Reminders and MMS receiving: announcing a major new FrontlineSMS release

Today, we're very pleased to announce a new FrontlineSMS release - version 1.6.16, to be precise - with two major new features: MMS receiving and the Reminders module!

With this release, FrontlineSMS allows you to receive multimedia messages via a standard email account. More complex than SMS messages, MMS can include text, images, video and audio. This is a massive step forward for FrontlineSMS, and opens the door for the first time to receiving photo, audio and video reports, medical diagnostics via MMS…and more user innovations. We hope you will share your ideas, and if you plan to use MMS with FrontlineSMS please let us know!

For the moment, FrontlineSMS can only receive MMS via email, which requires the computer running the platform to have access to the internet. However, most mobile carriers worldwide support sending MMS from a mobile phone to an email address. Read more on our updated help pages.

Another keenly awaited new feature is the Reminders plugin from Dale Zak, which allows you to schedule email and SMS reminders for a specific date range and interval such as hourly, daily, weekly, monthly or by specific day(s) of the week.

Examples of practical applications include prompting patients to take anti-retroviral medication, reminding parolees to meet with probation officers, and helping special needs populations to live independently. Already, Babakan Sari Community Health Center in Indonesia has expressed enthusiasm for using the new feature for outreach to Tuberculosis patients.

Many of you are familiar with Dale - he is an active social mobile developer who also works as Mobile Project Manager for Ushahidi. The reminders plugin source code has been available on GitHub for some time for those of you with the developer skills to incorporate it into FrontlineSMS. Now we are delighted to bundle it with this official release. It's still in Beta, which means we want our users to actively test it. Please let us know if you encounter bugs and (as ever) we welcome your feedback and comments on how we can make improvements. We think the Reminders plugin illustrates the heart of the FrontlineSMS approach - by the community, for the community.

We are also happy announce significant interface improvements to the import tool by Morgan Belkadi, to enable you to preview the contacts data you're importing and to preserve your group hierarchies - check out this screenshot of our beautiful new preview tool:

The HTTP trigger is getting a tweak too - it is now possible to set it to start automatically when you launch FrontlineSMS. And last but not least, we're very grateful to be including a new Ukrainian translation from Katerina Ivchenko and Aleksei Ivanov.

Click here to go to the download page.

This release has truly been a team effort - from the users who sent in MMS during testing, to our developers and testers all over the world, to the core team and the donors who make this all possible. Heartfelt thanks to you all. o/

The Daily Maverick: FrontlineSMS: Mass communication where the Internet ends

Called FrontlineSMS all the system needs to operate as an effective communicator is a computer, a mobile phone and the text message-based software. The boon of this system is that it works where the Internet cannot reach and is a major benefit to marginalised NGOs and other rural organisations. “At St Gabriel the software is used to coordinate community healthcare workers running over a huge area to check if people are going to be available, when they are due to take their medication, and to mobilise communities when the mobile clinic is on its way,” says Ken Banks of Kiwanja who invented FrontlineSMS. Hailing from the UK’s Channel Islands, Banks was firmly entrenched in a financial and technology career, which by his own admission was rather boring, when in 1993 he joined a developmental mission to build a school in Zambia. The experience was life changing and a couple of years later he was back in Africa, this time in Uganda to build a hospital. By the time he returned to the UK, he had decided to study social anthropology and to find a way to use his tech skills to benefit the developmental sector.

Read more on the Daily Maverick Website.

TechCrunch: Crowdsourcing Disaster Relief

A group of companies, including Ushahidi, FrontlineSMS, CrowdFlower and Samasource, collaborated to set up a text message hotline – “Mission 4636” – supported by the U.S. Department of State. The Haitian government collaborated with radio stations to advertise the hotline, and a few days after the disaster, anyone in Port-au-Prince could send an SMS to a toll-free number, 4636, to request help. The messages were routed to relief crews at the U.S. Coast Guard and the International Red Cross on the ground.

Read more on the TechCrunch Website.

White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood: Mum's Tattoo Parlour at Glastonbury Festival

Our twenty-sixth guest post comes from the lovely James at the White Ribbon Alliance, who piloted FrontlineSMS in campaigning in a particularly innovative and fun bit of awareness-raising - offering free transfer tattoos at Glastonbury Festival... The White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood is a coalition of individuals and organisations that campaign to make pregnancy and childbirth safe for all women and newborns. With members in 148 countries, I had thought for a while that FrontlineSMS could be a very useful tool for many of our members, so was keen to "road-test" the software when the opportunity presented itself.

Glastonbury Festival seemed like a great opportunity to do so. For the second year running, we were running a campaign to raise awareness of Maternal Health - by offering people the ultimate way to show how much they love their mum - by coming to our "tattoo parlour" and having a classic "mum" heart tattoo.

In the first year, we were taken aback by the amazing response and the vast number of people that got a tattoo and signed up to be part of our movement. However, this left us with thousands of people's handwritten contact details to type up onto the computer for our mailing lists, which made it really difficult for us to get back to them quickly and simply.

So, this year, I downloaded FrontlineSMS, bought an old electric pink Sony Ericsson phone and USB cable from the Queensway Computer Market (for any London dwellers, this is a veritable Aladdin's cave of old phones, computers and parts), and a SIM card, so that people could text us their email addresses instead.

I had a couple of hiccups setting up FrontlineSMS with the phone - firstly, drivers weren't available for, or didn't work with, Windows 7 - which meant that computer that I'd been putting off upgrading from Windows XP was suddenly my least favourite machine in the office no more - and then the first set of drivers that I downloaded for the phone didn't allow FrontlineSMS to see the handset.

However, a quick search for the phone's model number on FrontlineSMS's forums turned up a link for alternative drivers, which linked the phone up and meant it could send and receive texts perfectly.

Not wanting to risk taking a laptop to the muddy fields of Somerset, I anxiously left the computer in the office running FrontlineSMS with my fingers crossed that it wouldn't crash and that no-one turned it off whilst I was at the festival.

Happily though, when I returned, everything was still running - and a couple of minutes later, I had exported all the email addresses into a nice .csv file ready to be imported into our mailing list server! Unfortunately, we still had thousands of handwritten signups to transcribe. Whilst I don't think we'll ever eliminate this, FrontlineSMS seems like a really effective way to reduce the use of paper, offer easier ways for people to ask for more information about our campaigns, and for us to get back in contact with them.

Perhaps more importantly, it proved itself a reliable tool that I think has the potential to be really useful to our members around the world - and we look forward to introducing them to it and hearing their thoughts and ideas of how they might use it for their own work in support of Maternal Health.

Your stories are our bread and butter

Friday morning saw me zooming up Portobello Road in west London, cursing the tourists and looking forward to a large flat white with some new acquaintances - I was meeting with a couple of people have just started to use FrontlineSMS for campaigning. This is an increasingly common, and always delightful, part of my job. I generally pepper people with questions, exclaim 'that's interesting' every ten seconds, and scribble furious notes. Often, people ask for advice - what's the best way to fit this into our programme? How should we pilot? How much will it cost? The thing is, I'm not the expert, hence all my questions - but I know where to find the real pros.

FrontlineSMS are a diverse bunch, based all over the world, as our new Member Map is beginning to show. You're working on projects in all sorts of fields, from safe motherhood, to community cohesion, to citizen journalism, to minority rights activism, and all points between and beyond. And YOU are the FrontlineSMS implementation experts. We know the theory, and of course we know the software, but there's no substitute for experience when it comes to finding ways around the real world pitfalls and problems that users encounter. So if anything, I'm less an expert myself, and more of a matchmaker, linking people using FrontlineSMS in similar ways; or a librarian, remembering stories of past solutions and pointing them out to people encountering a similar problem.

So where do we find these examples? Well, face to face meetings are probably the richest way for us to find out what you're up to. We'll go anywhere! Send us an email and we'll hop on a plane, train or death-defying local form of motorbike transport and come see you. Failing that,  we often give examples from our guest posts, or from email correspondence with unfailingly generous people all over the world who have millions of things to do, and yet still find the time to sit down and tell us what they're up to.

We're also working with a couple of our users to write up glossy, jointly-branded case studies, which get into a bit more technical detail than a guest post can, try to show the impact FrontlineSMS has had, and even list local suppliers. The idea is that FrontlineSMS users should be able to use these documents themselves to explain the SMS portion of their project to their own donors and stakeholders. They'll also be an invaluable resource for others looking to implement a similar programme. Watch this space for the first case study in the next few weeks.

At a more basic level, we need more data about who's using FrontlineSMS - we need to know who you are, where you are, and what you're doing. People like numbers - what, where, how many. For this reason, we added a small tool to a recent version of FrontlineSMS that offers to send back anonymised statistics to us (more on that in a future blogpost, as they've only just started to come in).We'll also be running a user survey in September to try and get a better picture of how FrontlineSMS is being used. Finally, in 2011 we'll be working on allowing you to register your copy of FrontlineSMS.

All this information gathering has three purposes:

1. We find that it's only when we get to know you that we start to hear what we should be improving, what not's working, what else we should add. All the new features we've added (Translation Manager, Forms, and the HTTP trigger) have been in response to your feedback. And it's only when you tell us that we know something's not working - users reported a problem with the software on Monday morning, and we had it fixed and a new version uploaded within a few hours.
2. As I said above, you're the experts. Hearing from you means we can share more with other users, and help give people ideas for how to use FrontlineSMS in their own work.
3. We can explain to our donors and supporters what FrontlineSMS is achieving in the world, which enables them to keep supporting us, and in turn, lets us keep doing all the things we do to keep FrontlineSMS evolving and keep the community flourishing.

Your stories keep us improving; keep us innovating; and keep the lights on in the office. Better still, they help inspire other users. Do you have a story to tell?