their simple mobile phones as powerful reporting tools. As this new and exciting project takes off, we hope to utilise the opportunity of this week’s online dialogue to collect ideas and lessons learnt from other actors in the field. This will help us to gain perspective as we shape a customised tool which we hope will assist journalists and broadcasters to harness the power of their mobile phones.

Other participating resource practitioners:

  • Melissa Ulbricht (co-facilitator) - MobileActive's staff writer, United States
  • Becky Hurwitz - Project Manager at MobileActive and currently working on the SaferMobile project, United States
  • Rich Jones of the Open Watch Project
  • Mong Palatino - one of the founding conveners of TXTpower, Philippines
  • Brian Conley and others of Small World News
  • Sean McDonald and Amy O'Donnell of FrontlineSMS
  • Alix Dunn - applied researcher in the role of digital tools in activism, Egypt
  • John (Kipp) Kipchumbah of InfoNet, Kenya
  • Sam duPont - Field Fellow for Dimagi, author of Global Mobile blog at at DC think tank NDN, Thailand and Philippines
  • Patita Tingoi and others from Fahamu, Kenya
  • Boukary Konaté and Eddie Avila from Rising Voices, Mali and Bolivia

You can follow and contribute to the discussion here from 27th July

FrontlineSMS brings mobile tools to new audiences

caption id="attachment_7443" align="alignright" width="300" caption="'Doing' the FrontlineSMS empowerment logo \o/ "] Our latest FrontlineSMS e-newsletter is out now, and shows that it has been another packed few months at FrontlineSMS!

Our newsletter comes out every few months, and provides an update on FrontlineSMS community news and our upcoming activities. You can subscribe to our e-newsletter on the right hand side of the screen, and you can now read the latest edition online, which includes:

Take a read of our latest e-newsletter here to find out more. And don't forget, you can subscribe to our e-newsletter on the right hand side of the screen, if you'd like to receive our updates straight to your inbox!

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Innovation in practice: Family planning via SMS

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Florence Scialom, FrontlineSMS Community Support Coordinator, speaks with Esha Kalra, Georgetown University’s Institute for Reproductive Health (IRH) Programme Associate

It is difficult to bring an innovative idea to life, without first proving its potential in practice; there is a need to demonstrate on a small scale that something actually works before it can make a big difference. FrontlineSMS can be used as a tool in this process - as a free and easy to use software it can be used to test a concept before an investment is made in any costly software development.

Georgetown University’s Institute for Reproductive Health (IRH) is a global organisation dedicated to improving reproductive health worldwide, and they have been able to test the value of their latest m-health initiative using FrontlineSMS. This m-health service, called CycleTel™, empowers women by providing accessible reproductive health information via SMS. I recently spoke with Esha Kalra, India-based IRH Programme Associate, to find out more about CycleTel, and the value IRH gained through using FrontlineSMS.

As IRH explains, “CycleTel facilitates use of the Standard Days Method® (SDM), a fertility awareness-based method of family planning based on a woman’s menstrual cycle. Appropriate for women who usually have menstrual cycles between 26 and 32 days long, SDM identifies days 8 through 19 as the fertile days. To prevent pregnancy, the couple avoids unprotected sex on these days.” By making this fertility information accessible via SMS, CycleTel empowers women to have more control over their reproductive health. “We found the process straight forward and easy to explain to women who participated in testing the service,” Esha told me, explaining her experience of managing one of CycleTel’s testing phases.

IRH used FrontlineSMS to support two phases of manual testing of the CycleTel concept, in Lucknow and New Delhi, both in India. For the first phase in Lucknow, 30 women were selected to participate in the trial, and in the second phase in New Delhi the number of participants rose to 90 women. Esha was responsible for managing a number of the study’s components, including operating FrontlineSMS during the second phase in New Delhi. Esha explained to me that she very quickly picked up the variety of FrontlineSMS functionalities which could serve the needs of the project. “I do not come from a technical background, but I found messages easy to organise and send, using the group and key word functionality. In addition, the data we collected was easy to manage because we were able to regularly export it from FrontlineSMS,” Esha explained.

A notable step taken by IRH to get staff accustomed with FrontlineSMS was to create a project manual ahead of using the software. This manual drew content in part from information in the FrontlineSMS help files, but it was tailored by IRH to suit CycleTel’s programme needs. Esha described the value of this, stating that, “it really helped to have everything documented before the start of project; the manual laid out how to use FrontlineSMS to meet our project requirements and made project management much easier.” It was this forward planning on the part of IRH, combined with ease of use of FrontlineSMS that led the project to its initial success.

There have been positive proof-of-concept results from this test phase – with the majority of test users saying that they would like to continue to use the service and would recommend it to a friend. The formative research using FrontlineSMS, and especially the feedback from test users, was absolutely essential to determine the potential scope of the CycleTel service. As a result of CycleTel’s formative research results, IRH decided to pursue customised software development to automate the service. For IRH, being able to test CycleTel using FrontlineSMS proved to be a critical step in the iterative process they are now taking from concept to scale.

IRH are currently working with us to produce a full case study on their use of FrontlineSMS, so keep an eye on our blog for further details on this coming soon!