Category: News

Ushering in the Advisors #3: Tess, Renny

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Following the launch of the FrontlineSMS Advisory Board late last year, we’re honoured to announce news of our latest two appointees – Tess Conner and Renny Gleeson. Tess and Renny join previous recruits Larry Diamond, Jenny Aker,  Jan Chipchase and Erik Hersman.

Rather than formulate a general board of Advisors, we’re trying to be strategic by appointing individuals in areas we consider key for the ongoing success and growth of the project. Tess and Renny fall into the branding/public relations category – clear communication and positioning will be increasingly crucial as we continue to build and deploy non-profit facing mobile services. In addition to their professional expertise, both have a strong interest in ICTs and their impact around the world. Tess has already spent the past year helping us with press and outreach, and Renny has been instrumental in the exciting – and path-breaking – branding work carried out on FrontlineSMS and the growing family of related projects.

Tess is an independent Communications Executive leading consultations which involve global community investments and social initiatives. With experience living and working in the developing world, she’s developed a great deal of passion and understanding around on-the-ground realities faced by rural communities, and the potential of the right technologies in the hands of these communities. Recently with Cisco Systems, her drive is to understand issues concerning technology’s role in education and economic development. She graduated with a Masters in Global Media and Postnational Communication from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and is an avid surfer.

Renny has worked all sides of the interactive marketing space from client, to agency, to publishing/sales, beginning his “career” as an animator and game designer creating online and CD-ROM games, before helping to found Saatchi & Saatchi’s Darwin Digital company in 1997. He was later recruited by the National Basketball Association to be their Senior Director of Global Media and Interactive Marketing, where he created mobile programs and programming, oversaw fantasy game-related syndication revenue and developed interactive platforms for NBA corporate partners. Renny has since found his spiritual home at Wieden+Kennedy (W+K) as their Global Director of Interactive Strategies, where he shapes client vision on the “brave new digital world”.

We’re incredibly excited to be able to draw on the considerable experience of our new Advisory Board members, each of whom will help steer and direct our technical, marketing and organisational development. With software downloads now approaching 5,000 and the imminent launch of a number of new initiatives, not to mention the emergence of new spin-off organisations such as FrontlineSMS:Medic and FrontlineSMS:Credit, there’s without doubt plenty to be getting on with.

The Board of Advisors will all be profiled on the FrontlineSMS website once all appointments have been made. The final two will be unveiled in the coming weeks.

Welcome Tess and Renny! \o/

New year, new funding, new release

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We may only be a couple of days in, but 2010 is already promising to be another exciting year. After twelve months of steady growth (and one which saw us regularly exceed our limited technical capacity), late last month we were pleased to secure significant new funding. A $150,000 grant – our first from the Rockefeller Foundation – will allow us to increase the size of our FrontlineSMS developer team and better service the growing needs of our user, partner and developer communities. A huge thanks to Rockefeller for their support. \o/

The revamped version of FrontlineSMS – originally funded by the MacArthur Foundation in 2007/2008 – has only been available for just short of 18 months, but we’ve already put out two significant upgrades, with a third imminent. Each of these has been shaped by user feedback and requests for new features, all co-ordinated through our active and growing online Community, probably one of our greatest achievements. The latest release includes new language support, a mapping module and extended ability to connect external software applications.

Over the past few months we’ve also been quietly working on a new SMS-based initiative with partners Wieden+Kennedy, Accenture Development Partnerships (ADP) and the GSM Association. Technical development on this Hewlett Foundation-funded project – which will solve one of the biggest challenges faced by many grassroots mobile initiatives – starts next month. More news on that, and the new FrontlineSMS release, soon!

Blog it, Kenny: Most read posts of 2009

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After months – maybe years – of badgering by good friend Erik Hersman (he of White African fame), late last December I finally moved my blog over to WordPress. I actually began blogging in February 2006, but started with a plain-old HTML page on the kiwanja website. Shortly after I moved over to Blogger before finally seeing the light and moving to the king of blogging platforms. (Erik – you were right).  🙂

It’s been great seeing the readership grow, and with a neat calendar year of invigorated blogging behind me I thought it would be fun to throw together a list of the top twelve most read posts of 2009. These posts are the most read, rather than most popular (usually measured by number of comments, Tweets, etc):

1. Bones for mobile phones (1466 reads)
2. Anthropologists! Anthropologists! (946 reads)
3. A mobile database that brings it all together (806 reads)

4. The making of an SMS icon (727 reads)
5. The Million Dollar Homepage (639 reads)
6. Dispelling the myth? (603 reads)

7. Time to eat our own dog food? (564 reads)
8. Mapping medicine availability via SMS (547 reads)
9. FrontlineSMS: Now with Forms (540 reads)

10. Step inside the laptop bank (538 reads)
11. Grameen’s AppLab comes of age (533 reads)
12. Radios. Batteries. Solar. Implications (529 reads)

And three personal favourites which didn’t make it to the list:

13. “Inappropriate” appropriate technology?
14. Why does this picture trouble me?
15. A glimpse inside social mobile’s long tail

Interesting that three of the top six posts are anthropology-related (as is one of my favourites). Anyway, happy new-year-blogging to everyone! Thanks for reading. Here’s to 2010!

Information into action: Africa and beyond

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Two organisations I’ve had the pleasure of working with – Tactical Tech and Fahamu – have independently announced the release of a film and a book which cover different aspects of non-profit digital activism. Both are well worth a look.

Info-activism.org – a Tactical Tech initiative – explores how rights advocates “use information and digital technology to create positive change”. Actions are broken down into 10 tactics which, through the site, provide original and artful ways for rights advocates to capture attention and communicate a cause (see video, above). The website includes a 50-minute film documenting inspiring info-activism stories from around the world and a set of cards, with tools tips and advice to help people plan their own info-activism campaigns. Further details of the launch are available on the BBC News website.

Turning to more traditional media, Fahamu/Pambazuka have published a new book – SMS Uprising: Mobile Phone Activism in Africa – which provides “a unique insight into how activists and social change advocates are addressing Africa’s many challenges from within, and how they are using mobile telephone technologies to facilitate these changes”.

The book is essentially a collection of essays by people engaged in using mobile phone technologies for social change, and it provides an analysis of the socio-economic, political and media contexts faced by activists in Africa today. The essays address a broad range of issues including inequalities in access to technology based on gender, rural and urban usage, as well as offering practical examples of how activists are using mobile technology to organise and document their experiences. Contributors include friends Sokari Ekine (Blacklooks) – also the editor – Amanda Atwood (Kubatana.net), Juliana Rotich (Ushahidi), Christian Kreutz (Crisscrossed.net) and others.

Congratulations to everyone at Tactical Tech and Fahamu on their initiatives, both of which provide valuable contributions to a growing body of literature on digital activism. Thanks also for the invitations to contribute – an honour and a pleasure!