SMS inspiration: A view from the Central Independent States

I'm beginning this week in the small landlocked eastern European country of Moldova, talking to representatives of IREX-supported organisations running telecentres and internet access points across the region. We just had a short session on FrontlineSMS, explaining how it works, and starting to come up with ideas for how to use it. Even though we talk every day about how users innovate way beyond our wildest dreams, I somehow still wasn't prepared for the deluge of brilliant ideas coming from the floor! Here are just a few, which the group have generously allowed me to share as inspiration for others thinking about how to incorporate SMS into their work:

• In a wide geographic area, liaising with partner NGOs, colleagues, and even the authorities - even if it's just to SMS and point out an important email you sent that day. Where the Internet hasn't yet really taken hold, people often don't check their email accounts every day.
• To let people know about trainings and workshops, or ask them to get involved in campaigns and actions
• To create a feeling of community between schools and kindergartens across a wide area
• To let students know when their scholarship money is ready for collection
• To send information to newly arrived migrants in Kazakhstan, where migration is a high-profile issue; informing  them of the law on registration, the contact details of their embassies in-country, and how to get a visa, a work permit, or citizenship
• In a big country, the potential as a research tool and information-sharing tool is huge
• Updating parents about their child's academic performance and behaviour at school.

Participants were also very realistic about the obstacles to using SMS. In countries where SMS bundles aren't common, costs can quickly mount up. In some countries, people often have multiple SIM cards to use across multiple networks as a cost-saving measure - subscription-based services can be a challenge here. And users realised quickly that they had to plan for the service they are considering offering to really take off, so that they would have to resource administrative support for it - but some, such as those proposing parent information services for schools, also saw that they could generate an income to cover this from a small subscription fee for the service.

A final note of caution from me was that in some of these countries, SMS are routinely monitored for political activity not favourable to the government. Where this is the case, organisations need to be aware that mobile services - or even the mobile network - can be quickly shut down, or bulk messaging heavily regulated and the SMS themselves can put both the service provider and the people they are interacting with at risk.

Over the next couple of days I'll be working with individual users on their operational and practical challenges - including types of network, operating costs and staff time - and I'll post further reflections here when I can.

Texting for life in Pakistan: the International Organisation of Migration

The International Organisation for Migration, an intergovernmental organisation working to support people to return to their homes after being displaced by disaster of conflict, have been using FrontlineSMS in Pakistan for some months. Below, the twenty-eighth FrontlineSMS guest post is an operational update from Maria Ahmed and Isabel Leigh, in the Mass Communication Team.

October 15th is Global Handwashing Day, and in Pakistan, the IOM have been sending messages about hygiene and sanitation as part of their response to the devastating floods that hit Pakistan in recent months, affecting approximately 20 million people according to the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Aid (OCHA).

IOM are leading the  communication response on behalf of the UN 'Cluster System' of humanitarian responders, and have developed over 50 Public Service Announcements (PSAs) in Pashto, Sindhi and Punjabi on topics including  prevention of diarrohea and malaria, water purification methods, mother and child health during the fasting month of Ramadan, child protection issues, treating snake bites, setting up durable shelters and fire safety in camps.

IOM first started using FrontlineSMS in the North in 2009, to mirror humanitarian messages sent out using radio broadcasts with informational texts. People in Northern Pakistan, nearly 3 million of whom were displaced by conflict in 2009, use cell phones extensively amongst family members, often texting in Urdu ( the national language) using the English script. Using FrontlineSMS has saved IOM over $15,000 compared to the  costs they would have paid to develop an organised, mass texting system using a commercial supplier. Supported by Zong, the Pakistani subsidiary of China Mobile, IOM is sending free, bulk, informational messages to affectees and humanitarian workers across Pakistan to enhance informational outreach.

In the South, people are used to using mobiles for voice calls, but send far fewer text messages. So IOM are partnering with Zong, who have donated a million free phone calls through 100 cell phones to IOM to enable a free phone service for flood victims to get vital information, seek help and access relief services offered by the Government and aid agencies. IOM hope to continue to expand the service to reach more handsets in Sindh, Punjab and KP, and from January onwards, in Balochistan, Gilgit Baltistan and Pakistan Administered Kashmir.

ECOCARE Maldives: Project Mobilize

Our twenty-seventh guest post comes from ECOCARE Maldives, an NGO working for the protection and sustainable development of the environment, writing about how they've used FrontlineSMS in their environmental awareness programme with local school children. It's an incredibly simple use case, but it helps them to continue offering the service, and making a difference on the ground...

ECOCARE was introduced to FrontlineSMS software by 350.org during one of their SMS projects, Project Mobilize. After the October 24, 2009 event we used the software in one of our environmental awareness programs.

At the beginning of 2000, an ongoing environmental awareness program, called the Sonevafushi Nature Trip, was launched to create awareness among the primary school children of Malé and Baa Atoll. Baa Atoll lies about 96 miles to the north of Malé. Transporting 100 school children and teachers to the atoll was quite a challenge. School children from Malé and islands in Baa atoll work as colleagues to study the environmental issues such as mangrove ecosystem, coral reefs, beach erosion, biodiversity, natural vegetation, and waste in the atoll. We run the six-day program every year, during the school holidays.

The project makes it possible for children from Malé, who don't have the opportunity to experience greenery in the dusty, smoke-laden city. They are given a chance to learn what the environment is and what could be done to protect and preserve the environment for sustainable future development. They learn about the dependence that the fishing industry and tourism have on the coral reefs and life around it, and the great importance of protecting the reefs. At the same time, school children and the community in the islands of Baa atoll learn from their counterparts from Malé the extent of the environmental degradation that Malé has gone through in its urbanization, and understand the consequences if Baa follows in Malé's footsteps. In future, these children will become the citizens making the decisions to turn away from a path of environmental damage.

While the participants spend almost one week away from their family and concentrate only on the environment, we send important updates and other information via SMS to the mobile phones of their family members and other authorities, using FrontlineSMS. We've found it to be much more reliable than other softwarewe've used.

We’re still using FrontlineSMS on Project Mobilize and also we’ll be using it on our future Sonevafushi Nature Trips. FrontlineSMS is great software that we all at ECOCARE Maldives salute!!

CityCampLondon: thoughts on SMS and appropriate tech

This weekend has been spent at CityCampLondon, in a fog of coffee and beer, on Brick Lane and at the Kings Cross Hub, thinking and talking about using tech to make London better. I wanted to post a slightly more coherent version of my thoughts here.

At the Mobile in the City panel, I reflected on the UK's digital divide, which I've posted about here before, but took it further to suggest that the same factors preventing people from getting online might militate against them having a smart phone. As of January 2010, there were 11.1 million smart phones in the UK, 22.6% of active mobile contracts. Over three quarters of us still use 'dumb' phones. And while 31% of us browse the internet on our phones, 18% access social media and 13.7% access the news, 90.3% use SMS, or text messaging. Ok, so smartphone adoption is growing by an amazing 70% year on year, but I would argue that it's likely that the most marginalised and most vulnerable in society will be the last to see the benefits. Put simply, there's still an excellent case for using SMS to interact and communicate with people we struggle to reach using other technologies.

An example of this would be people who are rough sleeping, or homeless. A friend told me that when she volunteered in a soup kitchen, the most common request was for her to charge the batteries of people's pay-as-you-go phones behind the counter. Three soup kitchens, and one soup VAN, have downloaded FrontlineSMS to keep in touch with their regulars by text. Others are running helplines for teens, and domestic violence sufferers, or using SMS as an adjunct to treatment and support programmes for people with depression. People are collecting survey information, even reports of bird sightings. I'm searching right now for someone in the UK to house and maintain a simple FrontlineSMS hub to support activists monitoring evictions of Gypsies and Travellers in Essex (if you can help, let me know - no experience or tech knowhow required! Read more about this here.)

What these ideas have in common is that they aren't dependent on introducing new tech of any kind - just using technologies and communications media that people already have in their pockets, to enable them to do what they were doing before, but reaching further and doing better. The questions I've been asking people as we've gone through the third day here at the Hub Kings Cross are - who are you trying to reach? And what are they already using? Do you understand the social context? How boring I must sound.

Events like CityCamp and OpenTech are great but can be all about the tool. My plea this weekend has been to put the end user first. I'm not saying you shouldn't get excited and make things, but there is a gap between innovation (coming up with a tool) and implementation at scale (widespread use and social impact), and the bit in the middle is the human element. Make things easy, both for end users and for the organisations trying to reach them - keep technology simple and recognisable, keep the need for training to a minimum, keep barriers to access AND to implementation low. This remains a challenge for FrontlineSMS as we head towards our sixth year, but one we're determined to crack.

The corollary to this is that too often these events result in new organisations trying to cover similar ground in a new way. How frustrating that established players are so seldom flexible enough to pick up new ideas and adapt their existing models to take advantage of them. The pitches we're hearing right now (I'm writing this from the shadows as braver and more brilliant people than I pitch NESTA and Unltd for funding to bring their newborn ideas into the world) are strikingly diverse in style and approach, and in the problems they seek to attack. If there's something I'm disappointed about this weekend, it's that more people from the public sector haven't stuck around to understand how simple technologies can transform how they interact with their clients.

Thanks to Dominic Campbell and the FutureGov team for a great event and for bringing together a diverse bunch for three days - and thanks for inviting FrontlineSMS!

Jobs@FrontlineSMS: Community Support Coordinator (London)

** Please note - this role is based in London, UK ** Are you a self-starter with an eye for detail and a willingness to pitch in and do what needs doing? Do you have an interest in aid, development, conservation, social change, health, or any of the other sectors in which FrontlineSMS is flourishing? Are you web-savvy, know your way around a spreadsheet, and possessed of the kind of dogged determination that gets you where you want to go no matter what the odds? Then perhaps you could be our new Community Support Coordinator.[pdf]

A critical role for our growing organisation, this position (based in E1, London, UK) will be the heart and soul of the team, helping to keep the trains running on time with a number of administrative tasks, while taking the lead on maintaining our community resources and databases, making sure we keep track of support requests via our vibrant user community, writing blog posts and case studies, and getting to grips with our most important partners - the users implementing with FrontlineSMS on the ground.

Here's what our outgoing intern, Adam, had this to say about working with us:

FrontlineSMS is an exciting and dynamic organization. The diversity of the skills and projects of this small organization makes working here fascinating, while the uniqueness of the projects makes the work very important. The small team has a hefty workload and being able to absorb some of the tasks seems to be truly helpful to the staff. Likewise, as another person in the office, I’ve spent most of my time pushing ahead new projects which have been on the back-burner for months. From helping to develop a new survey (look for it soon), to drafting case studies, tracking device tests, and whatever has come up, I’ve had a great opportunity to work on a lot of different projects and really help give the team time and projects that couldn’t have happened otherwise.

The workload in the office is constantly shifting because such a small organization has so many priorities for each person. No day in the office was ever just like another, and almost every day in the office would end up changing throughout the day. All in all the experience has been wonderful. As a student working on a Masters dissertation relating to mobile technology in the developing world, I had a great opportunity to discuss the field and apply my understanding into practical outlets for the organization. At the same time, learning what it takes to manage and promote a small and vibrant organization are a set of skills that I hope to recycle wherever I end up next. And of course, the team is great fun and this part of London has great lunch offerings!

Who could possibly resist lunch offerings? If you're interested in applying, take a look at the job description and send us your CV with a covering note setting out how you meet the person specification and how your experience and passions are relevant to the role to info@frontlinesms.com by 5pm on Tuesday, 19th October 2010. Interviews will be held in London during the week of the 25th October 2010.