When actions DO speak louder than words

Winston Churchill once famously remarked that it was "better to be making the news than taking it. To be an actor rather than a critic". But there are times when this simplifies, and trivialises, the complementary roles that 'actors' and 'critics' can play. Half-a-century on, modern technology has empowered 'critics' in ways Churchill could never have imagined.

In 1984 a BBC news crew, accompanied by reporter Michael Bourke, travelled to Ethiopia and brought news of a growing humanitarian crisis to the worlds' attention. "A biblical famine in the 20th Century" and "The closest thing to hell on Earth" was how he described it. The international community were shocked into action, and the following summer saw Live Aid - Bob Geldof's massive mobilisation of the music industry which helped raise hundreds of millions for the famine victims. Michael Bourke - 'critic' turned 'actor'.

Today, modern-day blogging is creating mini-Michael Bourke's the world over. Human rights violations, environmental vandalism, political killings, oppression against citizens, animal cruelty and unlawful detentions make the news from all corners of the globe, made possible by brave souls empowered by mobile and internet technologies. The line between 'actor' and 'critic' is becoming increasingly blurred, if it exists at all anymore. Recent events in Kenya - which have spurned the creation of Ushahidi.com - is a perfect case in point.

A few short days ago, good friend Erik Hersman (who Blogs as the widely read and highly respected White African) aired his frustration at the lack of news coming out of the country from the man and woman on the street. In "It's Not About Us, It's About Them", Erik noted:

"While blogging, emails, Twitter and the internet are doing a great deal of good getting the news out of what’s going on in Kenya to the rest of the world, I find myself troubled. You see, the communication that needs to be happening is at the grassroots level. Everyday Kenyans do not have access to any of these services. Let’s put our minds and capabilities towards solving real problems for people beyond the technologically elite"

True to his word, just five days later saw the launch of Ushahidi.com, a site which allows Kenyans to report acts of violence via the web and SMS, incidents which are then aggregated with other reports and displayed on a map. Ushahidi - which means "witness" in Kiswahili - provides an avenue for everyday Kenyans to get their news out, and news of its launch has been widely hailed in the mainstream press (and the Blogosphere, funnily enough). Putting Ushahidi together is a textbook study in rapid prototyping and collaboration, and Erik takes a huge amount of credit for blurring the 'actor' and 'critic' distinction yet further by pulling his finger out and actually doing something. As he says, when all the dust settles in Kenya, he doesn’t want to be one of the ones saying “I should have done something”.

From a personal perspective, Bloggers such as Erik have been hugely supportive of kiwanja's work, without which there would have been little chance of initiatives such as FrontlineSMS and nGOmobile ever getting off the ground. nGOmobile alone has generated interest from over seventy grassroots NGOs, all of whom are now in with a chance of winning equipment to run their own text messaging services. FrontlineSMS has empowered NGOs in over forty countries from all corners of the globe. Essential to this has been a dedicated band of supporters, including White African, ZapBoom, Tactical Tech, ShareIdeas, Textually.org, Ore's Notes, Total Tactics, Black Looks, Saidia.org and 160Characters, among many others.

Whether or not we're 'actors' or 'critics' - and whether or not it really matters - we all have a valuable role to play. Ushahidi shows us just how valuable that role can be.

Out of nothing comes something

I don't usually work on planes, even eleven hour transatlantic flights. But this time I thought I'd give it a go - maybe do something a little bit more interesting than reading reports or doing email. So I plumped for this. I've wondered for a while what the FrontlineSMS footprint is, you know, where it's been used since the launch just over two years ago. So I did the grunt work on the plane and have just thrown it onto a map. And here it is.

The totals are quite impressive. It turns out that FrontlineSMS is being used in 41 different countries, and in some cases by more than one NGO in that country. I counted over 60 uses of the software, too. From helping blood donor clinics and human rights workers to promoting government accountability, keeping medical students informed about education options, providing security alerts to field workers, the capture and exchange of vegetable (and coffee) price information, the distribution of weather forecasts, the co-ordination of healthcare workers, the organising of political demonstrations, the carrying out of surveys and the reporting and monitoring of disease outbreaks. Oh, and election monitoring, of course. There are many more. I knew the tool was flexible but, for the first time having this information available has been a real eye-opener.

The latest version of FrontlineSMS is being developed as we speak, with work on a new website underway. We have a fantastic product, a great vibe in the non-profit world, increasing publicity and a great donor in the MacArthur Foundation. There are also plans afoot for an exciting global launch at a major GSM Association event in Cannes next May. Momentum is at an all-time high, and proposals for the next phase of development, starting mid-2008, are already out.

From nothing, apparently, comes something...

Considering Africa

During the summer, sandwiched between the end of my first Stanford Fellowship and a trip to Uganda with Grameen, I was asked by the Corporate Council on Africa to give an interview about my work. They were putting together a feature on "ICT innovators" for their Africa Journal, and wanted to talk about FrontlineSMS. I'm always happy to talk about my work - after all, I rely on this kind of interest to get word out about what I do - and am constantly surprised at the level of interest I get.

This week I finally saw a copy of the Journal. They had chosen to interview just three individuals, quite likely due to time and space constraints, but I found myself in the company of a couple of hugely talented Africans doing great work to further the advance of ICT on their continent. Funnily enough, one of them was Nam Mokwunye, a good friend of mine from Stanford, running an ambitious project to connect 100 Nigerian universities. Being seen as someone "whose localised solutions have greatly contributed to Africa's ICT infrastructure" felt strangely odd since I don't generally see myself as doing that. I am happy to simply be in a place where I can help others achieve their own goals and dreams.

The unpicking of FrontlineSMS

Going by the title of this Blog post you might be expecting a little online session for prospective FrontlineSMS users. You know the kind - what it is, what it does, where it's been used and so on. Well, however useful that might be, this posting is more for my benefit. It's time for a spot of thinking out loud...

FrontlineSMS started life in 2005 as a classic example of evolutionary prototyping - in other words, the act of throwing something together and then sticking it out there and waiting to see what happens. Apart from a hunch and a small grant from a couple of early converts, there was little proof that anyone would be interested in the software, let alone make the effort to use it. I remember to this day talking about it during an interview with Charity Times in the early summer of 2005. I was still in Finland at the time, writing the code, when it dawned on me that it might be a good idea to put together a website if I was going to start talking to major industry magazines. (Incidentally, the Charity Times interview was already lined up - I just managed to convince them that it would be good to put out a "call for trialists" in the article). So programming was put on hold for a day while I very quickly put together a website. (In case you were wondering, the top banner on the FrontlineSMS website is actually the view from the lounge window where FrontlineSMS was written. It seemed kind-of relevant, in the absence of anything better to put there).

So, FrontlineSMS was let loose on the world during the last couple of months of 2005, and it was then a case of sitting back and waiting to see what happened. There never was a big plan, no big intention, no big vision. Not only did I not have the budget or capacity to do much else, I didn't know what else I could do. But herein lay the beauty of the project, for me at least. If it was going to be a success then the very people it was meant to empower would need to play a big part. I never wanted to force anything onto anyone, never wanted to have to "sell" the idea, so it was down to grassroots NGOs to somehow find out about FrontlineSMS and then find a use for it. If that didn't happen then there probably wasn't a need in the first place. If that was the case, I thought to myself, I'll let my hunch go and move on to something else.

Well, as it turned out the hunch wasn't a bad one, and FrontlineSMS has come on a long way since that heady Finnish summer two years ago. In addition to there being funding (thanks to the MacArthur Foundation), there now is a plan, and a vision. But despite there being more structure to the project, the software continues to surprise me - and that's why it's such a great project to work on. Okay, the Nigerian election monitoring was great, as was its use in the Philippine elections shortly after (this wasn't so widely reported) and the overall response from the community. But despite feeling more in control in recent months, it turns out that FrontlineSMS is doing some pretty exciting stuff out there that I'm only beginning to hear about. (Keeping in contact with grassroots NGOs working in pretty remote areas presents its own challenges, so I do have an excuse). So my learning continues...

So, what have I learnt recently? Well, two things in particular. Over the past few months it seems that FrontlineSMS has not only been merrily sending out security alerts to field workers in Afghanistan (a conflict zone if ever there was one), but it's also been providing market prices to several thousand farmers in Indonesia. None of this should surprise me - FrontlineSMS is a tool, after all, and it can be used for many different things. I've always maintained that the software would end up being used for things I'd never dream of, and on that note at least I have been proved right.

FrontlineSMS on a Mac?

Bobby, a friend of mine from the Philippines (who I met at a recent Fahamu workshop in Nairobi), has been doing some great work with FrontlineSMS lately and has become a real supporter of the software. Over the next few weeks development of the next version will begin - thanks to funding from the MacArthur Foundation - and hopefully Bobby will be a central player in that. In the meantime, he holds the honour of being the first person - that I'm aware of, anyway - to get FrontlineSMS running 'on' a Mac (within an XP 'virtual machine', anyway). And here's his photo to prove it.

The new version will be platform independent, so hopefully we'll see a lot more Macs running FrontlineSMS in the coming months and years...

Bridging the knowledge divide

A common theme in my work, and in many of my conference talks, centres around a very simple message - appropriate technology. It's nothing new, and as a concept has been around since the 1970's with Fritz Schumacher's defining book, "Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered". During my recent interview with Nokia's "New Horizons" magazine, however, it was interesting that the conversation was entirely appropriate-technology focussed. I was expecting questions about FrontlineSMS, my work on wildlive! and my developing-country technology experience. Instead, the interview was dominated by my focus on "needs-based", "human-centred", "grassroots" and "appropriate" technologies. Believe me, I was more than happy to talk about these things - I don't think enough people do.

It still surprises me - sometimes even saddens me - that we live in an era where there's a general tendency to over-engineer solutions. Not only is this a waste of time in my view, but it's a waste of money and effort. It also raises expectations. Believe me, there's plenty of this going on as we speak (sorry, read). I come across this at conferences where I meet hugely technically-abled people who spend their time trying to find homes for the very latest technical gadgetry. And because of where I work, and the circles where I mix, the home they are looking for is usually in a developing country. This only serves to exaggerate the problem.

Take the recent use of my FrontlineSMS system in the Nigerian elections. FrontlineSMS is not rocket science. It's so simple, in fact, that it slipped under most people's radars. One comment on Slashdot discussing its use highlights this over-engineering view well:

It's too simple. You guys don't know what you are talking about. Doing it all with one computer and an SMS modem? You can't future proof it that way. I want to see some mention of CORBA and SOAP. How can you have a system without middleware? Can you use dot NET? Everybody uses that these days. And what if I want to use it when I am already on the phone. Can't it have a WAP interface as well? I want to sell a thousand copies of this thing and nobody is going to pay a million bucks for something which doesn't use a single cutting edge technology

There is certainly no written rule that everything has to be cutting edge. Very little, in essence, is. Is Google cutting edge? There were plenty of other search engines around before they came along. All they did was see the opportunity, do it better and hit the target. Over the coming weeks I'm going to be spending a lot of time discussing mobile phone use, and web access, in developing countries. I'll soon be presenting a paper - the same one presented at W3C in Bangalore last December - at the 16th International World Wide Web Conference in Banff, and sitting on an expert panel at the same event. And my message will be the same as it has always been.

Although it should come as no surprise that there's a gulf between many developers and the realities of life in developing countries, there have been attempts to bring the two together. Some have worked better than others, but at least there's a realisation that a meeting-of-minds is needed. If you want a simple, effective example as to why, take a look at the handsets being used by the majority of rural people in developing countries (see photo, taken in India this January). Then have a think about how Java, Flash Lite, WAP and smart-phone applications would go down with these users. Okay, one day these technologies will become relevant, but right now I would argue that they're not. SMS is still the killer application, like it or not. And, on the subject of web access on mobile devices, I would also argue that we haven't quite mastered it ourselves yet. Generally-speaking the user experience still leaves a lot to be desired.

I'm not the only person who thinks this way. Far from it. And I'm looking forward to meeting the others, and our technically-minded colleagues, in Canada next month. Time to re-open the debate...