Not only established non-profit organisations can benefit from “long tail” mobile solutions. In this, the fourth in our series of FrontlineSMS guest posts, Georgia Popplewell – who manages a community-lead neighbourhood watch scheme in Trinidad and Tobago – talks about the innovative use they found for the software
“Blue Range is an upper middle-class suburb of 280 households located at the northern end of the Diego Martin valley in Trinidad and Tobago. Like many communities in the country, Blue Range has begun to feel the effects of the country’s rising crime rate (543 murders were recorded in 2008), mainly in the form of burglaries.
The community has a private security patrol and a number of streets are sealed off with barriers at night. Blue Range also maintains a Google Group mailing list which residents and the neighbourhood association use to share information.
Just after midnight on December 4th, 2008, a resident sent a message to the mailing list stating that around 7:45pm he’d seen two men behaving suspiciously in the neighbourhood. Around 8:15pm on the same night, two men broke into the home of another resident. The resident put up a fight and managed to drive the men away, but ended up quite badly injured as a result. That resident and others in the area reported that they had in fact heard dogs barking around that time. It seemed obvious that if the first resident had put his neighbours on the alert at the time he had seen the two men, the incident could have been avoided.
With that in mind, I started looking for ways that security-related information could be shared more quickly and easily among the area’s residents. In my work on the citizen media project Global Voices, I’d come across FrontlineSMS, and decided to try it.
After testing it for several days with a group of my neighbours, I presented FrontlineSMS at a community meeting on December 7th, 2008. The service now has over 250 subscribers.
Blue Range’s FrontlineSMS set-up, currently run from my home on a Macintosh computer, a Motorola PEBL phone and a Clickatell messaging account, is largely automated. Subscribers can add themselves to the service by texting in “addme [name]” (numbers are verified before they’re added to the messaging group). Subscribers can broadcast messages to the entire group of users by adding a specially designated prefix to their text, messages which are then distributed using the message “forwarding” functionality in FrontlineSMS. All security messages sent via the automatic broadcast are also archived on the neighbourhood mailing list using the email forwarding functionality in the software, where residents can discuss them and offer supplementary information.
The FrontlineSMS service has been highly effective in building a greater sense of security and community in Blue Range, and in helping residents feel like they are being kept in the loop with regard to incidents in the area. Recently, for instance, when a security chopper was hovering over the area for about 20 minutes, a message relayed via FrontlineSMS assured residents that the chopper was there not to look for perpetrators but to support a medical evacuation.
In a more recent incident in the area, a burglary on January 12th in which one resident was bound and gagged by the perpetrator – and his wife made to walk through the house and hand over their valuables – has nevertheless revealed gaps in the service and demonstrated that certain parts of the neighbourhood lack the critical mass of subscribers required for it to be really effective.
With each incident, however, more residents are beginning to realise the value of subscribing to the service”.
Georgia Popplewell
Managing Director
Global Voices
www.globalvoicesonline.org
Hi Georgia, many thanks for sharing this!
I really feel a lot better/safer more aware since signing up with your site. Thank you Georgia 🙂
Hi, this is great. Would really like to find out more about this. will be doing checks online and googling.
Thanks for the post – keep up the good work.
Just think – 4 years ago, all this stuff was bleeding edge.
On the flip side, the email functionality is a problem in T&T due to the geodigital divide…
Thanks for the comments, and I echo @Patrick – by sharing this other communities in similar situations may now realise that there is something they can do, and set up their own services
@Taran – Nice to hear from you again. It’s been a long time! The really interesting thing about Georgia’s project is that, to me, it shows the potential for mobile solutions all the way to the end of the long tail – small community groups looking for simple solutions to something which represents a significant problem to them
You know you’ve caught fire when people start using your technology for things you would never have imagined. These are inspiring examples!
@Kiwanja – I agree. Georgia’s project is interesting and practical for that particular area. But I do have to qualify that project’s reach – there are various socioeconomic and geocentric divides, arguably linked, which do not permit for this solution in most of Trinidad and Tobago. In fact, one person I showed this article to commented, “Well, if we could do that we already would have. And you would have to.” You’ll recall that I’ve been dealing with SMS->other media a year before Twitter was even a company. 🙂
The good part is that, with proper *local* exposure, Georgia’s project could be used as leverage for more internet penetration within Trinidad and Tobago. Certainly, anyone can SMS (though it seems the 40+ demographic does not, and they are typically those most affected) – but to derive long lasting benefits, access to OTHER information must also be had.
You’ll recall my stance has been the equivalent of an emergency number for SMS messages is required. That stance has not changed; however what I see here is something also needed with Trinidad and Tobago Law Enforcement: Transparency.
So it’s good. But how good it is remains a factor of how much it is used. I stopped fighting that battle 2 years ago. Perhaps some others shall run into the breech… 🙂
@Steve – Well, if the fire gets out of control, please be sure to help us put it out! 😀
@Taran – I can’t comment specifically about the environment in Trinidad & Tobago, but the purpose of sharing these stories is so that other people interested in using FrontlineSMS, or other people who may be experiencing similar challenges to Georgia and her neighbours, know that there is something they can do, however small and insignificant it may be on a larger scale.
I also don’t think that this alert system is meant to replace or be seen as a better solution to existing ‘services’ or procedures, but as a supplemental one. It makes sense to make use of whatever technologies are available, and mobile is obviously part of a wider social media mix. I agree that it would be great if an emergency SMS number existed – in whatever form – but right now it doesn’t, so while people battle those particular challenges others will seek their own (perhaps temporary) solutions. Things like generating transparency are obviously far wider battles, even if they are hugely significant.
Many mobile-based projects aren’t trying to be cutting edge, and few are going to win awards any day soon. But that’s not why people do them. If SMS can provide a solution to a local problem, people should have the opportunity to implement them, and if FrontlineSMS helps move some of that forward then I’m more than happy with that. This is what the long tail is all about.
There are certainly huge challenges out there, but sometimes they just have to be tackled one small chunk at-a-time. 🙂