The Ushahidi Blog » open mobile consortium http://blog.ushahidi.com Thoughts and Lessons from an African Open-Source Project Wed, 08 Feb 2012 13:33:53 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.4 Ushahidi and the Open Mobile Consortium http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2009/06/05/ushahidi-and-the-open-mobile-consortium/ http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2009/06/05/ushahidi-and-the-open-mobile-consortium/#comments Fri, 05 Jun 2009 15:41:30 +0000 Erik Hersman http://blog.ushahidi.com/?p=605 I’m a little late to the party as far as announcing that the Open Mobile Consortium (OMC) has launched – but, better late than never. We’ve been part of the working group since the very beginning and are proud to be a part of such a great group of people and organizations.

The Open Mobile Consortium

The OMC is all about open source mobile phone software, with a focus on humanitarian needs.

“OMC members share a vision that by working together to drive grassroots mobile technology innovation in some of the most challenging, resource-poor environments in the world, they will create a simple, flexible, and reliable set of technology that enable to individual and organizations anywhere in the world to effect social change.”

If you’re doing the same type of software development as the others of us in the consortium, please get in touch. Robert Kirkpatrick of InSTEDD is the Chair of the OMC, you can reach out to him if you have any questions or comments.

The website was created by the wizards of Development Seed (these guys really are the best Drupal shop I’ve come across).

]]> http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2009/06/05/ushahidi-and-the-open-mobile-consortium/feed/ 0 Open Mobile Consortium Technical Meeting http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2008/11/10/open-mobile-consortium-technical-meeting/ http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2008/11/10/open-mobile-consortium-technical-meeting/#comments Mon, 10 Nov 2008 16:32:12 +0000 Erik Hersman http://blog.ushahidi.com/?p=84 David at the Open Mobile Consortium meeting
(David Kobia, Director of development for Ushahidi, who is currently sitting next to me madly trying to get the French translation version of our DRC deployment going…)

Today and tomorrow, David and I are in New York at the UNICEF offices for the first technical working group meeting of the new Open Mobile Consortium (OMC). The OMC is a group that came about just a month ago at the MobileActive conference in Johannesburg (more here on that).

Items we’re covering on day one:

  • Technology Demos: Different organizations briefly describe current capabilities, limitations, and future directions. Where are they working? At what scale? Who are the partners? A balance of strengths and weaknesses.
  • Pattern Mining: Work towards collecting proven practices from the field.
  • Protocols, Capabilities, and Libraries: Identify common needs and match to implementations.

From the opening introductions, there are representatives from InSTEDD, Cell-Life, Open Rosa, Dimagi, UNICEF, Makarere Univ (Uganda), Southwest Univ (Senegal project), Univ of Southern Maine, Univ of Wash, Google Android, Inveneo and Digital Democracy.

Open Mobile Consortium meeting

Thoughts

What do you do when you don’t have internet connectivity with some of these devices? Disconnected operations. This applies to web (Ushahidi), and mobile (JavaRosa and Android).

SMS technology is not always sufficient to effectively gather information. (lessons learned from RapidSMS in Northern Uganda outbreak of Hepatitis E)

Requiring users to use a special format for SMS text messaging is a big barrier to use.

UNICEF techs have created the Mobile Hacking wiki, well worth getting into.

MobileHacking.org

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