Mobile Tech Primer

From MobileActive Wiki

What do you Want to Do?

We started with a discussion of what people in the session wanted to accomplish, irregardless of the technology to do it.

Three main goals were articulated:

• Outgoing communication with people in a small area (town)
• Get a list of people to distribute content to via online sign-up for cellphone movies, alerts, ringtones, sms, mms
• Conversation with a group of individuals – school to school, for example, students talk to each other
• Build a closer relationship with feedback from people, for example the people tat are already recipients of an SMS from an organization.

We briefly discussed Alo Cidadao,a multi-service organization that has 450 mobile subscribers that receive regular messages. Most were recruited face-to-face and opted in to the mobile list in person at events or door-to-door recruiting.

Questions

• Can I spam people over sms? NO
• Brazilian overview with SMS
• What are the rules for SMS opt in?
• What are the costs to send 500 messages
• What are your users using - what kind of handsets, what are these handsets capable off, and what services are available at what costs?
• What are the opportunities we are not thinking of yet with 180 million Brazilians, 102 million of whom are cell phone users?

USERS

We discussed at length the characteristics of the constituents of the different organizations in the room and developed a list of typical users and what kind of mobile tech they might respond to.

• Older - voice, as a lot do not know how to SMS
• Illiterate - voice
• Poor – sms receive but not send since that costs money
• Rural – problems with coverage and access so mobile might be hard to use
• Languages – customized content/ language specific content, know who needs to get what is hard to do -- needs ways in which to
• Younger and more affluent – SMS and MMS (they have to have the right phone)
• Heterogeneous - SMS seems to be the right vehicle, lowest common denominator

Outgoing Communication: What are the Tech Options?

Voice

• Voice is mail, negative connotation for the most part (used by spam messages from the carriers) and it costs too much/R$ - No one listens to their voicemail
• Call someone with a recorded message? Requires additional technology and could be perceived as cold, impersonal unless it's a message from a friend or trusted source. Possible to use skype for recorded messages with a batch program. All requires some permission from operator.

SMS

• Seems more personal
• Spam issue -- opt-in process must be strictly observed

• Step I – online sign up and building your mobile numbers list
  • Face to face, door to door
  • Event sign up
  • Mail/paper
  • SMS/ advertisement/ posters
  • E-mail

• Step II – How to deliver SMS
  • Hire a vendor - costs R$ and may not have NGO experience but the only way to scale beyond a small distribution list/grow to some larger level

• • Software: DIY for bulk SMS; there are a number of options but they are only for small-scale distribution and do not scale well. Tools include: Okto, Frontline SMS, Microsoft SMS Server, etc. Also needs operator permission, most likely to avoid being shut down.

• Step III: Evaluate - how successful was the implementation? How did users respond? What is some user feedback? (Ask them!)

Bottom line that that you really need to KNOW YOUR USERS to make sure that you are delivering information in a way that is useful to them.

Other Tech Options for Outgoing Communications and Interactivity

• Interactive Voice Response (IVR) a voicemail system that people can access for specific information (press '1' for this information etc)
  • There are some open source tools such as Asterisk for this kind of system but it needs a techie to implement or money to pay a vendor.

Many-to-many/Group Conversation: What are the Options?

• Many to many via mobile is hard. In some countries there are mobile social networks (MxIt in South Africa) but not in Brazil. In many places this is still emerging.
• One possibility is a voice conference call, of course. With skype this can be done relatively inexpensively.
• Other option is to have some point person talking with one another, for example, teacher to teacher via mobile and then put the thread of the conversation on a huge screen that students can see or use an SMS blog that students are able to access so long as there is Internet access.
  • Nokia PC Suite could be used for accessing mobile content on a PC and then projecting it to a wall, for example, so a classroom can see the interaction or the mobile content.
  • Send SMS to an e-mail address that then updates a website or a blog and can be shown on a portal online. (requires internet access, though)

Examples and Ideas

• Jane Placca is working with information exchange projects between Southern Brasil (Integrart) and (Development for Peace Education ) Southern Africa, investigating different ways of transmitting and receiving information between disenfranchised communities in the Global South. Research within the rural communities being explored this year.

• Nani Catta Preta

Existem dois projetos. O primeiro é concluir o projeto iniciado há dois anos, criando um mapa afetivo na Estação da Luz. Foi realizada a entrevista, na qual desenhei essas pessoas e elas esperavam um retorno que fosse apresentado na rua, onde todo o projeto foi realizado com moradores de rua e trabalhadores da região (o projeto consistia no caminho que cada um fazia entre o trabalho e suas casas). Faz parte da tradição de São Paulo as pessoas irem e virem, todos são estrangeiros em São Paulo, mesmo quando se fala sobre bairrios. Uma das crianças entrevistadas sugeriu o uso do celular para contá-la o retorno da pesquisa realizada, no entanto o projeto não foi aprovado por falta de dinheiro e por acharem que o celular teria “uso indevido”. O segundo projeto é trabalhar em uma ONG na qual um dos projetos implementados ano que vem será a comunicação entre crianças de diferentes municípios do Brasil.