Audio & Video: Curry Stone Design Prize

I spent quite a bit of time in South Africa and Mozambique looking at how mobile technologies could be useful. I think there’s a tendency, when we look at innovation today, to think immediately of iPads and smartphones. The important thing is to lead with the problem, lead with the people, and the answer may be a crayon at the end of the day.

I was meeting lots of non-profits working in rural areas who were also very interested in figuring out how they could use phones, but people weren’t building tools that, to me, seemed to work very well in those places. When I set out to solve the communication problems that I saw in South Africa, that’s really all I was trying to do: just sticking to the root thing that we were trying to solve, which was sending a text message to somebody and getting a reply back. I don’t know specifically where the idea came from. It really did just appear, and I scribbled some notes down.

Most of the things I was interested in were conservation, or human rights, or agriculture, or climate change. All this stuff bugged me. You can’t do all those things, but I somehow managed to create a piece of software that allows me to contribute to all the things that concern me, all in one go. FrontlineSMS turns a low-cost laptop computer, a mobile phone and a cable into a two-way text messaging system, which allows non-profits working in the developing world to run automated text messaging services with rural communities. You can use it with very little computer skill or experience: healthcare workers, farmers, human rights activists, election monitors, whoever you’re trying to communicate with. You type a message and send it to all of those people.

It’s, in a sense, quite an old technology. It’s been around for a long time, and hence it’s so accessible. The fact is that there are 5 billion mobile phones in the world today, and that’s a very accessible technology, whereas the internet isn’t so accessible. I think before, it was always either/or: use a laptop or use a mobile phone. [unclear] you can’t really avoid that platform. But secondly, yes, you have a mobile phone, but you need something that enables you to harness the power of that phone.

When I released the software in 2005, we had our first user in Zimbabwe after about a week, and I was very excited to have one user. Then, suddenly, in April 2007, a loose coalition of Nigerian NGOs took the software and helped monitor their national elections, and it was the first time, it’s believed, that African NGOs had monitored their own elections using mobile technology. I think the idea that everyday citizens could actually report things changed the way people thought about how they might go about trying to swing an election, and I think that’s had a wider impact all around the world. For people who put their necks on the line for that type of work, the least I can do is do my best to support them. I’m not on the front line of this.

HarassMap was really concerned with the level of harassment on Egyptian streets, so they created an SMS service using FrontlineSMS to allow people to send reports when they experienced harassment. They also used an online crowdsourced mapping tool so that they could then respond to the areas where harassment was most prevalent.

One of the key things with FrontlineSMS is that, as an organisation, we don’t deploy the software ourselves in developing countries. We make it available to existing non-profits and grassroots organisations. If we hadn’t open-sourced it, we would not have had this rich ecosystem of developers. People working in certain sectors have identified additional functionality that could be added to the software, which makes it more useful and more relevant. FrontlineSMS:Medic are building patient record-keeping systems that are powered by text message; FrontlineSMS:Credit are building microfinance modules; and the newest one, coming out later in the year, FrontlineSMS:Media, will allow us to build citizen journalism, data collection and news story tools to report things that are happening where they are. When you get a group that has been oppressed, that has been so dispossessed, and all of a sudden they find something that renews that hope, for me that becomes a really inspiring moment, and that is where change happens.

The logo for FrontlineSMS, here on this badge, is a backslash, a lowercase o and a forward slash. It’s a text representation of somebody who would feel empowered, which is the message that the software seems to give. It’s text because it uses standard characters available on the keyboard. We also get photographs from users in the field, actually sending in workshops and their staff, feeling: yes, we’ve got our system running and we’re empowered. So we see our role very much as building tools and allowing the people who actually own the problem to solve it.

Transcript edited from YouTube’s auto-generated captions for accuracy.