My post on Google's SMS services raised quite the storm in the waterglass. Erik Hersman took me to taks for, as he sees it, questioning that "if people who are claiming to help the poor should charge, and if so, should they make a profit."
However, this was not my point. My question was why, given the target audience as noted in the Google post and Grameen Foundation press release, for at least one of the services (SMS Tips) the cost per SMS comes at the highest premium price but is not advertised as such in the promotional literature and PR. Secondly, given that Google Labs in India makes a smilar SMS info service available at the regular cost of an SMS in India (which is exceedingly cheap), why does Google behave so differently in the African market, in essence colluding with the absorbitantly high costs of SMS there?
So I emailed Rachel Payne, Google’s lead in Uganda to clarify the costs that I only speculated about. Here is what she says, clarifying the pricing:
Google, in partnership with MTN Uganda, has launched 'Google SMS', a set of services that allows users in the country to access SMS information services. These include, for example, access to health and agriculture tips, weather information, and news and sports. Google offers these online information services aready on the web, but is now expanding them to SMS - however, at a high price per SMS.
"We seek to serve a broad base of people -- not only those who can afford to access the Internet from the convenience of their workplace or with a computer at home," said Rachel Payne, Google's country manager for Uganda, in a post on the Google blog.
Must work on mobile devices that are widely used in Asia (China in particular, but also Myanamar) and the Middle East (Iran for example). These are regions where State-sponsored Internet blocking is rampant.
Must be possible to download and install by a non-technical device owner using a simple one-click install, with an optional settings step and optional advanced settings.
A company that provides charity text donation services is believed to be the first to waive its commission on donations to third sector organisations. Win handles ‘short code transactions', or texts to numbers of about five digits, between charities and donors. It usually receives between five and 10 pence per standard £1.50 text donation, but has said this week that it will waive the fee for charities and other not-for-profit organisations using its services. About 30 per cent of every text donation made to sector organisations in the UK is taken in charges by third-party service providers and mobile networks.
It's been an eventful week here at MobileActive.org with much going on. So it's only now that we are happy to announce that MobileActive.org is a 2009 Knight Foundation News Challenge Winner. The prize is for the Mobile Media Toolkit, a comprehensive directory of mobile tools and strategies that will allow anyone use mobile tech for citizen media and journalism. We believe that there is a critical need for better aggregation and presentation of tools, tech, and resources for citizens and media organizations around the world. MobileActive.org is one of nine winners, out of more than 3,000 applicants.
For more, watch this video, courtesy of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University, where I explain what the Mobile Media Toolkit is all about. Thank you, Knight Foundation, and Gary Kebbel, Knight Foundation journalism program director, for your support of our work. (video after the break)
This spring, UNICEF Malawi and the UNICEF Innovations Team deployed RapidSMS to monitor child growth and nutrition. We wrote about it previously here.
Now there is a detailed report (pdf), evaluating the effort. The report, released on June 16th, was issued by Columbia University's School of Public Policy and Affairs (SIPA), UNICEF Malawi, UNICEF's Innovations team, and Mobile Development Solutions (MDS).
The report details the findings of the deployment, and outlines recommendations for the future use of SMS in Malawi. Raymond Short of Mobile Development Solutions says that,
On July 5th, Mexicans will go to the polls to elect new members of the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of Congress. Two Mexican initiatives, Cuidemos El Voto and Anulo Mi Voto, are using SMS in different ways to make people's voices heard in what they fear will be a less-than-democratic election.
Cuidamos El Voto
By simply sending a text message, citizens will be able to report any voting irregularities or other problems. But Oscar Salazar hopes that Cuidemos El Voto, the vote monitoring system, doesn't receive too many texts.
"We really hope that the number of incidents is low, this will mean Mexican democracy is for real," wrote Salazar in an email interview with MobileActive, who is coordinating the project. "However, if this is not the case, we want to provide NGOs and common citizens with the tools to enforce this process."
In the growing network of people in the MobileActive.org staffers and contributors, I am very pleased to welcome yet another amazing woman in mobile. Leigh Jaschke is our new MobileActive.org Fellow for the next few months. She'll be focusing on building out our database of projects and increqase resources and information specifically on formal and informal ways in with mobile phones are used for learning, public education, education, and training.
Here is a bit more about her: Leigh is an educator and trainer with 6 years of international experience. She has worked in international development, and in program and event management. She is currently researching the role of mobile technology in education sector capacity building. Leigh holds a degree in International Development and Economics and will complete her Master of International Education in May 2010. She is fluent in French, and has also worked in German, Spanish, Mandarin, and Bambara (Mali).
At a small agrarian cooperative in Chile, farmers with little access to the internet have a new source of farming information: text messaging.
The messages, a combination of national and international news and farming information about topics like weather and pricing, are part of a project called DatAgro, which aims to bring relevant farming information to rural populations that have little access to computers. DatAgro is a project of Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit DataDyne. The pilot is being implemented by the Santiago-based Zoltner Consulting Group, which looks at ways that ICTs can be used for development. The project is primarily funded by a $325,000 Knight News Challenge Grant and will continue until November 2010.
"The idea was to create a platform that allowed people who didn't have access to the internet to access news," said Meghan Cagley, a program officer at DataDyne.
Sharek961 is another effort in Lebanon to monitor the election there today on June 7. Unlike LADE which uses more than 2,000 trained volunteer election monitors to systematically report from polling stations throughout the day, Sharek961 aims to get ordinary Lebanese citizen to text, call, and email in incidences from polling stations, crowdsourcing the conduct of the critically important election there.
According to Sharek961's press release,
"Sharek961.org [is[... empowering citizens to report in Arabic and in English, through four means; SMS, email, Twitter and web reports. Reports can address anything election-related happening around the country, from political rallies and polling queues to vote-buying and violence. Sharek961 anonymously publishes these reports alongside news reports, blog posts, photos, videos and tweets, on an interactive map, making them publicly available to all citizens, media outlets, and organizations."
Lebanon will hold a critically important parliamentary election on June 7, and election observers from around the world have descended on the country. However, as in many other countries now, there are local organizations and citizen efforts on the ground that are using mobile technology for sophisticated election observation efforts. The Lebanese Association for Democratic Elections (LADE) and the Coalition Libanaise pour l’Observation Elections (CLOE), for example, have put in place an extensive SMS reporting system, for example. LADE will deploy a total of 2,500 volunteer citizen observers throughout the country directly at the 5181 polling stations.
So asks the Enough Project, and its new campaign Raise Hope for Congo. The Enough Project is part of the Center for American Progress, a US-based left-leaning think tank and advocacy organization. The Enough Project's campaign aims, according to Eileen White Read from the organization in an article submitted to MobileActive.org to
..end the trade in “conflict minerals” from the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo, which are sold by rebel groups to purchase arms and serve as a direct cause of widespread sexual violence in that country.
In Uganda, medical clinics keep track of patient and medical payment records on paper. They then carry these often error-ridden forms to a management agency, where the information is manually entered into a database to receive reimbursements for the care provide. The process is tedious, time-consuming and leads to errors that can be costly for the local clinics. Melissa Ho, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California Berkeley School of Information in the United States, believes that a mobile phone can make the process more efficient and accurate, saving money and resources for local clinics.
At the turn of millennium, tech journalists (clawing their way back from the Y2k=K non-disaster) found smartphones. Futuristic interfaces, newly-discovered mobility and the work-anywhere promise of the Blackberry kicked off the trend, later boosted by the emergence of high-speed mobile Internet and a new crop of Internet-enabled devices. Market figures are for smartphones are certainly impressive, with Gartner recording device sales of 139.4 million in 2008, up 13.9% from 2007.
That same year, the meteoric rise of the iPhone gave us the ability to purchase third-party smartphone applications through the App Store which became a major selling point for the hardware. In the first quarter of 2009, smartphone sales represented 13.5% of mobile phone sales worldwide. Sales show no sign of slowing, and neither does the blistering pace of innovation in hardware, interfaces and 'ecosystems' like the App Store.
We are proud and happy that six months of hard work have paid off - the Open Mobile Consortium has launched officially today. Conceived at MobileActive08 in South Africa, the OMC is featuring a suite of fully open source mobile applications focused on health and humanitarian work. The OMC is an unprecedented collaboration amongst nine high-profile organizations to develop an interopable set of platforms of high-quality open source mobile tools for humanitarian and civil society work.
Here is our press release:
New York, NY – May 26, 2009 – The Open Mobile Consortium today launched its global development community to help organizations working towards social good to better collaborate and share mobile phone-based technologies. The OMC’s open source software tools help organizations to better serve the health, humanitarian and development needs of the “bottom billion,” the poorest and most disenfranchised citizens of the world.
With the proliferation of interest in Mobile Tech 4 Social Change Camps around the world, we have now put up a wiki to keep track of and provide resources for this growing movement of M4Change Camps. The wiki includes a detaied FAQ on how you can run your own Mobile Tech 4 Social Change camp (because this small team here is, well, very small!). Spread the love and roll a camp in your town!
Mobile Tech 4 Social Change Camps are local events for people passionate about using mobile technology for social impact and to make the world a better place.
Each event includes interactive discussions, hands-on-demos, collaborative scheming about ways to use, develop, and deploy mobile technologies in health, advocacy, economic development, environment, human rights, citizen media, to name a few areas.
There is a new initiative under way to used use old phones to donate money for mobile health initiatives for clinics in Africa. The Hope Phones campaign is a project of kiwanja.net, the UK parent organization of FrontlineSMS, a text messaging platform. The project asks people in the United States to donate their old phones for a small donation, in turn, to FrontlineSMS that then can be used to purchase new phones for community health workers in clinics in Malawi and other countries in sub-Saharan Africa.
I attended Mobile Tech 4 Social Change in New York back in February. It was a bit of a trek from Halifax, Nova Scotia but Jacob Colker (co-founder of The Extraordinaries) convinced me it was good opportunity to meet like-minded people interested in using mobile technologies for social good. Jacob was right, I was absolutely blown away by the incredible people devoting their lives to helping make the world a better place. I was so inspired by the event, I decided to organize the same event in Halifax.
I am a member of the Working Group of the Open Mobile Consortium, a now publicly launching collaboration among organizations around the world focused on developing open source mobile solutions for social impact and change.
There have been many myths surrounding open source software and little conversation in this field why open source software is important and successful, especially in the context of developing countries and in the field of mobiles for development. I'd like to debunk some of these myths and clarify why the Open Mobile Consortium is focused on open source mobile solutions that build on, and talk to one another. I also invite comments for anything that I have missed or differing point of views.
Ken Banks has a theory: The long tail theory of mobile applications for social development. It goes something like this, paraphrasing him from his incendiary blog post:
Mobiles are the most rapidly adopted technology in history. But if mobiles truly are as revolutionary and empowering, then don't we have a moral duty in the ICT for Development (ICT4D) community to see that they fulfill that potential?
Banks says that indeed, we do have that moral duty, and I agree with him wholeheartedly there.
Midway through last week’s Mobile Tech 4 Social Change BarCamp in Washington DC, my fellow public health student, Ada Kwan, and I were inspired to propose a session on the role of academic research in the current mobile movement – a topic of many of our personal conversations.
Among the participants were representatives from academia (including but not limited to public health, computer science, information technology, and political science), industry, NGOs, funding agencies, and government. The session sparked very constructive dialogue that I would like to share.
As the session unfolded, the complexity of this idea quickly became evident. The original question—what is the role of academic research in mobiles for social change— opened the floodgates for more difficult questions:
Imagine you are an NGO (a non-governmental organization) in a developing country, working on a critical development issue -- say, developing an educational infrastructure for women and girls. You know that mobile technology can help you in this regard and you have a project in mind that you want to try out, involving the use of SMS content and mobile information services for rural teachers. You think that there are tools and content out there for your particular needs - but you may have no idea how to access relevant expertise, mobile tools, or content.
Enter Vodafone, one of the largest mobile telecommunications network companies in the world, operating in 25 countries with partner networks in another 42 countries.
Take a low-cost ultrasound probe, a Windows mobile phone, and the skills of two scientists at Washington University in St Louis in the United States, and you get the world's first mobile-phone ultrasound instrument.
USB-based ultrasound probes have been around since 2005, offering a much cheaper and more portable alternative to larger ultrasound machines. Probes provide increasingly high-quality imaging for a tenth of the cost. A typical, portable ultrasound device costs around $20,000, while USB probes sell for around $2,000 right now - and the price is declining. Probes are ideally suited for first-responders and for primary care in developing countries, for example.
The small probes are connected to a phone with a USB cord that have been, typically, connected to a laptop for displaying the images. But carrying around laptops for transmitting images is not an option in many clinics in developing countries for lack of consistent electricity, heat, and lack of Internet access.
UPDATE: In an email conversation with Yaw, he pointed out a few additional noteworthy things about the Open Data Kit.
Here is how our client is different:
As researchers we want to push the boundaries of what organizations can do today to collect their rich data. We want users to own, visualize and share this data without the difficulties of setting up and maintaining servers. We want the tools to be easy to deploy, easy to use, open source and freely available. It is only now that technology (hardware, software and infrastructure) which matches our above ideals have become available.
ODK is more than open source, it is open standards, easy to work with and available today. We use xforms standard for input and output. Organizations can start with low end java phones and run Javarosa. When they are ready to collect data on a more powerful platform, they can move up to the ODK Collect on android phones and all their forms will still work. Results can be sent to any compatible xforms server (in fact, RapidsSMS support is coming soon).
For developers, the code base is easy to use. For example, if you wanted to add barcode reading or submission to Openmrs servers over wifi, it will take very few lines of code. We already have local African developers working on similar functionality.
We've piloted the application and are scaling rapidly. We started with twenty devices in Uganda which were used to collect over 1000 geotagged forms with images. Our upcoming deployment will be a couple of hundred devices collecting millions of forms.
ODK also has a ton of features and we adding more each day. Touchscreen UI with swipe navigation and progress bar, xforms compatible gps and photo support, question grouping, repeats and constraints, answer defaults and constraints, logic and branching in forms, and much more is coming. We put the roadmap at http://code.google.com/p/open-data-kit/wiki/RoadMap
We think we've pushed the state of data collection a bit forward. Certainly, ODK Collect is not for every organization who wants to do data collection, but for our partners who are using it now, it is providing a lot of value.
Open Data Kit (ODK) is a suite of tools aimed at resource-poor organizations to collect, transform and report their data. Developed by Yaw Anokwa and Carl Hartung from the University of Washington, ODK Collect enables mobile data collection on the Android platform. ODK is one of a growing number of mobile data caollection apps, many of which are reviewed here and here on MobileActive. This video gives an overview of the Open Data Kit. You can download the source code here.
