Posts from — August 2008

With well over four hundred download requests for the new (well, latest) version of FrontlineSMS, it seemed like a good time to dig a little deeper and see if any patterns were emerging. It’ll be interesting to do this again in the coming months, and see how or if these numbers have changed over time.

Platform

The first version of FrontlineSMS ran exclusively on Windows machines, and we were keen to expand this to cover other operating systems in the latest release. That said, it comes as no surprise that the majority of new users have requested the Windows version (79%). The majority of Apple Mac requests (13%) came from either techies or users in developed/Western markets, and almost without exception all Linux requests – trailing in third place at 8% – came from the developer or techie community. This reflects what we originally expected, and justifies our original focus on a fully-automated Windows installer, as opposed to the Mac and Linux versions which require a little manual configuration. (This is set to change, however, as we work with Ushahidi on a standard platform-independent installer in the coming weeks).

Location

Geographically we have an interesting spread, with three regions cancelling each other out. Bearing in mind these are the areas of ‘residence’ – so-to-speak – of the users (and not necessarily their region of focus or operation), North America is slightly ahead at

26%, followed very closely by Africa and Asia (both on 25%). Europe sits back in fourth place (14%), with South America becoming a new ‘growth’ area for FrontlineSMS, hitting 8% from a standing start back in June. The Middle East makes up for quantity (only 2%) with quality – there are some very interesting FrontlineSMS-activities taking place there at the moment, and I’ll hopefully be able to write about them at some stage. As always seems to be the case, the more interesting FrontlineSMS use-studies seem to be in war-torn areas, or areas of political instability.

Purpose

What’s particularly interesting about the proposed uses of FrontlineSMS is that there’s no clear ‘winner’ (see below).

Education and economic empowerment programs account for an equal share of 28% of downloads, followed by health projects at 10%, human rights and advocacy work at 9% and – surprisingly – media and arts at 8%. Two surprise packages are the number of youth-focused projects – 6% – and religious – 5%. Further analysis, and a more detailed breakdown of the categories, will be useful as the user-base grows.

So, what does this tell us? Well, it’s a bit of a mixed message, but the numbers do give us an early “average FrontlineSMS2.0 user” profile – that of an organisation based in North America (by a whisker), running the Windows version and working in economic empowerment or education. Interesting…

This is no ordinary August. In fact, it’s a bit of a double anniversary for me…

If you’d have come looking for me fifteen years ago, you’d have needed to get yourself to Chilubula, a small town about an hours drive from Kasama in northern Zambia, where I was working on a building project. In little over a month, about fifteen of us (aided by a fair number of children, it must be said) turned a pile of locally made bricks, more than a few bags of cement and a dozen tins of paint into a new school building. Pretty impressive stuff (assuming, of course, that it’s still standing).

It was my first taste of any kind of overseas development work, my first ever trip to the African continent, and it really got me thinking. Chilubula turned out to be a major turning point in my life, and set the early seeds for kiwanja.net a decade later.

Five years after Chilubula – August 1998 – I was well into my journey and in the middle of studying social anthropology with development studies at Sussex University. It was my second year summer break, and the little money I’d saved from an IT job in Brighton and some programming work at Jersey Zoo got me to Karuma Wildlife Reserve in Uganda. For three months about ten of us camped out in the reserve, carrying out biodiversity and rural livelihoods research. (Karuma Wildlife Reserve hugs the southern boundary of Murchison Falls National Park, and is designed to act as a buffer zone between the people and the park).

But it wasn’t all work. Here, Robert and I enter a small village during a two week break, and are greeted by a crowd of excited children. Part of the trip also saw us spending time in Masindi, a town I returned to earlier this year during my work with Grameen Technology Centre, and which also featured in the opening paragraph of my recent Vodafone receiver article.

My flat in Cambridge is littered with cassette tapes, masks, ornaments, paintings, photos, letters and memories from my many Africa trips over the past fifteen years. It’s hard to believe that it started so long ago, hard to believe the places that journey has taken me, and hard to believe where it’s landed me today. After all, none of this was ever planned.

Where next, I wonder?