From HarrassMap in Egypt to mapping violence against children in Benin to software simulations in Zambia, these two tools have been used together to give voice and collect content for various groups. The SMSMap event in Nairobi featured Anahi Ayala Iaccuci (Internews) speaking about her experiences using both tools for the Zambia simulation. Claire Wardle, BBC School of Journalism, shared her London Tube strike experiences using Crowdmap with London participants. And in London, UK Linda Raftree (Plan International) spoke candidly (and virtually) about what worked and needs work to do more joint projects. Each speaker highlighted some of the collective needs and challenges of navigating the new world of merging SMS to Map including the various software bugs encountered with Ushahidi. More on the Violence against Children, Plan International project:

The Nairobi event included a technical demo and the London event included audience discussion groups. Our common goal was to inspire people to talk about their potential projects and meet each other. Both Ushahidi and FrontlineSMS are fully committed to collaborate, provide documentation and other potential events to assist our communities in their endeavours to change their cities and their world. We were delighted to have over 60 people in London and 30 in Nairobi begin that journey with us. Community really starts when you put people with common interests together to build goals and be inspired. The feedback provided by participants is core to each of us improving their experience using our software.

More on the event:
Liveblogs, twitter, videos, skype presenters and software simulations were all part of our interactive event. Here is a running blog capturing the live media from both cities:

Thank you:

Thank you to all of those involved in helping us with the FrontlineSMS and Ushahidi ‘SMS to Map’ event. A special thanks goes to Cast London at Goldsmiths University for sponsoring the London-based event and to the iHub for hosting the Nairobi-based event too. We could not have held these events without this kind support.

Thanks to Anahi Ayala Iacucci (Internews Network) and Hamilton Juma (iHub Community Manager) for their excellent hosting of the iHub Nairobi event, Dan Mcquillan (Goldsmiths, University of London) for his amazing support arranging the London event, and of course all of the wonderful speakers including Linda Raftree (Plan International), Claire Wardle (BBC College of Journalism), Linda Kamau (Ushahidi), Sharon Langevin (FrontlineSMS:Credit), Limo Taboi (Ushahidi), Anahi Ayala Iacucci (Internews Network), and Laura Walker Hudson (FrontlineSMS Director of Operations). And, a warm thank you to the FrontlineSMS team for co-hosting the London event with Charl and myself. Florence, Amy, Hussein, Laura and Lisa, it was a pleasure to spend the day with you to make this happen. Very special thanks for Florence Scialom for being the rock of organization for all of us. Here’s her post about the event.

Thanks to the participants and volunteers for joining us on this adventure to change and connect the world with open source software.

Androids running SMSSync at Ushahidi Liberia

These days technology just works. There’s no magic and very little rocket science; put in some 1s and 0s and get out 1s and 0s. The days are gone when bugs, actual insects, would chew their way through the computers wire and cause mayhem.

Now some of you right now are saying, “Yeah, but I still can’t figure out how to make my Facebook profile private.” That’s a user interface issue; the underlying technology is working perfectly. The layer that exposes that technology to you may be poorly designed, but that’s not what we’re here to discuss.

Yes technology hums along gloriously – until certain assumptions no longer hold true. Such assumptions usually include constant electricity and Internet, two things that are not constant in Liberia. Thus what seems like a perfect combination – SMS technology and Liberia – has a few obstacles to overcome before riding off into the sunset happily ever after.

For us at Ushahidi Liberia, we wanted SMS and Liberia hit it off. SMS is a great way for people on the ground to send in reports of what’s really happening. All you need is a phone and a cell phone signal. Most places in the world have cell phone coverage, and an increasing number of people have cell phones. The Ushahidi platform even has built-in support for SMS because it has worked well in other deployments. So let’s get to know more about the compatibility of this couple in particular – SMS and Liberia.

SMS

Simple Messaging Service is a GSM standard that uses extra bandwidth in the signaling path that controls call flow. The signaling path is used to tell a cell phone that a new call is coming in, that the call has been hung up, the number of the incoming call and so forth. Since the signaling path isn’t used when there is no phone call, phone companies realized they could add a messaging service on top of this unused signaling path – and SMS was born. Because the signaling path is only intended for short messages like, “incoming call +231-6-555-343”, SMS messages can only be 160 characters long.

Liberia

Liberia is a small country in West Africa still recovering from a civil war that devastated the nation’s infrastructure.  Despite the lack of power lines, power stations and any kind of hard-wired telecommunications infrastructure, Liberia now has a relatively robust cell phone network. While less than 1% of Liberians have access to the Internet, at least 20% own cell phones and even more have access to shared phones. SMS seems like a natural choice for Liberians to send messages to our Ushahidi Liberia sites, given that even the cheapest cell phones available in-country support SMS.

Half a powerline: Liberia's damaged infrastructure

The Trials of Matchmaking

At this point, things look good for our two lovebirds. A simple global standard for sending short messages and a country where the telecommunications infrastructure is best equipped to handle short messages. In fact, such a partnership has worked so well in other countries that the wonderful people at kiwanja.net created FrontlineSMS. FrontlineSMS is a program that turns your average laptop and a cell phone into an SMS gateway for bulk messaging and routing incoming SMS to the Internet. By connecting a cell phone to a computer via a data cable, FrontlineSMS can intercept incoming SMS and automatically send them to a website of your choosing – an ideal matchmaker for SMS and Liberia.

However, it is here we encountered our first obstacle. Computers need power. You can get around this requirement for a few hours by using a laptop, but the problem persists. Ushahidi Liberia’s first office used a diesel generator for electricity, like most Liberian workplaces that do not have access to a power grid. Diesel isn’t cheap in Liberia, so the generator only ran from 9am to 7pm; that leaves 14 hours without power.  In other words, 14 hours without the ability to send and receive SMS via a desktop SMS gateway.  Because many of the reports sent to our Liberia instances about conflict and instability, we could not afford to be operational for only 10 hours a day.

The second obstacle was an unreliable Internet connection. In Liberia, all Internet connections are via satellite – far slower and more expensive than fiber optic connections. Ushahidi Liberia’s first ISP leased a satellite Internet connection comparable to a slow DSL connection in the US – comparable until the ISP splits that connection among all of its customers, who then split their slice of the connection amongst all the users in the office/home.  During peak working hours as many as 500 people were using that one Internet connection, causing it to drop out when bandwidth was exceeded, and causing any user to grind their teeth in frustration when it was working but oh so slow.

When the Internet dropped out in our office and FrontlineSMS received an SMS to forward to Ushahidi servers, the sending would fail and FrontlineSMS would drop the message without resending. At that time, FrontlineSMS did not notify the sender or the receiver that a message failed to send, so it could be days before the person running the FrontlineSMS instance might realize that half the sent messages were missing. FrontlineSMS, like many platforms, is designed with the assumption that the Internet works.  Granted, we were using FrontlineSMS as an SMS gateway to the Internet and not solely as a bulk messaging system, so our needs were specific.

SMSSync to the Rescue

Considering these glitches, our couple might not be as compatible as we thought – that is until SMSSync came along. SMSSync is an Android app written by the Ushahidi team that replaces the computer as the intermediary and runs the SMS gateway program on the phone itself. Since Android phones can connect to the Internet via WiFi and GPRS, they can receive an incoming SMS and then send it out over the Internet all by themselves. This solved our first problem of power. Phones can easily run 14 hours, or a couple of days, without recharge; that’s what they’re made to do. But we still have the issue of unreliable Internet.

SMSSync Android app

To address the Internet, our team worked closely with SMSSync’s creator, Henry Addo, to incorporate a resend function that repeatedly tries sending a message until it is received by the target URL. Now messages can be received by SMSSync even when the Internet is out and they stay in a holding pattern until the connection returns.

At this point it seems like everything is going to work out for SMS and Liberia, but not so fast.

There’s still one more assumption suggested earlier – that humans will interact with technology correctly. Even the most well-intentioned, experienced user will occasionally get it wrong. The civil war held up the arrival of the latest technologies, and as a result many Liberians don’t have extensive experience with technology.  We noticed that every so often we’d receive a blank message from our users in the field; someone probably hit send prematurely. At first we didn’t pay much attention to this, but then we noticed that SMSSync would stop sending messages after receiving blanks.

After a lot of hair-pulling, we realized the glitch was related to the Ushahidi platform itself. It was programmed to reject blank SMSs as erroneous. SMSSync would try to forward the blank SMS to Ushahidi, Ushahidi would reject it, SMSSync would wait 5 minutes and try again, meanwhile all the other messages were waiting in line. We reprogrammed the Ushahidi platoform to accept all messages, blank or otherwise. Messages that appeared to be errors would be marked as such for the users of the Ushahidi platform to decide what to do with them.

We also had a similar problem with promotional SMS from the cell phone companies. They’d send out things like, “Talk free this Saturday” and often these messages wouldn’t be from numbers like, “06-555-123”, but rather from “winBig” or “LonestarCell.” Again, we didn’t think much of this, but SMSSync stopped working shortly after receiving these messages. It turns out that the Ushahidi platform is also set to reject SMS from numbers that aren’t numbers, sending an app like SMSSync into a never-ending loop. We also fixed this in the Ushahidi platform.

At this point we’ve accounted for assumptions about electricity, Internet and human users. The final assumption we had to overcome is that the technology will always, from now to eternity, until you tell it otherwise, do what you want. But here’s a twist: in an effort to save battery power, Android phones are programmed to turn off their WiFi radios after a certain period of inactivity. Thus SMSSync would work brilliantly for awhile, but then stop forwarding messages for no apparent reason. We’d look at the phone, see the unsent SMS, and since we were now using the phone the WiFi would come back on and mysteriously work. Much to our embarrassment, this also took a long time to figure out.

It’s the Simple Things

At this point I’d like to make it clear that 99% of the time it’s the simple things that get in the way. It wasn’t some small manufacturing defect in our phones, it wasn’t a rogue bit of code deep in SMSSync, it was just a simple feature of the phones that, when they aren’t working as SMS gateways, works to the user’s advantage.

KeepScreen Android app

We fixed the WiFi automatic sleep by installing KeepScreen on the phones. KeepScreen is a free Andoid App that just keeps the screen on all the time. By keeping the screen on, and making the Android think the user is still using the phone, the WiFi also never goes off.

Now our phones work perfectly, day and night, through power and blackouts, high bandwidth bliss and connection timeouts, to send SMSs from our users on the ground to our servers high in the Internet’s metaphorical cloud. And after much hardship, Liberia, a beautiful country, and SMS, a messaging protocol of elegant simplicity, are together at last.

Reclaimnaija is a broad-based citizens’ platform, which was set up to enhance the participation of grassroots people, organizations and local institutions in promoting electoral transparency, accountability and democratic governance in Nigeria.

Why ReclaimNaija?

A look at the history of elections in Nigeria shows that there is weak public confidence in the integrity of the electoral process due to previous experience of massive electoral fraud in the country. The way the business of electioneering is conducted by the politicians makes it difficult for citizens to make informed choices about candidates running for office. There is paucity of information on the candidates and most candidates do not engage politically with the electorate. The campaigns are not ideologically driven nor do they focus on issues and programmes. Rather they are more focused on personalities, intra/inter party rivalries, inducement and gratification of the electorate, especially the rural and urban-poor communities.

It became imperative to build the capacity of the citizens and grassroots people to engage proactively with the electoral process and outcomes. ReclaimNaija was, therefore, created to provide such empowerment through in-depth voter education and the promotion of citizen action.

To this end, Community Life Project and its key partners, Community Development Departments nationwide and Federation of Muslim Women’s Associations in Nigeria (FOMWAN), the promoters of ReclaimNaija, carried out 193 civic and voter education forums for community and grassroots leaders spread across the 36 States of the country and the Federal Capital Territory. An average of 120 leaders was in attendance at all the forums. Participants were drawn from existing networks with viable structures such as Artisan and Trade-Based associations, Faith-Based Organisations, Community Development Associations, Youth Organisations, Okada (Commercial Motor Bike) Riders and Owners and Associations of Persons with Disabilities.

This broad scale education of community leaders was strategic in getting a buy – in from the grassroots. The trained leaders took ownership of the platform. They effectively became the faces and voices of reclaimnaija, as they went ahead to carry out public awareness activities. For instance, the Okada Riders and Owners Associations mobilised their membership and organised week-long carnivals in several cities across the 6 geopolitical zones of the country distributing fliers with the reporting numbers; while the Association of Hairdressers educated their members, put up posters in their salons and also distributed fliers to their clients.

Okada riders distributing posters

These outreach activities contributed significantly to the effectiveness of reclaimnaija.net platform.

ReclaimNaija.Net Platform

The reclaimnaija platform, which is driven by the Ushahidi web engine, is a reporting platform set up as a mechanism for grassroots people to get their voices heard on issues of electoral transparency and governance. The platform makes it possible for citizens to monitor the electoral process and report incidents of electoral fraud and other malpractices simply by sending text messages or calling dedicated numbers in four major languages (Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba and Pidgin). For the text messages,FrontlineSMS is what has been used as the SMS gateway. Citizens can also report to the platform via email, direct reporting on the site and twitter.

Community Life Project successfully deployed the platform for promoting electoral transparency in the pre-election phase of the 2011 elections.

ReclaimNaija.Net and the 2011 Elections: The Journey So Far


The platform was effectively used by the citizens and grassroots people from all over the country to report incidents during the voter registration exercise. The reports were collated real time and fed to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). This assisted INEC in troubleshooting in many locations across the country. They were also useful to the media in monitoring and publishing stories on the voter registration exercise thereby helping to amplify the voice of the people.

In addition, the reclaimnaija.net website serves as a one-stop online resource for information on the 2011 elections. It features all the polling units, senatorial districts and wards, the Nigerian Constitution, information on candidates, the 2010 electoral act, the election timetable, electoral guidelines, certified voters’ registration figures, political parties as well as civic and voter education modules.

For the first time in our history, citizens of this country have a formidable platform for promoting electoral transparency and popular participation. Citizens were able to positively influence the electoral process. For instance, a lot of reports came from communities with limited access to registration centres and a couple of such communities had the deadline for voter registration extended by two days.

Reclaimnaija.net has already succeeded in redefining the paradigm of election monitoring in Nigeria.

FrontlineSMS has long been a part of the Ushahidi ecosystem. When we rebuilt Ushahidi in the summer of 2008 at a free and open source platform, we built hooks into it so that anyone who used FrontlineSMS could easily sync that information to the Ushahidi maps. At that same time, FrontlineSMS open sourced their code, and we tried to learn as much as we could about how to better help users who were running their own SMS gateway through FrontlineSMS so that the system could truly be run by anyone, anywhere.

It’s a simple as this:

Today FrontlineSMS is adding MMS to their repertoire!

That’s a big deal. It means that we can now figure out how to include more than just text messages, but also images, video and audio. Incoming MMS messages can trigger an SMS auto-reply, or an external command, etc. It’s a great blending of SMS/MMS in one system, and shows how holistically their team has thought about the user interaction with simple messaging.

We’re thinking of implementations of this, and we’d love some feedback from you on how it could be done an what would be useful. Leave some comments below with your thoughts.

Taking the maps offline through FrontlineSMS

We’re working on even better integration into this longstanding keystone of the open mobile space. Right now we (“we” being Dale Zak, Emmanuel Kala and Brian Muita) are working closely with Ken Banks and his team of wizards to do a couple of cool things. First is the completing of the very exciting offline mapping tab which is probably about 70% done at the moment. Second, there’s also talk of adding functionality to allow Ushahidi users to post reports directly from FrontlineForms, and this could prove very useful in a wider capacity where people want to get structured data from end-users via SMS which is then posted online.

Many great things lie ahead for the two teams, and we expect more and better integration as we work on different features and functionality together.

[full press release: FrontlineSMS + MMS press release (PDF)]

Download FrontlineSMS v1.6.16 here.

My role in all of this started shortly after the Ushahidi-Haiti instance was up and running, providing technical support and new, rapid development on the instance as needs arose. Virtually all of the core developers were working around the clock making sure critical bugs and new features were taken care of, as well as making sure the servers were running smoothly.

The home of the future redevlopment of SMS Turks on github.

While everyone was in full gear working on the website, we were able to secure the 4636 short code with the help of Josh Nesbit of FrontlineSMS, Digicel and Comcel. We just had one problem, the stakeholders who were going to be digesting these messages and passing them along to the appropriate organizations spoke English and some French. Messages being sent from Haitians on the ground would be coming through primarily in Haitian Kreyol, which would have made it nearly impossible to categorize, map and respond. So, my focus shifted towards the short code effort. With the help of InSTEDD donating server space and Robert Munro handling volunteer feedback, I was able to write a system at 4636.ushahidi.com that would allow translation, categorization and basic geocoding of all the messages that came in. I’ve coined this project, “SMS Turks.”

In crisis situations, it’s always better to use systems that have been tested thoroughly that can scale well. Since SMS Turks was literally put into production the day it was built, there were bound to be issues. Also, volunteers can only put in 12 hour days translating text messages for so long. CrowdFlower graciously offered their services to pipe the messages through their system, handling the technical aspects at no cost to Ushahidi. Over time, as volunteers go back to their day jobs, Samasource will be providing Haitian’s paid opportunities to process the messages as they are coming in, allowing us to put money into the Haitian economy.

The SMS Turks system will be entirely rewritten from the ground up as an Ushahidi project. It will be easily pluggable into Ushahidi, as well as produce feeds that should work with virtually any other open system.

You can see my notes from the talk here.

That same team has built a major campaign, Hope Phones, to gather unused and discarded mobile phone handsets and convert them into funds for use in their mobile health campaigns in Malawi and elsewhere in Africa.

“Hope Phones will make use of the nearly 450,000 cell phones discarded every day in the US. HopePhones.org allows donors to print a free shipping label and send their old phone in to The Wireless Source, a global leader in wireless device recycling. The phone’s value allows FrontlineSMS:Medic to purchase usable, recycled cell phones for healthcare workers.”

This is a fundraising campaign, one put in place to promote a project that already has a track record of working.

Get involved:

1. Visit www.HopePhones.org and donate your old phones.
2. Spread the word:

• Email your friends, family, classmates and coworkers.
• Post on Facebook and become a fan of the Hope Phones page.
• Tell the world on Twitter – use #HopePhones as a tag so we can thank you.
• Let us know if you want the Hope Phones widget for your website or blog.

3. Contact info@hopephones.org if you’d like to help set up a Hope Phones collection center.

Brenda of FreedomFone, Erik of Ushahidi and Ken of FrontlineSMS

One of the discussion points that has kept coming up in conversations here is how powerful platforms are over single products. In this case, I define a technology platform as a basic tool that provides unique functionality that can then be customized for many uses outside of what the original creators could have done on their own. A product, on the other hand, is also a tool, but one that has a specific purpose – one that can’t be extended.

So, I see a platform as a foundation, a product is a specialized tool.

The FrontlineSMS/Ushahidi relationship

To this point, we’ve baked FrontlineSMS into the platform. Basically, we make it easy to do one of two things. First, if you have a FrontlineSMS setup already going, you can just layer Ushahidi on top of that and sync the data for visualization purposes. Second, if you’re about to start using Ushahidi and need a local number, we get you started on FrontlineSMS as a way to create that local gateway to gather and sync SMS messages.

This is possible because both of us have open platforms. We can continue to build our own tools, focusing on the needs of each of the users that we support. However, because of the open nature, we are able to easily access and utilize each others platforms.

It’s simple, it lets each group go after their own self-interest, and it works.

Needless to say, this isn’t just us, but it’s an example of how platforms can work together to become more than the sum of their individual parts. You can see the same type of interaction happening between other organizations, like InSTEDD and JavaRosa, with OpenMRS and Android.

A couple of platforms in the ICTD space

• FrontlineSMS is a platform. It simply lets you setup a localized SMS gateway.
• Ushahidi is a platform. It allows for the gathering of distributed data via mobile phone, email and the web, then the ability to visualize and manage that data.
• FreedomFone is another platform. It’s an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system, that allows people to interact via voice, not just text. Highly useful in many parts of the world, not just Africa.

Last week I was in Maputo for the W3C workshop on the “Africa Perspective on the Role of Mobile Technologies in Fostering Social Development”. The aim of the workshop is to understand the specific challenges of using mobile phones and Web technologies to deliver services to underprivileged populations of developing countries, and also to capture the specificities of the African context.

Ushahidi was privileged to have a seat to present. I was in the mobile activism session where I presented with our mutal friend Frontlinesms, of Kiwanja.net the software that powers Ushahidi’s SMS functionality and with Erik Osiakwan as well who presented Web plus SMS for elections. A software used to collate ghana elections results and its SMS functionality is also powered by frontlinesms. I presented the history of Ushahidi. How it was born out of crisis and the empowerment it gave to ordinary kenyan’s to report incidents during the post election crisis and also on the current state of the project, where we have so far delpoyed after its first depoyment and the way forward for us.

There was a session on M-health( Mobile health ) where applications were presented concerning mobile solutions in the health care sector. One interesting application presented by Josh Nesbit is Frontlinesms:medics an SMS based communication network. Josh Nesbit the implementer of the solution is a senior in the Human Biology Program at Stanford University, he traveled all the way to St. Gabriel’s Hospital in Namitete, Malawi with recycled cell phones, laptops running Frontlinesms. A voluntered community health workers were called, trained in text messaging and were given cellphones. At the hospital was a computer running frontlinesms which cooordinates the health network activities.

As a result of the SMS communication network, the hospital now responds to requests remote patient care, tracks distant patients and their health related activities, informs community health workers of proper drug dosages and uses and facititates the communications between community health workers. As before the SMS communication set up, all this activities have to be done over 100 miles which is stressful and expensive.I see an Ushahidi instance setup here. If ever the health workers want to track the locations and record extactly where most health related issues happens, they can map the various issues on a map using Ushahidi. I look forward for such an instance set up.

It’s with that thought in mind that groups like InSTEDD, Ushahidi and FrontlineSMS (all of the OMC group actually) have continued to talk and figure out ways that we can truly layer our technology together in a user-friendly way that makes sense to non-technical people in the field. From the beginning, we baked in FrontlineSMS support to Ushahidi. We’re moving into a phase where we start to integrate in tools from InSTEDD as well, with hopes that we can make a connecting mechanism between instances that can sync over just SMS, not only the web.

The FrontlineSMS example

Last week a couple of us started playing with FrontlineSMS Forms, a new service on the FrontlineSMS platform, which allows for dynamic forms to be created on a FrontlineSMS hub and then sent to a Java app running on a phone in the field. Point your WAP enabled mobile phone at Forms.FrontlineSMS.com to get the mobile client.

Creating the dynamic forms on the computer:

Using the J2ME forms app on your phone:

This allows for a nice controlled data gathering environment. Nothing new there though, as we already have OpenRosa. Ken tells me that integration with the OpenRosa/xForms standards are in the cards for future iterations.

What’s exciting about seeing this development is not just that it works well, or that it’s completely customizable, but that it’s already being tied up in this modular fashion that I mentioned above. Just today FrontlineSMS:Medic was announced – which is being run by a bunch of university students like Josh Nesbit. (If this simple approach works, it could make a bunch of the smart adults selling multi-million dollar solutions look a little silly).

This new FrontlineSMS:Medic program is integrating with OpenMRS – where they will build an SMS bridge so medical records can be edited, updated and requested via SMS in the field. That’s exactly the type of cross-application functionality that we need to encourage and see put into use in this field!

Where is it all going?

What I’d like to be able to do is take the LEGO approach and grab FrontlineForms OR OpenRosa, layer on Ushahidi for visualization and maps, and then sync it all via Mesh4x using SMS.

Most of all, I hope we get beyond our own app-centric view. If we can just get to a point where we provide simple, modular solutions for real-world users then we’ll all be a lot further. Let the user decide what works, which tools fit best for their specific needs and how to integrate it. An ecosystem approach that encourages curiosity and customization, and one that doesn’t tie a user to one specific system forever.