During some much-needed SEO work on this website, something surprised me. Twenty years after I built the first version of FrontlineSMS, it turns out people are still reading about it, citing it and teaching it. Academics and the ICT4D community keep coming back to it as a case study in appropriate technology development.
Amazingly, in all that time my site never had a comprehensive, dedicated page about the platform. It was a major oversight – and it’s now fixed.
The new FrontlineSMS Story page pulls the story together in one place – the papers, news coverage, talks, interviews and blog posts, along with early screenshots from the 2005 Beta and the story behind the logo. It also includes some little-known insider history, drawn from my own email archive. You’ll find the original ‘Project SMS’ budget, the very first emails and a few moments from the early days that I’d half forgotten myself.
The page isn’t exhaustive, but I hope it’s a useful starting point for anyone studying, teaching or just curious about how a simple text-messaging tool ended up used in more than 190 countries. \o/