Farmer to farmer. Phone to phone.

In this - the fifth in our series of FrontlineSMS guest posts - Gary Garriott, Innovation Program Officer in the "Digital Futures for Development Program" at Winrock International, talks about their implementation of FrontlineSMS as part of a wider agriculture-based initiative in El Salvador Background

"Winrock International is a social enterprise which describes itself as a "mission-driven, nonprofit business". Winrock works with people in the United States and around the world to increase economic opportunity, sustain natural resources and protect the environment.

Derived from the international philanthropic tradition of the Rockefeller family, Winrock International (named for Winthrop Rockefeller, governor of Arkansas) and its predecessor organizations have acquired more than 50 years of development experience. Winrock has distinguished itself over this period by promoting capacity development for local entrepreneurship and community-based businesses in the areas of smallholder agriculture, environmental management, clean/renewable energy, and information and communications technologies.

Through its ‘Farmer to Farmer’ program, Winrock has been active in El Salvador in recent years providing volunteer technical assistance to smallholder farmers, especially to increase productivity and profitability in the horticulture and dairy subsectors. Sustainable approaches to achieve this objective are to strengthen agricultural sector institutions and improve sustainable use of natural resources. Both strategies tend to strengthen national trade institutions.

In this context Winrock works closely with FIAGRO, the Agricultural Technology Innovation Foundation - a local Salvadoran nonprofit - whose mission is to promote innovative technology for improving the competitive advantage of the agricultural sector. Through its Farmer to Farmer staff and Digital Futures for Development Program, Winrock provided an internal grant to FIAGRO to promote the use of cellular phones as a device to encourage buyers and sellers of agricultural products to exchange information and strengthen market linkages.

Mission link and rationale

Forty-six percent of of El Salvador’s population live in rural areas and earn incomes from agriculture-related activities. Even though the Internet has become an important worldwide diffusion media promoting the democratization of information and knowledge, farmers in El Salvador continue to be isolated from the new Information and Communications Technologies (ICT's) that could help them access local markets and develop business opportunities. A valuable alternative to computer-based information for farmers is the use of more affordable mobile phones, which are very popular even in rural areas. National statistics reveal that there are 55 mobile lines for every 100 inhabitants, representing an opportunity to use mobile lines as a real-time agribusiness information tool to promote products and services, and to establish real-time market links between producers and buyers and/or final consumers.

The Project

The aim of the project is to help Salvadoran agricultural and agro-industrial producers sell their products in local markets for better prices and to obtain better profit margins, thus mitigating the effect of intermediaries or middlemen. A primary target is better marketing of vegetables and garden crops.

Similarly, many of the SMEs that process grains and other agricultural feedstocks also depend on intermediaries and traders who tend to speculate and inflate prices during times of shortage, generating negative impacts on the profitability of these small companies.

The system envisioned by this project will allow producers and buyers to post buy/sell offers through SMS messaging directly to mobile phones or through a call center managed by the project where operators will log information obtained from semi-literate or illiterate farmers. Then summaries of these "classifieds ads" will be sent through SMS and e-mail to service subscribers. Additionally, communities of buyers/sellers with Internet access will be able to see these offers on a project web site as well as through RSS feeds via other web sites. Thus producers and buyers will be able to interchange information and directly develop commercial activities without total reliance on intermediaries.

While this system uses multiple channels to create an information exchange network, it focuses on the cell phones since mobile technology is nearly ubiquitous as the most pervasive channel with the most penetration in rural areas.

The FrontlineSMS application

Originally, the project envisioned working directly with a Salvadoran mobile operator that had offered to provide software interfaces as well as billing capabilities. While these discussions continue and will hopefully be successful, FrontlineSMS provides a more than adequate platform to move this project into operational mode and will likely provide service well beyond the pilot stage.

FrontlineSMS has, in short, saved the project from becoming trapped in a slow-moving bureaucratic process and allows projects results to be obtained during the time-critical pilot implementation in order to justify Winrock’s internal investment as well as the institutional commitment made by FIAGRO.

The pilot implementation manages and posts buy/sell offers from buyers and sellers. If sellers (usually smallholder farmers) are not comfortable using SMS, they can call a small call center managed by FIAGRO and an operator requests all the information needed to produce a ‘classified ad’ ready for posting through multiple channels. A daily summary is sent via SMS to the users of the pilot system as a digest of all the offers published during the previous 24 hours, divided into various categories. FrontlineSMS in combination Clickatell is used to send and receive SMS messages among large numbers of users. Through the call center, the user can also call to get specific information about products geographically close to a particular market or urban center and in the same way can request information about buyers for specific products.

Through FrontlineSMS, the functionality to directly publish offers through SMS over the Internet is being added too, where the users write a keyword, either to Buy or Sell, followed by the product information such as name, amount, sell or buy price, and product location. All this information will be added to the pilot system and available when the users contact the call center.

The pilot will accommodate approximately 600 users with technological resources currently available; however, to scale to a larger user group and expand it to a regional or even national level, further investment is required for additional technological and human resources, such as software development, computer and communications equipments and collaborators that support project operation through national mobile operators. The system will be sustained based on per call charges made to the call center as well as charges for SMS reception. Users will be charged only for the information they receive or request and with the frequency desired; the user can cancel the subscription at any time.

We believe this to be the first FrontlineSMS trading application in the agricultural space in El Salvador and possibly the first anywhere in Central America. Further information is available on the short video below.

From the FrontlineSMS Community site

Thank you FrontlineSMS!"

Gary Garriott Digital Futures for Development Program Winrock International www.winrock.org

Other staff involved in the project include:

Ricardo Hernández Auerbach, Regional Director, Farmer to Farmer Program, Winrock International Juan Carlos Hidalgo, Executive Director, FIAGRO (Fundación para la Innovación Tecnológica Agropecuaria) Raúl Corleto, ICT Coordinator,  FIAGRO (Fundación para la Innovación Tecnológica Agropecuaria)

@twitter meets @frontlinesms

@jack - inventor, Founder and Chairman of Twitter - meets up with @kiwanja - developer of FrontlineSMS - at the "Symposium on Technologies for Social Action" (e-STAS) conference in Malaga last week, where they both spoke about elements of citizen empowerment.

In their quest for globally-available, affordable (free!) text messaging, the Twitter folk are not alone, but unlike their non-profit counterparts Twitter are beginning to win the battle of nerves with the operators (expect to see free messaging slowly come back over the coming year). NGOs the world over can only dream of having this kind of clout, although it was interesting comparing the Twitter experience with that faced by FrontlineSMS users and the wider NGO community.

It'll be interesting to see where the Twitter Foundation might go with this, if and when we ever see one.

Guardian: Free text messages save lives in Malawi

FrontlineSMS:Medic is relatively straightforward and, apparently, effective. Community health workers, most of whom had never seen a mobile phone, let alone owned one, were trained to send text messages containing medical information back to the hospital staff.

If health workers sent a drug name in a text, the system would automatically respond with information on dosages and usage. Health workers can also give status updates on particular patients or make a call for further medical information to help them treat cases on the go. It is particularly important in a country where HIV and Aids are rife – with infection rates as high as 70% in some areas.

"If you ask the community health workers why they are doing their work, it's because friends and family were literally dropping dead around them and they wanted to do what they could to help," says Nesbit. "Basically they had all of the ethos, but didn't have the connection to the real resources at the hospital."

The pilot project, which has been running for five months, has already had a significant impact: as well as getting emergency medical attention for 130 people who would have otherwise gone unseen, it has allowed the hospital's tuberculosis officer to treat twice as many people because his time can now be more used more efficiently.

The system, which costs around $500 (£349) to operate, has also had a financial benefit, which is particularly important in a place where resources are severely strained. Two members of staff estimate that they will each save around $5,000 a year in fuel costs alone.

Read more on the Guardian website.

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 Martin valley in Trinidad and Tobago. Like many communities in the country, Blue Range has begun to feel the effects of the country's rising crime rate (543 murders were recorded in 2008), mainly in the form of burglaries.

The community has a private security patrol and a number of streets are sealed off with barriers at night. Blue Range also maintains a Google Group mailing list which residents and the neighbourhood association use to share information.

Just after midnight on December 4th, 2008, a resident sent a message to the mailing list stating that around 7:45pm he'd seen two men behaving suspiciously in the neighbourhood. Around 8:15pm on the same night, two men broke into the home of another resident. The resident put up a fight and managed to drive the men away, but ended up quite badly injured as a result. That resident and others in the area reported that they had in fact heard dogs barking around that time. It seemed obvious that if the first resident had put his neighbours on the alert at the time he had seen the two men, the incident could have been avoided.

With that in mind, I started looking for ways that security-related information could be shared more quickly and easily among the area's residents. In my work on the citizen media project Global Voices, I'd come across FrontlineSMS, and decided to try it.

After testing it for several days with a group of my neighbours, I presented FrontlineSMS at a community meeting on December 7th, 2008.  The service now has over 250 subscribers.

Blue Range's FrontlineSMS set-up, currently run from my home on a Macintosh computer, a Motorola PEBL phone and a Clickatell messaging account, is largely automated. Subscribers can add themselves to the service by texting in "addme [name]" (numbers are verified before they're added to the messaging group). Subscribers can broadcast messages to the entire group of users by adding a specially designated prefix to their text, messages which are then distributed using the message "forwarding" functionality in FrontlineSMS. All security messages sent via the automatic broadcast are also archived on the neighbourhood mailing list using the email forwarding functionality in the software, where residents can discuss them and offer supplementary information.

The FrontlineSMS service has been highly effective in building a greater sense of security and community in Blue Range, and in helping residents feel like they are being kept in the loop with regard to incidents in the area. Recently, for instance, when a security chopper was hovering over the area for about 20 minutes, a message relayed via FrontlineSMS assured residents that the chopper was there not to look for perpetrators but to support a medical evacuation.

In a more recent incident in the area, a burglary on January 12th in which one resident was bound and gagged by the perpetrator - and his wife made to walk through the house and hand over their valuables - has nevertheless revealed gaps in the service and demonstrated that certain parts of the neighbourhood lack the critical mass of subscribers required for it to be really effective.

With each incident, however, more residents are beginning to realise the value of subscribing to the service".

Georgia Popplewell Managing Director Global Voices www.globalvoicesonline.org

Chipping away at the SMS literacy barrier

With all the excitement surrounding Monday's launch of FrontlineForms, we almost forgot the other improvements we've made to the FrontlineSMS software. As well as support for IntelliSMS - another Clickatell-style online aggregator - we finally got round to adding Unicode support which, to the non-technical, means you can now send and receive messages in foreign scripts, i.e. non-Latin or non-Roman character sets. Projects in India and the Middle East have been asking for this, and it's exciting to see it finally delivered (thanks Alex!).

Although there are still very real literacy issues for SMS-based social mobile projects, at least allowing messages to be sent and received in the local language - assuming handset support is available - removes at least one more barrier. We're excited to see how much this ends up being used, and what further opportunities it opens up for FrontlineSMS users around the world.

Aid Worker Daily: FrontlineSMS introduces FrontlineForms and changes the game for all of us.

Read more at Aid Worker Daily.

FrontlineSMS: Now with Forms

It's been a hectic few months, but we're finally there. Today we're excited to announce the release of the new FrontlineForms, an SMS-driven data collection tool which seamlessly integrates into our existing and growing FrontlineSMS platform. Sure, data collection tools already exist, but many require mobile internet access to function, degrees in Linux to get running, or PDAs or the kinds of phones that just aren't available to the masses in most developing countries. FrontlineForms runs on most high- and low-end Java-enabled phones, can be downloaded directly onto a handset over-the-air, doesn't require internet access beyond installation, and utilises the already-proven simple user interface of FrontlineSMS. In short, FrontlineForms compliments our existing focus on empowering the social mobile long tail with an entry-level, usable data collection tool.

According to my thinking, tools for the long tail need - among other things - to run on readily available hardware wherever possible, and be simple to install and easy to use. These innocent little criteria can create huge challenges, though. Writing an application which runs on all desktops (Windows, Mac and the various flavours of Linux), that interfaces locally with the widest range of phones and modems, and connects remotely with a data collection tool which runs on as many Java-enabled handsets as possible is a huge technical challenge. Many other mobile solutions concentrate on one desktop operating system, or a small family of mobile phones (sometimes just a single phone), which is all fine if you want to concentrate on users higher up the long tail. With our focus on grassroots NGOs, we don't.

So, this is how it works. Using the new FrontlineSMS Forms Editor (above), users are able to create a form visually on their computer by dragging-and-dropping field types, giving them names and setting other parameters along the way. The form is then encoded and sent via SMS to any number of handsets running the FrontlineForms client, a small program which runs on a wide range of Java-enabled handsets. Once these handsets receive a new form, the Java client interprets the data, saves the form layout and displays a mobile version ready for the fieldworker to complete (see below).

The FrontlineForms client can hold many different forms at the same time, all selectable from a drop-down menu. As requirements change new forms can be built and distributed by simply texting them to the recipients handset through FrontlineSMS - they don't need to travel to the office to be added. Once out in the field the user simply inputs their data, and once complete multiple forms are combined and compressed, ready to be sent back to the FrontlineSMS hub, again as SMS. If at any time users find themselves working out of range of a mobile signal, the data is usefully held in "offline" mode until connectivity is restored.

The addition of data collection functionality to FrontlineSMS is a significant step forward for the software. From today, non-profit organisations in the developing world can experiment with anything from simple two-way group messaging campaigns to prototyping SMS-based information services, or start collecting data in the field, all through a single software application. The modular nature of FrontlineSMS means that users are able to deactivate functionality they do not need, but then easily reactivate it as they grow into SMS services. Future "modules" will include mapping functionality - powered by Ushahidi - and multimedia messaging (due later this year) allowing the transmission of pictures, audio, video and text. More specialist applications, including those being developed independently by the FrontlineSMS:Medic team, will also appear as optional modules.

According to Dr. Luis Sarmenta of the Next Billion Network and MIT Media Lab - whose students worked on pre-release versions of the tool as part of their own projects:

"Data collection from the field is one of the most common needs we see among projects in the developing world today, and enabling people to use mobile phones instead of paper would empower a lot of groups and people out there to do their work more efficiently, more effectively, and with broader reach. FrontlineForms seeks to provide this profoundly useful capability while remaining true to the goal of ease-of-use that has been the key to FrontlineSMS' success and value"

Télécoms Sans Frontières (TSF) were equally positive after spending several days putting the entire platform through its paces as part of a wider evaluation exercise. According to Grégory Rebattu, TSF’s Niger Representative:

"Crucially from our perspective, FrontlineSMS is extremely user-friendly, allowing partner organisations on the ground to rapidly deploy a data collection and dissemination system from scratch. This simplicity is crucial for organizations which may lack technical skills, and users can be up and running in a matter of minutes with the minimum of mouse clicks. The intuitive nature of the software also means that little technical support is required once they’re up and running"

Today's release of FrontlineForms gives many new and existing FrontlineSMS users access to entry-level data collection tools for the very first time. Those that find it valuable, and those whose data collection needs grow, can then move onto more scalable and powerful solutions such as those developed by DataDyne, an organisation we've been in contact with over the years and whose work is making a considerable impact in parts of the developing world. What FrontlineForms aims to do, over-and-above anything else, is give grassroots NGOs the opportunity to try out mobile data collection with the minimum of fuss, the minimum need for high-level technical expertise or equipment, and the minimum of funding.

These are exciting times for the FrontlineSMS community. The software has been allowed to develop organically, based very much on the needs of  users in the field, and it continues to power increasing numbers of social change projects around the world. If 2009 doesn't turn out to be the "Year of Mobile" everyone is talking about, we'll sure be doing our best to make it the "Year of the FrontlineSMS user".  o/

(Further details on today's FrontlineForms launch can be found on the official Press Release. A special thanks goes to Tess Conner for her work on media and PR, to MIT and Télécoms Sans Frontières for their feedback, to the team at Masabi for their commitment and contribution to the project, to members of the FrontlineSMS Communiity for their ideas and enthusiasm, and to members of the wider social mobile community for their continued support and encouragement. You know who you are)