Category — News

In just over a weeks time I’ll be heading back to the US to collect the Curry Stone Design Prize on behalf of FrontlineSMS. This is an exciting (and interesting) award for us for a number of reasons. You can read more of my thoughts on that here, and check out our official prize page here.

The Prize Ceremony is being held at the Harvard Graduate School of Design on 7th November, and it’s open invitation. If you’re interested in coming along drop the organisers an email. Details below.

“The Curry Stone Design Prize was created to champion designers as a force for social change. Now in its fourth year, the Prize recognizes innovators who address critical issues involving clean air, food and water, shelter, health care, energy, education, social justice or peace”.

Yesterday was an exciting day for us as we announced FrontlineSMS had won the prestigious 2011 Curry Stone Design Prize. This award follows closely on the heels of the 2011 Pizzigati Prize, an honourable mention at the Buckminster Fuller Challenge and our National Geographic “Explorer” Award last summer. It goes without saying these are exciting times not just for FrontlineSMS but for our growing user base and the rapidly expanding team behind it. When I think back to the roots of our work in the spring of 2005, FrontlineSMS almost comes across as “the little piece of software that dared to dream big”.

With the exception of the Pizzigati Prize – which specifically focuses on open source software for public good – our other recent awards are particularly revealing. Last summer we began something of a trend by being awarded things which weren’t traditionally won by socially-focused mobile technology organisations.

Being named a 2010 National Geographic Emerging Explorer is a case in point, and last summer while I was in Washington DC collecting the prize I wrote down my thoughts in a blog post:

On reflection, it was a very bold move by the Selection Committee. Almost all of the other Emerging Explorers are either climbing, diving, scaling, digging or building, and what I do hardly fits into your typical adventurer job description. But in a way it does. As mobile technology continues its global advance, figuring out ways of applying the technology in socially and environmentally meaningful ways is a kind of 21st century exploring. The public reaction to the Award has been incredible, and once people see the connection they tend to think differently about tools like FrontlineSMS and their place in the world.

More recently we’ve begun receiving recognition from more traditional socially-responsible design organisations – Buckminster Fuller and Clifford Curry/Delight Stone. If you ask the man or woman on the street what “socially responsible design” meant to them, most would associate it with physical design – the building or construction of things, more-to-the-point. Water containers, purifiers, prefabricated buildings, emergency shelters, storage containers and so on. Design is so much easier to recognise, explain and appreciate if you can see it. Software is a different beast altogether, and that’s what makes our Curry Stone Design Prize most interesting. As the prize website itself puts it:

Design has always been concerned with built environment and the place of people within it, but too often has limited its effective reach to narrow segments of society. The Curry Stone Design Prize is intended to support the expansion of the reach of designers to a wider segment of humanity around the globe, making talents of leading designers available to broader sections of society.

Over the past few years FrontlineSMS has become so much more than just a piece of software. Our core values are hard-coded into how the software works, how it’s deployed, the things it can do, how users connect, and the way it allows all this to happen. We’ve worked hard to build a tool which anyone can take and, without us needing to get involved, applied to any problem anywhere. How this is done is entirely up to the user, and it’s this flexibility that sits at the core of the platform. It’s also arguably at the heart of it’s success:

We trust our users – rely on them, in fact – to be imaginative and innovative with the platform. If they succeed, we succeed. If they fail, we fail. We’re all very much in this together. We focus on the people and not the technology because it’s people who own the problems, and by default they’re often the ones best-placed to solve them. When you lead with people, technology is relegated to the position of being a tool. Our approach to empowering our users isn’t rocket science. As I’ve written many times before, it’s usually quite subtle, but it works:

My belief is that users don’t want access to tools – they want to be given the tools. There’s a subtle but significant difference. They want to have their own system, something which works with them to solve their problem. They want to see it, to have it there with them, not in some “cloud“. This may sound petty – people wanting something of their own – but I believe that this is one way that works.

What recognition from the likes of the Curry Stone Design Prize tells us is that socially responsible design can be increasingly applied to the solutions, people and ecosystems built around lines of code – but only if those solutions are user-focused, sensitive to their needs, deploy appropriate technologies and allow communities to influence how these tools are applied to the problems they own.

Further reading
FrontlineSMS is featured in the upcoming book “Design Like You Give a Damn 2: Building Change From The Ground Up”, available now on pre-order from Amazon.

Do you know a software developer building open source tools with the potential to positively impact communities around the world? If you do – or you are one – then read on.

The Tides Foundation is now accepting nominations for this year’s Pizzigati Prize. The Antonio Pizzigati Prize for Software in the Public Interest annually awards a $10,000 cash grant to one individual who has created or led an effort to create an open source software product of significant value to the nonprofit sector and movements for social change.

The 2012 winner will be announced in April at the Nonprofit Technology Network annual conference in San Francisco. Each year, starting in 2006, the Pizzigati Prize has accepted nominations for talented and creative individuals who develop open source software products that demonstrate impressive value to the nonprofit sector. Tides welcomes nominations from both developers and the nonprofits who work with them.

Earlier this year I had the honour of picking up the Pizzigati Prize in Washington DC on behalf of everyone at FrontlineSMS. According to the Pizzigati jury, we’d managed to:

create software that speaks directly to the reality that millions of people globally have only simple mobile phones and no access whatsoever to the Internet. The software they developed turns mobile phones into grassroots organizing tools for everything from mobilizing young voters to thwarting thieving commodity traders.

The 2010 Pizzigati Prize winner, Yaw Anokwa, led the development on Open Data Kit, a modular set of tools that’s helping nonprofits the world over on a wide variety of battlefronts, from struggles to prevent deforestation to campaigns against human rights violations.

“Open source software developers like these fill an indispensable role”, explained Tides Chief of Staff Joseph Mouzon, a Pizzigati Prize judge and the former Executive Director of Nonprofit Services for Network for Good. “The Pizzigati Prize aims to honor that contribution – and encourage programmers to engage their talents in the ongoing struggle for social change”.

The Pizzigati Prize honors the brief life of Tony Pizzigati, an early advocate of open source computing. Born in 1971, Tony spent his college years at MIT, where he worked at the world-famous MIT Media Lab. Tony died in 1995, in an auto accident on his way to work in Silicon Valley.

Full details on the Pizzigati Prize, the largest annual award in public interest computing, are available online.

Please nominate, share or enter as appropriate. Good luck!

We were excited to join colleagues and friends in Washington, DC, on Tuesday 9th August to release the first edition of our “User Guide on Data Integrity”, a tool that will help FrontlineSMS users around the world better understand the flow of information into and out of the platform, the risks and vulnerabilities to that data, and simple ways they can mitigate those risks.

Review by Cathryn Paine reposted from the FrontlineSMS blog

To kick off the discussion around the new guide, we hosted a panel discussion at Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies, where FrontlineSMS’ Sean McDonald joined Jon Gosier of metaLayer, Development Seed’s Paul Goodman, and Internews Vice President for New Media Kathleen Reen, who moderated the event. This research effort, based on FrontlineSMS user input and research by Kristina Lugo and Carol Waters, focused not on mobile system security, a critical issue better addressed by others, but more on the ways that contextualized program design and implementation can improve data quality and reduce user risk. Above all, we learned through the process, context is key. Understanding the needs and norms of the target population, and the goals of the project itself, is vital in determining the proper tools and approach to designing a FrontlineSMS workflow that can achieve those goals.

The panel discussion centered on these key points, especially the role that stakeholders play in the reliability and integrity of project data. Issues from misinterpretation, to unconscious bias, to lack of corroboration can creep into an improperly designed data collection effort, polluting the entire dataset in the process. To mitigate these threats, Jon emphasized focusing on localization and usability in project design—understanding the users or beneficiaries of a project is the best way to minimize human error and maximize data integrity.

Paul Goodman during a project planning session, sketching out project workflow which includes FrontlineSMS use. Photo credit: Paul Goodman

Paul contextualized these points with insights from mobile projects in Haiti and Benin, focusing on the process of implementing new technologies—from design to training to implementation. Particularly, the panel discussion focused on assuming that program data would be made public, in an effort to design projects that achieve important goals while minimizing risks associated with data sharing or system compromise.

Throughout the conversation, the discussion kept coming back to the importance of user-focused, context-aware approaches and resources in ICT projects. No matter how complicated the technology, an informed and engaged community of project staff and participants is really the best tool for safeguarding quality data. All in all, a great discussion that we hope to keep going through the forum and ongoing interactions!

You can download a PDF of the FrontlineSMS User Guide on Data Integrity here.

This week represents something of a first for us as we head to Africa as part of a UK business delegation lead by David Cameron, the British Prime Minister. Also in attendance is Lord Green, the Minister for Trade and Investment, and Andrew Mitchell, Secretary of State for International Development, along with a number of prominent business leaders from across the UK.

This trip is exciting for a number of reasons. Firstly, it represents the beginnings of a closer working relationship with government, something we’ve been keen to explore for some time. Secondly, in a visit dominated by big business, it gives us the perfect opportunity to demonstrate what the non-profit sector in the UK has to offer, and highlight many of the exciting developments – and potential – of mobile technology for social good across the African continent:

Africa has always been key for us. Our work is all about technology innovation, and how mobile phones can help solve some of Africa’s bigger problems. As the developers of FrontlineSMS, a piece of free text messaging software used across the continent, our key objective as part of the delegation is to foster closer relationships with the private sector and government, and understand how we can best support local innovation and entrepreneurship in the mobile sector. It remains an area with huge potential

Tonight we’re in Lagos, Nigeria after spending the first full day in Johannesburg and Pretoria. The South African leg of the trip kicked off with breakfast meetings with South African business leaders, followed by a short audience with David Cameron and Jacob Zuma and a quick photo opportunity. An official Press Conference was the final act of the morning, held by both leaders at the government building.

Events back home have lead to the cancellation of the visits to Rwanda and Southern Sudan – a real shame – so we’ll be heading home tomorrow (Tuesday) after lunch meetings with a number of Nigerian politicians. The BBC posted an article earlier today on the Africa visit, and the pressure the Prime Minister is under to return to London.

I often get emails from research companies or publishers trying to sell me things. Most aren’t relevant, remotely interesting or affordable. One this morning, from Portio Research, caught my eye. It’s still not affordable (at least not for us), but it did come with ten great report ‘teasers’. And all of them interesting and relevant. From the official email:

10 Facts You May Not Know About Mobile Messaging

1.     Revenues will break USD 300 billion in 2014. Annual worldwide mobile messaging revenue will reach nearly USD 210 billion by the end of 2011, and smash USD 300 billion in 2014.

2.     Messaging currently accounts for the majority of global data revenues. Messaging in 2011 will still be responsible for more than 60 percent of global data revenues; SMS and MMS alone will contribute a massive 55.7 percent to global data revenues in 2011.

3.     SMS is king. With little fanfare, SMS has long been the foundation and mainstay of non-voice service revenues. And will continue to be so for some time.

4.     SMS brings in 13 times more revenue than Apps. SMS alone generated USD 114.6 billion in 2010, and will reach USD 126.8 billion in 2011. Compare that to forecasted mobile broadband revenues (USD 58.1 billion in 2011) and mobile application revenues (USD 9.5 billion in 2011) and there is still much to get excited about in the world of mobile messaging.

5.     New European data usage trends are emerging. 2010 was something of a landmark year with significant growth seen in other mobile data services, beyond messaging. Trends seen in Japan and South Korea can never be seen as “typical” indicators of what will happen in other markets around the world, as those countries stand alone in terms of leading technology adoption. However, when mainstream markets in Western Europe witness trends that recur in more than one market, then we know a change is coming. Operations in Spain and Germany have now witnessed the changeover, where non-messaging mobile data revenues now exceed SMS revenues.

6.     MMS is a huge success. Contrary to years of popular opinion that MMS somehow failed as a service, MMS is the second highest grossing non-voice mobile service of all time, second only to SMS.

7.     MMS outperforms mobile apps and mobile music added together. In 2010, worldwide MMS traffic hit 248.7 billion MMS messages and generated massive revenues of USD 32.5 billion. To put that into perspective, MMS is bigger than mobile apps and mobile music added together, MMS is bigger than mobile gaming and mobile video added together, twice over. MMS is still a huge business, making a lot of money, and still growing in all geographic regions worldwide, and at a double-digit growth rate in most.

8.     Europe records the highest mobile e-mail revenue. In 2010, the Asia Pacific region was the largest mobile e-mail market worldwide in terms of number of mobile e-mail users, whereas Europe generated the highest mobile e-mail revenue worldwide.

9.     Latin America will see the largest mobile e-mail user base growth. As an individual country market, Japan has been the biggest market for mobile e-mail in terms of user penetration and it is expected to maintain its position in the near future. Over the coming years, the Latin America region will have the highest growth in its mobile e-mail market owing to the increasing smartphone penetration and the small current mobile e-mail user base.

10.  Over 311 million people use Mobile IM. Mobile IM is ‘the small player’ in the mobile messaging mix, generating revenues of USD 6.8 billion in full-year 2010, a substantial amount of money, but small compared to the massive USD 114.6 billion generated by SMS. Mobile IM is an extremely popular service, with more than 311 million users at end-2010.

The full report – “Mobile Messaging Futures 2011-2015″ – is available here on the Portio Research website. Have your cheque book ready.

Last week at the Rutberg Summit in London – an event dominated by senior mobile industry executives – one of the more interesting topics for me was differentiation. How will the new Microsoft/Nokia relationship impact the mobile OS ecosystem? What does the proliferation of Android mean to the many handset manufacturers bundling it with their phones? In a world being increasingly dominated by just a small number of mobile operating systems, how does one smartphone manufacturer differentiate themselves from the next?

Of course, the operating system on a phone is just one part of it. Not only is our choice of OS becoming increasingly limited, so is our choice of “look”.

Take this image – a small cross-section of the handsets on the market today. We’re almost at the stage where you can have any smartphone you like, as long as it looks like one of these. Spot the difference? Not much.

This week, Apple took out another law suit – this time against Samsung – accusing it of stealing/borrowing/using its iPhone design for it’s latest range of phones. (Apple also claim the Galaxy is a little too close to looking like an iPad). The Register has a good article on all of this.

If being a consumer really is all about choice, then there’s certainly less of that today than there used to be. It will be interesting to see where all this goes – court battles included – and where the growing tension between innovation and differentiation ultimately takes us.

For many of the open source “purists” in the ICT4D field, there is only one (relatively rigid) way to run an open source project. For others – usually those who have had to actually work through the many challenges and complexities of open sourcing a piece of software – things are rarely that clear-cut. Being “open”, and “openness” in itself, can mean many different things.

Three bits of news from the past fortnight highlight how difficult and controversial being truly “open” can be.

1. Twitter

In an attempt to “ensure users can interact with Twitter the same way everywhere”, the company announced that they were considering restricting – and even blocking – access to their API for third party applications. Although this may make sense from a business or user-experience perspective, it was arguably the very explosion of these third party Twitter clients which accelerated the growth of the service. Twitter’s decision to be more strategic with their API, rather than let anyone anywhere build applications around it, is a clear attempt to regain control of the micro-blogging service. The full story is available on the BBC Technology pages.

2. Android Marketplace

Right from its inception, Apple have been heavily criticised in some quarters for the way they control every aspect of the running of their App Store. Applications are vetted and quality tightly controlled, meaning that not “any-old-application” makes it into the store. While this may be problematic for application developers, end-users (such as iPhone and iPod Touch owners) get a largely guaranteed experience – apps that work, apps that have a reasonable and familiar UI experience,  and apps that are malware and virus free. The Android Marketplace is everything that the App Store isn’t, and whilst it’s fully open and community-managed approach may make the purists purr, for the end user the experience can be much more of a challenge. You can read more on the BBC here, where the open nature of the Android platform is described as a “boon and a danger”.

3. Android Honeycomb

“In the great mobile-device wars, Google has portrayed itself as the open-source crusader doing battle against the leaders in proprietary software—Apple, Microsoft, and Research In Motion”. This argument held up strong until a couple of weeks ago when Google – again in the “interests of the user experience” – decided to delay releasing the source code of its latest Android operating system. This has caused something of a shock in the mobile world, but for others it comes as no surprise.

Problematic as they may be, these little nuggets of news confirm one thing – that the mobile industry is in a constant state of flux. Two things we can be sure of, though, are that even seemingly unambiguous terms such as “open” can never be taken for granted, and that open can never be assumed – by default – to be better than closed.

I owe a lot to Nigeria. Throughout 2002 I lived in Calabar where I helped run a primate sanctuary. I made many friends and gained a real understanding of many of the problems facing the country. Five years later, in 2007, a loose coalition of Nigerian NGOs took our FrontlineSMS platform and monitored their elections with it, a breakthrough moment for us and for them.

This guest post, by Nosarieme Garrick, speaks volumes for the strength and character of the many Nigerians I’ve met over the years. It’s an honour to be able to help spread her message. I hope it resonates with you, too.

“The journey back to Nigeria was unexpected, but the planning came like a hurricane. One day I was chasing a story in New York, the next I was planning my trip back to the capital city of Abuja. So here I am pushing for the youth to truly exercise their civic duties in every sense of the word.

It started almost a year ago with a post on CNN Amanpour’s blog offering constructive criticism to Nigeria’s leaders, which received a deafening response, and persuaded me that sitting from the comfort of my Brooklyn apartment, ranting about that which ails Nigeria wasn’t good enough.

At the time a number kept haunting me – 70% of Nigeria’s population was under the age of 30, that’s 105 million people, yet the educational system is deplorable, food prices are so high that the average student can’t afford it, and millions of kids work the streets everyday hawking goods to help their families out. The majority of the country is disenfranchised. I looked at the political arena of Nigeria, and started to understand why, the lack of representation for the youth, with most of our political leaders way over the age of 50.

I realized the Nigerian youth had no voice. People had been making decisions for us, and we’d let them because we didn’t believe our votes would be counted. Countless times international observers had reported cases of electoral fraud but it never mattered, we’d watched complacently.

Growing up in Nigeria, every kid was aware of one thing if nothing else – children were to be seen and not heard. We didn’t stay in the room when our elders were talking, we didn’t question anything our elders said, and we definitely didn’t hold an opinion on their actions, wrong or not. In a sense there was a culture of fear created, what were we afraid of? Maybe lashes, being reprimanded, I’m not too sure anymore, we just knew that’s how things were. The home was a reflection of our leaders, we knew they were up to no good, but we said nothing for fear of jail, or even worse – death.

In April of 2010, I got together with some friends and came up with Vote or Quench, a youth driven, social media-focused organization seeking to engage our young people in Nigeria’s opaque political arena, and build a bridge between the diaspora and Nigerians at home. Inspired by the monitoring of election violence in Kenya, and the Iranian Green Revolution, we decided that 2011 would be the year young Nigerians would hold Nigeria’s leaders accountable, and create an atmosphere that encourages free and fair elections.

Since my return home, I have understood that we were not the only youths that felt that way. We paired up with a number of youth empowerment organizations (Enough is Enough, Sleeves Up) along with several blogs (CP-Africa, Last Plane To Lagos ) and young Nigeria celebrities (Nneka) to push for a mass awareness campaign for the crucial two week voter’s registration period. On January 11th, 2011 we challenged the youth to dream up the positive change that could happen if Nigerians went out and voted, using the hashtag #IFNAIJAVOTES. The campaign was a success, trending in Nigeria, and garnering massive support around the world to get people out to register. The registration period saw a huge turn out, with a recorded 64.5 million registered voters out of the eligible 76.5 million, despite huge setbacks by the flawed process. This spoke tons on the willingness of young Nigerians to go out and vote.

The culture of intimidation is quickly losing its edge as we have seen through the courageous, death defying acts of the Arab world. The youth have risen up and are standing up for their civil rights, and this is being mimicked through the world, Nigeria being one such example.

We are teaming up with these organizations once again to call for the first ever youth-centered presidential debate. As youth make up the 70% block of registered voters, we understand the power of our vote, and request that our candidates take an evening to address the youth that has been failed by previous administrations. Since the handover to civilian rule in 1999, presidential candidates threw out vague rhetoric about their plans to fix our country, however power outages are still a norm, infrastructure has yet to be developed outside of major cities, and what’s even more alarming is that our unemployed youth are quickly falling to crime, used as political weapons to disrupt elections, used to divide communities as we’ve seen in Jos, or are joining militia groups in the Niger Delta.

We will be utilizing social media and SMS to crowd source questions from Nigeria’s youth. We want to give the youth a platform to have their frustrations heard, and hear directly from our aspirants, in order for them to be held accountable for the promises they make. The problems of a militant youth in the Niger Delta are not dissimilar to those of a child bride in North, nor are they dissimilar to an undereducated youth of the east, resorting to kidnapping to make a living.

We want to know what these candidates have in store for the youth to get them back on track and give them the future that is owed to them by the country. We want to know why they are deserving of the youth vote. We are standing up, and asking: “WHAT ABOUT US?”

Here’s how you can help:

Many young Nigerians have no voice, and we are here to provide them with one that is so desperately needed. For one day, we’re asking you to support them and do your part for our collective future.

What: Campaign to Support “WHAT ABOUT US?”
How: Dedicate your profile pictures and social network statuses to “WHAT ABOUT US?” and attend a virtual event at http://tinyurl.com/WAUEVENT
When: Thursday March 3rd, 2011

Thank you.”

A product from around the world, but loudly repping Nigeria, Nosarieme Garrick is a journalist, entrepreneur and activist currently leading the VoteorQuench.org campaign in raising awareness for youth participation in Nigeria’s upcoming elections. You can follow her - @Nosalikes on Twitter – or email her – Nosarieme [at] voteorquench.org

I’ve just spent two days at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona – courtesy of the GSMA – an event described as the “must-attend annual gathering of the mobile industry”. An estimated 50,000 senior mobile leaders from 200 countries converge on Barcelona for four days to talk, sell and promote all-things mobile. It’s pretty full-on.

Here’s a very brief round-up of some of the things that caught my eye (and ear) over the course of those two days.

Move over 3G – it’s now all about 3D. LG showed off what they claim to be the world’s first full 3D smart phone – the LG Optimus 3D – which supports the recording, viewing and sharing of 3D content. Not everyone’s convinced that there’s a market for this, me included, and most people I spoke to more broadly about the various 3D technologies on offer at the Congress said that most made their eyes go funny. Conclusion: Work in progress.

Still on the subject of new phones, Sony Ericsson showed off their highly anticipated “Playstation Phone”, or Xperia Play if you want the official title. Expect to see it in some European and Asian markets from next month, and in the US from the spring (courtesy a CDMA version and tie-up with Verizon).

Something which appealed to the environmentalist in me was Sharp’s “Touch Wood” mobile range, an “eco-friendly phone made with the surplus wood culled from overgrown forests in Japan”. Felt good, too.

There was plenty of talk around the humble SIM card, too. The Embedded SIM project continued to build up a head of steam, proposing a “worldwide standard that will allow the remote management of SIMs, effectively removing the need for a physical SIM card and allowing them to be embedded in many different types of device”. It will be interesting to see whether they embrace the multi-SIM phones turning up all over much of the developing world. And Gemalto showed off their “Facebook SIM card“, effectively allowing even the most basic, entry-level phones to access a limited range of Facebook functionality.

According to a survey carried out last month, mobile apps “attract almost as much mobile device use as messaging, and exceed the totals for voice calls and web browsing”. Over the past few years the usage debate seems to have moved from voice vs. SMS to SMS vs. web. Expect it to now move more towards web vs. apps.

When I attended my first Mobile World Congress in 2008, Android was the new kid on the block, having just been announced a few months earlier. This year, Android was pretty hard to escape.

With the developing world now accounting for four in every five mobile connections, the potential of emerging markets was not forgotten, either (although the definition of an emerging economy remains open to debate – China, for example, continues to be counted as “emerging”, as does India). That aside, the Congress Daily produced an interesting breakdown:

On a more personal level, it was great to catch up with friends at the GSMA Development Fund, the UN Foundation, Grameen Foundation, Clickatell, Wieden+Kennedy, National Geographic, Vital Wave and the mHealth Alliance, to grab lunch with Jan Chipchase, share a glass of champagne with the Text to Change team, and catch up with Nigel Waller at Movirtu. There were many more people I didn’t get to meet, but I’ll hopefully bump into them at various other events during the course of 2011.

Further reading
An expanded version of this article was published on the Guardian “Poverty Matters” Blog, here.