Ken Banks & David Kobia, originally uploaded by Maneno.org.

A busy conference week is just beginning. Ken Banks, of FrontlineSMS, and David Kobia, of Ushahidi, meetup at Barcamp Africa on Saturday in sunny California at the Googleplex.

We are baking in FrontlineSMS as one of the options for local SMS messaging into the new Ushahidi Engine. This allows administrators to choose a local number, tether a normal SIM card with a mobile phone to their computer, and then sync messages between FrontlineSMS and the Ushahidi Engine on the web. It’s important for us to have the local number option because the international SMS gateways (like Clickatell) don’t generally give the option for a local number for developing nations.

Ken, and his development team, have been extremely helpful, working closely with the Ushahidi dev team to make the integration happen. Next week, I get to spend time with Ken as we are both Pop!Tech Fellows.