Where technology meets anthropology, conservation and development

It’s been three long years since the idea of supporting multimedia messaging (MMS) within FrontlineSMS was first raised by a handful of users. About a year later, the Hewlett Foundation stepped in and funded its development, excited by its potential in health, agriculture and governance, among others. Today, we’re excited to finally announce MMS support in FrontlineSMS. And it’s something of a game-changer for us and our users.

To quote from today’s Press Release:

The open-source SMS communications platform FrontlineSMS has delivered major new features as part of a new software release today. With this upgrade, FrontlineSMS allows organisations 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 huge step forward for FrontlineSMS: it opens the door for social and environmental organisations to incorporate photo, audio and video documentation in their work, and it paves the way for innovations like the FrontlineSMS:Medic partnership with Cellophone that will provide medical diagnostics via MMS. With MMS, FrontlineSMS extends its efforts to empower large groups of people to gather and share information of any kind, anywhere there is a mobile signal

For further details, or for tweets, re-tweets and comments on this story, check out the FrontlineSMS Blog.

Please note: From today onwards, all official FrontlineSMS posts and Guest Posts will be posted on the official FrontlineSMS website. Older entries are still available here by clicking on the relevant category to the right.

On my travels it’s not unusual for me to find a dozen or more Village Phone operators in a single village. It’s also not unusual to find them with pretty-much the same phone, quite often the same price plan, and the same signs and posters. And just to rub it in, their shops and kiosks are often the same colour, too. Standing out from the competition can be quite a challenge in an environment like this, but it can be done.

Making a phone call on a Village Phone can hardly be called a private affair. First of all you’re likely standing out in the open, the phone owner usually hangs around a couple of feet away, and children crowd around because that’s what children do. In an attempt to break the mould – and gain a little competitive advantage – this Village Phone operator decided that customers should be allowed to put some space between her, the children and their private conversation. So her customers can take the phone ‘away’ somewhere where it’s a little more private. To stop them running off with it, she attaches a length of wire which leads back into her shop. Simple, but clever.

Maybe the wire could double up as an aerial extension for places with poor reception (now there’s one for Nokia to consider, or Motorola in this case)?

Sometimes, living in a wired world can have its advantages…

Further reading
“Unplanned adolescence“, a Fast Company article on what happens to Village Phone operators when local mobile ownership increases (and my response to that), and “Africa’s grassroots mobile revolution – A traveller’s perspective“, a photo essay I wrote a couple of years ago for ‘Vodafone receiver’

Last week I wrote a post on the difficulties of running a “mobile for development” – or m4d – project. I tried to make it challenging, and was hoping to stir up some discussion around the merits of mobile-initiated development projects versus development-initiated mobile projects. You can read that post here.

Unless you’re one of the bigger technology blogs – Mashable, TechCrunch, Scobleizer and so on – it’s hit-and-miss whether or not a post will get the traction you’re looking for. Apart from a couple of dozen tweets and a dozen or so comments, the post didn’t generate as much debate as I’d have liked. But it did get me thinking – if these kinds of discussion weren’t taking place here, then where were they taking place?

I’m regularly asked at conferences for hints on the best sites for people to post questions and stimulate debate around mobile technology, and I always struggle to give an answer. It seems crazy that, for a discipline which began to fully emerge probably about seven or eight years ago, there still isn’t a genuinely active, engaging, open online community for people to join and interact with each other.

In order to get a sense of which communities exist, I recently sent out a message to a number of ICT4D and mobile email lists I subscribe to, and posted the odd message on Twitter. Very few people could suggest anything. A few people mentioned email lists which dealt specifically with sectoral issues, such as health, but not specifically with mobile (although mobile was a regular thread in many discussions). Only MobileActive suggested MobileActive, which was a surprise considering its positioning as a global, mobile community with over 16,000 ‘active’ members.

Finding nothing was only part of it – many people clearly had different ideas of what made up community, too (I’d put this down to a challenge of definition). When I pushed out my call for sites, I specifically asked for those which were “open, active, collaborative and engaging”, things that I thought would be pre-requisites for anything worth being a member of.

According to Maddie Grant, a Strategist at SocialFish, a consulting firm that helps associations build community on the social web:

What makes a community open is when there’s “a lot more outside the login than inside”, so most of a community’s content must be at least viewable and shareable without logging in. To be active, most of a community’s content must be member (user) generated, not owner-generated, and must have some degree of conversation which includes comments, discussions and reviews

Going by these criteria I don’t believe we yet have a truly active, engaging, open mobile community. This seems a little strange when you consider the attention the technology has been getting over the past few years.

On the flip side though, it might not be so strange after all. As Jonathan Donner put it to me in a recent email, “Why should m4d have it’s own groups and community sites? Can’t we – or should we – just mainstream ourselves into ICT4D?”.

This discussion clearly has a long way to go. I just wonder where that discussion will take place.

Do the majority of people working in “mobiles for development” work in mobile, or development? It may seem like an odd question, but how people approach “m4d” may have more of an impact on success or failure than we think.

The world of social mobile isn’t short of anecdotes. “Put the user first”, “Consider the technology only at the very end”, “Don’t re-invent the wheel” and “Build with scale in mind” are just a few. Ignore these and failure won’t be far around the corner, we’re told. But maybe we’re missing something here. Sure, there’s a growing number of ‘best’ practices, but one thing we rarely seem to question are the very credentials of the project origin itself.

Everyone from donors to project managers and technologists to journalists are keen to identify traits or patterns in ‘failed’ mobile projects. Many of their conclusions will point to poor planning, poor technology choice or lack of collaboration, but sometimes the biggest failure may have taken place long before anyone got near a mobile phone.

What I wonder is this. Do we know what ratio of “m4d” projects are initiated by development practitioners (or sectoral experts in health, agriculture, conservation and so on) as opposed to mobile technologists, and what impact does this have on the success or failure of the project? In other words, if the problem solver is primarily a mobile technologist – the “m” part of “m4d” – then you might assume they have much less understanding of the on-the-ground problem than a development practitioner or sectoral expert might – the “d” part.

Does this bear out in reality? If failure does turn out to be higher among technologists then this is a relatively easy problem to fix, whereas many of the other perceived reasons for failure are not. It’s all about getting back to basics.

(Click here for more observations on mobile development).

I’ve always maintained that the people closest to the problem have the best chance of coming up with a solution, and this probably bears out in many cases, particularly in the ICT4D field. Ushahidi, started by Kenyans to solve a Kenyan crisis – and DataDyne, a health-based data collection solution designed by a paediatrician - immediately spring to mind. In these instances, being up-close and dirty with the problem came well in advance of any technology-based solution to it. The same goes for our very own FrontlineSMS initiative, borne out of a series of visits to South Africa and Mozambique back in 2003/2004.

In any discipline, the greater the rate of innovation the greater the problem of focus, and mobile is no exception. As Bill Easterly put it in a recent post in response to questions from students about how they might help “end world poverty”:

Don’t be in such a hurry. Learn a little bit more about a specific country or culture, a specific sector, the complexities of global poverty and long run economic development. At the very least, make sure you are sound on just plain economics before deciding how you personally can contribute. Be willing to accept that your role will be specialized and small relative to the scope of the problem. Aside from all this, you probably already know better what you can do than I do

This is great advice, and not just for economists. If mobile and health is your thing, focus on health and get very good at it. If it’s mobile and agriculture, or mobile and election monitoring, do the same. Whatever your area of interest, get out and understand the issues where they matter – on the ground – and don’t get totally sidetracked by the latest trends, technologies or disciplines. Whatever the reason for your interest in ‘mobiles for development’, make sure you don’t forget the importance of understanding the ‘development’ bit.

Focus is highly underrated, and often debates around technology choice, open source, challenges of scale and “understanding your users” are distractions from a much-less discussed but equally vital question. And that’s this.

“Who’s best placed to run a successful “m4d” project – the m‘s or the d‘s?”.

Around the time of two recent talks – Thinking Digital in Newcastle (UK) and National Geographic (Washington DC) – much of the world’s tech media was focused on Apple. Both the iPad and iPhone 4 had hit the shelves in relatively quick succession, and many people were marvelling at the latest innovations from California.

To the everyday man and woman on the street, cutting-edge innovation has rarely been so tangible. Sure, the technology behind motor vehicles or aircraft has advanced rapidly in recent years, but often what makes these things clever is either hidden out of sight – a new fuel injection system in a car, or a new kind of braking system, for example – or they’re not things many of us would ever get to interact with – such as the latest fly-by-wire controls of an aircraft cockpit.

The staggering advance in the consumer electronics world has changed all that, and we’re now holding mobile phones in the palm of our hand which are infinitely more powerful than the computers which took man all the way to the moon and back. These devices are changing the way we live, and the way we interact with each other and our environment. Consumer electronics are particularly relevant in interaction terms because their primary purpose is to allow us to interact with them. Thanks to advances in the technologies behind mobile phones, tablet computers, gaming consoles and television among many others, cutting edge technological innovation has come to every individual man and woman on the street. It’s got personal.

That said, we’re living in interesting times. The rate of innovation is unprecedented. What we’ve seen happen with mobile technology in the last five years alone is beyond incredible, and you sense the rate of innovation is only speeding up. This may be in part down to the fact that these devices have both a hardware – device – component, and a software – usability – component, meaning there are twice the number of opportunities to innovate.

What I’ve been sensing lately, however, is a growing ‘backlash’ – for want of a better word – and a desire to build what are seen as purer, more sustainable, locally sourced, culturally relevant technology-based solutions. Although you could argue a certain romanticism in the approach, the fact of the matter is that most technologies being pushed out by the electronics industry remain relevant to only a small percentage of the global population. It’s not only down to cost either, although that’s a large part of it. It’s also down to the fact that many of these devices just don’t work in places without high-speed data networks and/or a mains supply to charge them nightly. Many people just don’t have that.

I’m writing this on a flight home from Washington DC, and have just watched a programme which featured a water-powered lift. The idea is brilliantly simple. The lift – which runs up a steep cliff – harnesses the power of the nearby river and uses gravity, one of the oldest and most sustainable of energy sources, to pull one of two carriages upwards while the other drops.

It’s such a simple but effective piece of engineering that if it broke you’d likely be able to find someone locally who could figure out how to fix it. That’s clearly been the case since it began operating 120 years ago.

The likes of IDEO, Catapult Design, IDE and D-REV are household names to anyone interested in designing and building “for the other 90%”, and I’m a big fan of the approach. I’ve been also been a big fan of the appropriate technology movement for some time, and am excited to be speaking at the “Small Is…” festival later this year. The irony is that despite all of this I work in a high-tech world which is about as far away from much of the appropriate technology work ethic as it could be. John Mulrow in World Watch Magazine recently wrote a great article about the relationship between mobile technology and appropriate technology, but for me many questions remain.

Our world is becoming increasingly dependent on information and communications technology and many local, indigenous, traditional ways of designing, building and doing are slowly being replaced, and in many cases lost, forever. I’m not entirely sure if that represents progress or not.

“Thinking Digital is an annual conference where the world’s greatest thinkers and innovators gather to inspire, to entertain, and to discuss the latest ideas and technologies”.

FrontlineSMS was invited to give the closing address at the end of the second day of the conference. In this 30 minute video, we talk about innovation more broadly, and our work developing mobile tools specifically for NGOs around the world.

This video is also available on the Thinking Digital website, and the FrontlineSMS Community site. Other videos from the event are available here. Thanks again to Herb and the rest of the Thinking Digital team for the opportunity to present.

Last year I had the pleasure of attending ICT4D 2009 in Doha, where FrontlineSMS and Ushahidi were represented in the “Technology Showcase”. The event was a bit of a gamble. The Agenda had a strong academic focus, and I for one usually tend to avoid these kinds of gatherings, which are more often than not dominated by people simply standing up and reading through papers.

As it turned out, it was largely that. If anyone was previously in any doubt, by the second day it was abundantly clear that there was, indeed, a divide between the practitioners at the event, and those who spent their time evaluating what the practitioners did. Much of the research presented made little sense to those “out in the field”, and in some cases there was such a mismatch in language that practitioners hardly recognised their own projects when they were discussed.

Last August, I attended a related event hosted by UC Berkeley in which selected members of the computer science community sought to identify their role in the practicalities of the ICT4D world. It was a fascinating event which I blogged about in “Computer science, meet global development” shortly afterwards.

There is little doubt that a number of mobile-relevant disciplines have traditionally lived largely in their own silos – practitioners, social scientists, academics and computer scientists among them. Later this year a workshop will be held in London at ICTD 2010 designed to break at least one or two more of these down. According to “Qual Meets Quant“:

The increasing ubiquity of mobile phones in developing economies has enabled the capture, for the first time in history, of massive amounts of behavioural human data in areas of interest to international development. Proper analysis of such data could provide important insight into areas from health and education to microfinance and agriculture. Unfortunately, much of the research related to mobile phones and development has been done in methodological silos: technical researchers focus on quantitative analysis; ethnographers perform in-depth qualitative research; and policy makers extrapolate policies from published research

It looks like being a great workshop, not because it’s particularly fascinating from an academic standpoint (although it could well be), but because it seeks to bring down practical barriers in how disciplines approach and study ICT4D – and aspects of mobiles-for-development in particular. The Programme and Organising Committees boast some big names in the space, with Kentaro Toyama, Nathan Eagle, Jenna Burrell, Tapan Parikh, Bill Thies and good friend Juliana Rotich among them.

Further details on the Workshop, and how to submit papers, can be found here [PDF, 100Kb].

I don’t remember my first camera, but I do remember signalling my intent to take photography seriously when I bought a rather expensive Minolta 5000 about twenty years ago. A lot has changed since then, a time when experimenting was a frustrating (and expensive) affair. The advent of digital cameras changed all that, and in 2006 I moved away from my old Minolta and acquired a Panasonic Lumix FZ5, a camera which I still use today.

This is a very small selection of some of my favourite photographs from that camera. I have dreams of one day buying one of the latest Canon cameras, and mastering Photoshop, but that will have to wait. Sadly, for now, photography remains my number one neglected hobby.

Sandy feet (California, 2006)

Autumn flight (Palo Alto, 2006)

Museum of Islamic Art (Doha, 2009)

Grameen Village Phone (Uganda, 2007)

Mountain view (Banff, Canada, 2007)

Dead wood (Grand Canyon, 2006)

Light at the end (Los Angeles, 2006)

Incoming (California, 2006)

Making waves (Universal Studios, California, 2006)

Eye in the sky (San Francisco, 2006)

Top of the world (California, 2006)

Chris Lowe, Pet Shop Boys (San Francisco, 2006)

Haze on the 18th (Half Moon Bay, California, 2006)

In the shadow of the gull (California, 2007)

“From the palm streets of Sierra Leone to the fireworks of Boulder, we bring you an episode throbbing with life and contemplation. This time our exceptional production team highlight the work of 2010 Unreasonable Fellow Ben Lyon. Ben talks about his company FrontlineSMS:Credit which provides an effective technological bridge between mobile money providers and microfinance banking solutions to deliver state of the art financial services to the bottom of the pyramid consumers”.

This is a great video for a number of reasons. It’s wonderfully put together, for a start. It also captures Ben’s vision, ambition and spirit perfectly, and gives him an ideal platform to tell his own story in his own words.

Stories are increasingly important, and this was reinforced recently during my week with National Geographic (who always need more than just solid science to justify a magazine article or TV slot). The best way to resonate with others, and inspire, is to have a story and a passion which resonates and inspires. As Fried and Hansson put it in their recent book, “Inject what’s unique about the way you think into what you sell. Decommoditise your product. Make it something no-one else can offer”.

I met Ben through Josh Nesbit – Executive Director of FrontlineSMS:Medic – last June. That’s a little over a year ago. It’s incredible – and by no means unreasonable! - to see how far he’s got in such a short space of time, and with so little funding and resources (although that is rapidly changing). An early PC World article we pushed out was intended to generate some interest in his idea, but I think what’s happened since has surprised even Ben.

It’s also great to see the kind of support available to budding innovators and entrepreneurs today. When I started out in mobile in 2003 there was little by way of any genuine support network, and it was more a matter of everyone feeling their own way. Organisations such as the unreasonable institute now play an invaluable role identifying and nurturing young talent, and there’s very little doubt that many of the 2010 Fellows have got a great future ahead of them.

The term “enabling environment” may be ambiguous and over-used, but there’s little doubt it could be applied here better than anywhere else.

Related posts:
Mechanics vs. motivation: The two faces of social innovation
Enabling the inspiration generation

This is the book I’ve been waiting for for years. And it’s been a revelation in the few days I’ve had it. Broken down into largely single page ‘chapters’ – making it an incredibly easy read – it debunks many of the myths of running a business, of entrepreneurship, of innovation. What’s more, it’s written by doers, not talkers. I have plenty of time for doers.

Here are just a few of my favourite snippets from the “Rework” book:

“With so much failure in the world, you can’t help but breathe it in. Don’t inhale. Don’t get fooled by the stats. Other people’s failures are just that – other people’s failures”

“What do you really learn from mistakes? You might learn what not to do again, but how valuable is that? You still don’t know what you should do next”

“Ideas are cheap and plentiful. The real question is how well you execute”

“When you don’t know what you believe, everything becomes an argument”

“There’s a world of difference between truly standing for something and having a mission statement that says you stand for something”

“Great companies start in garages all the time. Yours can, too”

“Start a business, not a startup”

“If you’re successful, people will try to copy what you do. It’s just a fact of life. But there’s a great way to protect yourself from copycats – make you part of your product or service. Inject what’s unique about the way you think into what you sell. Decommoditise your product. Make it something no-one else can offer”

If you only buy one “business” book this year, make this it. Wonderful stuff.

Two “social mobile” related posts:
Social mobile: Myths and misconceptions
Mobile applications development: Observations