Mobile4Dev

Is hardware hacking becoming more accessible in the development context?

A positive psychologist friend once explained the concept of (watch as I butcher the terms and descriptions) "flow" to me. I understood it as working on things which are interesting, difficult, but not so overwhelmingly difficult that you can't make clear progress on. Importantly, also not so easy that you just breeze mindlessly through. Good logic puzzles, programming, and such things are often found on this razor's edge between too difficult and too easy.

Hardware hacking has long been a task which only a small, geeky set of people can really enjoy a flow state while exploring the dark magics of hardware.

Last night I shared some pints with DC-area OLPC fans , Mike Lee showed off an Acer he'd hacked a Pixel Qi screen into. Now, this is not a hack for the faint of heart (yet), but it's pretty amazing in the world of the mostly-sealed, non-user-hackable laptop setups to be able to swap in a new screen, especially not one provided in a kit from the original manufacturer.

Cross-posted at TechnologySalon.org

Where the last SMS4D Technology Salon reminded us of the unique gift of mobile technologies to be based where there impact will be, The Cloudy SMS4D Salon really drove home mobile as a multifunctional tool whose true impact is tied more to the usage than the technology itself. While we gathered to discuss SMS4D, we really talked about heath reporting and outreach, education, and community-building through knowledge management and sharing. It just so happened that these health projects were using SMS codes to report longitudinal child health statistics.

Data gathering in health, and even knowing when to gather data, is a huge burden, often relying on community health workers doing the healthcare version of the T&V system of the agricultural extension world. Waiting around for a planned infrastructure is hopeless, but working with the more incremental nature of mobile can improve reporting rates and reduce errors -- "utter chaos works everywhere" being the best quote of this tech salon. Childcount builds on existing SMS reporting to enable community health workers to rapidly register children, note any symptoms or diseases they might have, improve patient tracking (and thereby reducing duplication), and schedule immunizations and outreach. The SMS "encoding" builds off of a simple and familiar paper form, which is handy for training (but less useful than a mango tree, as we'll see). The runner-up quote from this Salon dealt with discussion around the potential risk of intentionally fabricated data -- "humans are awful at falsifying data" -- digitizing and quick, auditable reporting exposes both errors and lies.

RapidResponse Overview from Matt Berg on Vimeo.

Winning the award for innovative ideas in mHealth was the HappyPill project -- instead of boing old SMS, HappyPills uses "flashing" - where you call a number and hang up immediately to "ping" someone. Usually, flashing is just a free way to ask someone to call you back, or you can sometimes work out extensive codes -- one missed call is just saying hi, two is call me back, three means an emergency, etc.. HappyPills takes this basic, essentially binary interaction and applies it to help improve adherence rates for prescription regimens. A medical center can send out flashes to their patients, and the patients are reminded to take their pills and would then flash back to signal that they took their medicine. It's naturally not foolproof, but hugely more cost effective (almost cost-free) in comparison with sending a community health worker out to the patient on a motorcycle to witness their pill-taking.

It turns out that people are not just willing, but economically motivated and excited to use (and pay for) basic SMS-based services to improve their numeracy and literacy skills, improving their ability to communicate cheaply over their phones as well as better navigate market prices. In these low-technology communities, Tostan's Jokko Initiative is creating a curriculum to enable this via SMS, and they have also come up with an amazingly simple methodology to introduce people to menu systems using a mango tree metaphor which gracefully transitions from the concrete (planning a climbing route on a real tree to get to a specific mango) to the semi-concrete (the same, on a diagram of a tree), to the abstract (the tree diagram becomes the menu diagram, the mango a specific function). Anyone who thinks that is basic has never shown their grandparents a new shiny piece of technology, or had their entire worldview of user interface challenged by someone physically pointing a mouse at a screen).

Patatat is an early-stage solution which puts SMS into the role of a community town hall/newsletter/email list. It removes not only the normal geographic barriers that a listserv gets around, but also infrastructure barriers, so (for example) farmers across a region or the world can share knowledge around their crops without relying on the grid and hardwired phones/Internet to do so. This also centralizes costs to one "host" and minimizes it to the community, so a farmer could send one SMS (free to receive, costs to send), and the host would re-broadcast it to the entire "community." With Twitter already showing that it can (technically) report earthquakes faster than the earthquake itself spreads, this rebroadcasting tool also has clear applications in emergency announcements, citizen journalism and a myriad of other fields.

So, was this technology salon about technology, or was it about development projects? Sure, all of the projects discussed at the salon happened to use server and cloud-based SMS technologies. They also probably use paper, transportation, and people. That the technology is now moving from the focus of a project to being a (cool, exciting, powerful, still new-and-shiny) tool in the toolbox is truly heartwarming. It means it is maturing into a cross-sector role and not into another silo (sorry, a "cylinder of excellence" in the parlance of our times).

I made it to South By Southwest this year, where I immersed myself in innovative ideas for open-sourced businesses, technology design for good, social media for change, and the general awesome insanity of SXSW.

The absolute best part of this conference is the new world of twitter-powered discussions. At a talk yesterday, the entire Q&A session was run over twitter. The presenters paused a few questions in and asked for a show of hands of anyone who was not using twitter. In a large crowded ballroom, no one raised their hands. Every session ends up having a running, silent conversation and collaborative note-taking.

You can follow my notes in twitter at http://twitter.com/joncamfield, and see what events I went to (or was trying to decide between) at http://my.sxsw.com/user/schedule/joncamfield

On Sunday afternoon, I worked with CrisisCamp DC's Heather Blanchard and @HastingsCJ to organize a meetup for ICT4D practitioners at the Gingerman, which turned our great. Lots of faces were put to twitter-names, connections were made and beer was consumed.

Few, if any, tweet-ups will compare, however, to Monday night's Good Capitalist party that Ashoka's Changemakers co-hosted with a variety of other social entrepreneurship groups. Without a dime of marketing money spent, it had 2000 RSVPs and over 600 people who made it by to network, learn about social entrepreneurship, and enjoy the wonderful outdoor Austin weather..

Something is still missing in the world of mobiles and social networks.

I strongly believe in the power of social networks in development, be they online or offline. They create communities of practice from the local to the global level, which promotes better understanding of what a best practice is versus what is just a good theory that doesn't reliably work. You also have amazing, unprecedented access through mobile phones and SMS.

But there's nothing solidly connecting the two (unless I'm missing something?)

iRevolution has a good, academic-style breakdown of challenges and communication technologies for use to communicate securely within repressive regimes:

http://irevolution.wordpress.com/2009/06/15/digital-security/

It covers a lot of ground, balancing ease of use against level of security, and is looking for input!

This is my response to the current EduTech Debate on the role of mobiles Vs. computers in education. Join the conversation and disagree with me!

I'm sure I sound like a broken record by this point; but there are roles for both mobiles and computers (be it 1:1 computing as with the OLPC, or 1-computer classrooms, or simply computer labs). Mobiles have high penetration rates (but how young? elementary school?) but limited capabilities beyond 1:1 or expensive 1:many communication. Computers are much more fragile and require more infrastucture, but have such a wealth of educational software and information (especially if you add in the Internet).

Neither are silver bullets to heal a failing education system, but both could play a role in extending education (call-backs to listen in to class for rural youth unable to attend school regularly?) if implemented with a reasonable and maintainable budget and good integration into the existing education processes.

Check out some updates -- props to @MobileActive!

During the last breakout at the Mobile for Change (#m4change in twitter, a good writeup by Development Seed's Will White: Recap of Mobile Tech 4 Social Change BarCamp ) open conference yesterday, we began to get into some of the problems that had been bugging me all day.

During NDI's Ian Shuler's presentation on the state of Mobile in Development (especially in Election Observation) I twittered:

what happens when govt catches up, blocks sms during unrest? we need p2p networks #m4change
9:38 AM Apr 29th from web

Now that I'm not constrained by 140 characters, let me unpack that a bit.

Repressive governments are getting smarter. They've enjoyed the ability to censor, control and manipulate traditional media for quite some time now, and have been caught blindsided by the Internet and cell phones. We cannot hope or expect that to continue. We've seen the first, blunt reactions to this - shutting down SMS service during elections to prevent the spread of information, and during the #pman protests SMSs were severely throttled. In #pman the protesters were able to continue exchanging information on their cellphone's data connections. I wouldn't count on that working the next time around.

But it's unlikely that SMS would be totally cut off in a country for more than a few days around a big event, so why worry so much?

Because of course shutting SMS down temporarily is just the blunt response of a government that hasn't had time to do anything more devious.

Forcing all SMS messaging to run through a series of scans for keywords, tracking political dissidents using SMS to spread the word, and taking actions against people based on these types of logs would destroy the use of mobile phones - not only in the spread of democracy, but also in any form of activism that was not strictly in line with the current regime.

Due to the centralized structure of cell phone systems, scenarios that make China's Great FireWall look irrelevant are pretty easy to imagine even for a regime without much tech savvy.

So -- how can we fix this?

Encryption on cell phones has two big problems - it's not built in on most handsets and it's very clear that you're trying to hide something, which is just as bad as doing that something. Unless encryption was built into the protocols and implemented by default, it's useless -- and even if it were implemented, the telco could probably still access the texts, so we're no better off than we were before. Sure, end-to-end encryption would fix that, but key exchange and signing via SMS? I'd like to see a workable RFC on that.

I think the most valuable solution is a peer-to-peer mesh network that can carry voice, SMS, and data on it. The downsides of these is that their range can be extremely limited by lack of density of users.

Turns out there are mesh phones out there, a Swedish startup called TerraNet (previously mentioned on MobileActive) turns capable phones into mesh nodes:

The technology is simple: Terranet outfits a special Erricson phone with peer-to-peer wireless networking ability. In its pure form, there is no need for base stations, antenna installations or infrastructure. With this phone, a user can call and text anyone at no cost within two kilometers, or up to 20 kilometres in a mesh network.
(Via MobileActive

TerraNet Mesh Phones

The trick of course is getting these mesh phones (or adding mesh capability into enough existing phones) rolled out in enough numbers to make a difference. There are some clear use-cases in development for disaster-prone areas, areas without telco service (they could be a great business model for micro telcos), or as a low-cost phone + data connectivity tool.

However, there are quite a few barriers against this. The price point is higher than your basic cell phone, and you have to have rapid local adoption for it to even work. From a business side, it must fight against the existing install base of cell phones (and their providers). The business plan for the network is itself hamstrung by the very power of the technology - in a mesh network, how do you charge for calls that you don't know about?

If however the mesh technology could be embedded on new phones as part of a disaster-mitigation scenario (even in the US, cell networks are notoriously overloaded during crisis), a powerful technology would find its way into daily usage that was immune to many of the censorship and oppression problems of centralized communications networks.

There's a project Comm.Unity at MIT's Media Lab that runs as a software piece on top of cells, PDAs, and laptops:

Comm.unity runs on mobile phones, PDAs, and regular old laptops and PCs, allowing them to easily communicate with each other and build networks of interactions for their users without the need for any centralized servers, coordination, or administration.

There's also Fluid Nexus which is an application for mobile phones that is primarily designed to enable activists to send messages and data amongst themselves independent of a centralized cellular network

Fluid Nexus requires bluetooth, and for people to be within bluetooth range (though it is a store-and-forward style system), so it has its own limitations, but at the same time could be a powerful tool in the right situations.

It's a start.

Can Urban Connectivity Go Rural?

This month's Technology Salon approached last-mile connectivity problems from an entrepreneurship standpoint. What are the barriers to creating small, possibly local-only telcos using various technologies, and how can those scale through investment, international development assistance, or franchising?

The on-the-ground situation is good connectivity in urban and peri-urban areas, often including land-line support as well as mobile coverage. As you get further out into rural areas, coverage dwindles; without populations large enough to support (currently) the cost of installation and maintenance of a cell tower, the large firms are not interested. The telecom industry is often dominated by 3-4 large companies, often heavily regulated and/or in cahoots with the government.

FrontlineSMS Empowers: \o/ !

I recently saw Ken Banks present at a local speaker series run by IREX. He gave an updated version of this presentation from POPTech, on the power of mobile phones in citizen empowerment, NGO communication, and a host of other amazing stories of using the available, appropriate technology in remote and rural locations which are often off-grid and without Internet access. By attaching a computer (Linux, Mac, or Windows) to a cell phone with a data cable and installing his (free, open source) software, FrontlineSMS, that computer is turned into a messaging hub; sending and receiving text messages via the cell phone to hundreds of contacts.

That's pretty amazing. Three reasonably available pieces of hardware and you have a tool to send alert messages out, receive election monitoring information through, or communicate with field medical workers to coordinate and track supplies and treatment information. Or track corruption. Or report human rights violations. Or share news and tips in places where the media is not independent, as one of the FrontlineSMS success stories shows:

Are Mobile Phones the Winner?

February's Technology Salon was on the (false) dichotomy of mobiles versus computers in development. Thankfully due to the high caliber of all the attendees, we were able to establish and move quickly past the problem that so often plagues the actual projects and "real world" debates - which is better? Some people will claim mobile phones are better due to their low barriers to entry, but then you see low-cost computing and netbooks providing that same promise to computers. Others will argue that you'll never write a school paper on a cell phone.

The reality is, the entire frame of this argument is off on every possible angle.

First, there are clear cases where one technology is better suited to a task than another. I'd no more write long papers on a cell phone than I would carry around a laptop to use as a personal communications device. However there's a large chunk of tasks where either tool will suffice, and which "should" be used is more a factor of the local conditions than the features of any one technology.

Secondly -- and more importantly -- this discussion is tool-centric. We have a hammer (two, in this case) and are going around the development landscape searching for nails we can drive home, and it's a race between the two hammers to see who can hit the most nails. This is inherently the wrong way to apply ICT in development.

We shouldn't be arguing about mobiles vs computers, or even OLPC XOs vs Intel ClassMates, or Windows vs Linux, we should be arguing about specific problems in development, what tools could help, how, and for what costs (training time, implementation and infrastucture gotchas, as well as equipment costs).

MobileActive has a great entry on a handful of low cost, low-barrier ways to go mobile, from Twitter to desktop "guerilla" SMS campaigns (best run in developing nations with more lenient SMS rules). Having taken down Jamaica's email->SMS gateway (...a few times...) with a homebrew system for Peace Corps Volunteers to share activity and security tips, it's great to see some better programmed and managed systems (finally!).