2011 FINALIST FrontlineSMS

“FrontlineSMS empowers frontline social organizations to leverage the power and reach of mobile technology to enable positive change. We provide organizations in remote, rural regions of the developing world with software that turns a laptop into a mass messaging hub, without any need for Internet connectivity.”

Assessment Summary from the BFI Review Team

By utilizing the rapid growth of global cell phone use and text messaging, FrontlineSMS has successfully created a simple yet highly effective system for empowering millions of disenfranchised citizens to become active reporters of real-time data through a free and easy-to-use program that allows instantaneous two-way communication between large groups of people anywhere there is a cell phone signal. Allowing NGOs to effectively communicate in such a fashion has helped produce enormous improvements in many locales across a wide range of issues, including, but not limited to: voting fraud, healthcare, food security, price stability, human trafficking, domestic violence, emergency response and aid coordination for natural disasters, citizen journalism and open media. FrontlineSMS focuses not on solving problems directly but on enabling the NGOs and ‘practitioners working in the field’ to increase their own capacities and effectiveness. By offering a technology that is free to download, easy to use, and flexible in its function, FrontlineSMS operates as a meta-solution that can be combined with or added to existing programs and projects. Because FrontlineSMS is so simple and is open-source software it is easily adapted and used and is growing exponentially. The software has been downloaded over 12,000 times across 60 different countries, used by about 300 organizations, and has an estimated base of 12.5 million users. And while the statistics are impressive, they also highlight one apparent drawback to the project: the difficulty of tracking the true number of people using and benefitting from the software. Because it is free to download and share with others, it is impossible to know definitively how many people are using it. Although initiated by one person, FrontlineSMS now has a diverse, highly competent and experienced team based in both the UK and USA. Their phone interview clearly demonstrated their understanding of how NGOs function and their own desire to grow the service to assist more people worldwide. Their personal focus and priority is dealing with communications and service delivery to the last mile or those remote areas that have the weakest telecommunications infrastructure. They have a realistic grasp of how to expand the usability of the program (i.e. by providing updated versions of the software, troubleshooting assistance and resources, and cross-platform design), as well as how to adapt to rapid changes in communications technology. FrontlineSMS has already had a significant impact in critical sectors globally and appears to be well on its way to rapidly expand to more. It is a simple, elegant technology that will continue to assist positive agents-of-change (NGOS, community activists, environmentalists, etc.) worldwide in ways we are only beginning to understand. It is proving to be a very powerful tool.

WEBSITE: http://www.frontlinesms.com/ VIDEO: http://vimeo.com/user6120794/frontlinesmstwitter SOURCES: All Sources are on the CD provided or can be retrieved online when clicking the link. Source Number 1: http://www.frontlinesms.com/frontlinesms-blog/ Many case studies of FrontlineSMS being used in dozens of contexts worldwide Source Number 2: http://www.thedailymaverick.co.za/article/2010-08-23-frontlinesms-mass-c... S.A. Daily Maverick article on Ken and FrontlineSMS Source Number 3: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6570919.stm 2007 BBC article on an early application of FrontlineSMS

Entry Application FrontlineSMS Team: Ken Banks, Founder  Laura Walker Hudson, Core Team Director  Alex Anderson, Lead Developer  Josh Nesbit, Ambassador  Morgan Belkadi, Developer  Ryan Jones, Fundraising and Grants Manager  Sarah George, Communications Adviser Summarize your proposal in 50 words or less. FrontlineSMS empowers frontline social organizations to leverage the power and reach of mobile technology to enable positive change. We provide organizations in remote, rural regions of the developing world with software that turns a laptop into a mass-messaging hub, without any need for Internet connectivity. Describe the critical need your solution addresses. FrontlineSMS is a key part of the communications revolution underway in the developing world, giving social organizations tools to leverage the power of the mobile technology in their community. Our work accelerates the rate at which poor communities will be able to take advantage of the nearly limitless potential of pervasive mobile technology. Explain your initiative in more depth and its stage of development. Please include the inspiration, and/or underlying principles informing your initiative. FrontlineSMS began life when Ken Banks – an anthropologist, software developer and conservationist – was consulting in South Africa with an international conservation organisation. During one of many field trips he began thinking about how the park authorities could use mobile technology to communicate with local communities living around Kruger National Park, many of whom were beginning to acquire mobile phones. Frustrated by the domination of web-based communications tools – it was impossible to connect to the Internet in many of the places these communities lived – Ken began working on a communications solution that would offer its users the maximum amount of accessibility and simplicity. To reflect the reality in the field, this meant no Internet and no technology more advanced than a low-cost laptop and the basic mobile phones already in the hands of community members. In the late summer of 2005, armed with a laptop, programming guide and an assortment of cables, phones and GSM modems, Ken went to work on developing a prototype of what was eventually to become FrontlineSMS. In the intervening years, the software has been refined, our user base has expanded to more than 8,000, and we’re reaching millions of people in more than fifty countries around the world. FrontlineSMS software has been used as the backbone of nationwide election monitoring systems in Nigeria and elsewhere, as an agricultural market information system by the FAO and other organizations, and as a channel to inform and monitor potential targets of human trafficking networks in Southeast Asia, among many applications.

Despite our success, we believe there is much more ahead of us. Users' needs drive our work, and that means constantly improving the core software, delivering a thriving and useful community to help new users figure out how to implement successful systems, and anticipating the future needs of a sector that didn't exist a decade ago. How does your strategy and approach respond creatively and comprehensively to key social, cultural, economic, ecological, and technological issues which shape the condition you are seeking to transform? Why is your strategy a breakthrough and what makes it a preferred state model? Our strategy in designing, releasing, and supporting FrontlineSMS is directly in line with the concepts that we believe are responsible for launching the mobile revolution in the first place. We didn't try to reinvent the wheel or saddle nonprofit organizations with the need to train technological experts to keep a communications system up and running; rather, we have created a simple, user-friendly, plug-and-go system. Most importantly from our perspective, the backbone of our approach is the phone in the hands of billions of people throughout the developing world, and with which those billions are already comfortable. The explosive growth of mobile phone adoption, from less than 800 million users worldwide in 2000 to more than five billion today, is proof of not only the pent-up demand for communications tools in rural communities, but also the ability of even the poorest people to master technology that benefits them. Western NGOs didn’t thrust the mobile phone on communities; individuals throughout the world realized the benefits of mobile phones and decided to buy them. As a result, the world has transformed. FrontlineSMS takes the mobile revolution one step further, by allowing NGOs and community organizations to take advantage of the basic functions of mobile phones in entirely new ways. We have designed our core software to be entirely use-agnostic: Human rights groups can collect and analyze election monitoring reports from citizens nationwide; public health workers can send personalized reminders for scheduled treatments to patients, many of whom have never even owned a clock; agricultural organizations can broadcast market prices to even the most remote farmers, ensuring they don’t get ripped off by marketers. That all of this can happen with the same basic piece of software, without access to the Internet, from a cheap laptop anywhere in the world, is our transformative idea. Compare and contrast your initiative with at least two leading initiatives addressing the same critical need. In comparison to these initiatives why is your proposal more likely to effect change and make a distinguishing impact? FrontlineSMS isn't the only tool that is giving social and humanitarian organizations tools to harness the transformative power of SMS, but we do have some clear advantages over other products out there. The first group of tools similar to FrontlineSMS are bulk messaging gateways, like Clickatel and IntelliSMS. These services give you a web-based phone number that can send and receive messages without a phone. Each has features for organizing contacts and integrating software to suit user needs. However, FrontlineSMS aims at communities where Internet access is unreliable or nonexistent, precisely the places web SMS gateways are useless. It is possible to link FrontlineSMS to a Web gateway, though, if users have access.

Other initiatives have been designed, like FrontlineSMS, for nonprofits by nonprofits, and don't require the Internet. However, these tools, like RapidSMS (developed by UNICEF) and SlingshotSMS (designed by Development Seed) are complex frameworks, rather than simple, launch-and-go software. RapidSMS deployments often require custom software development, limiting the ability of underresourced organizations to use the tool. While we do build custom plug-ins for sector-specific applications of FrontlineSMS, the core platform can be used immediately by anyone. Also, once built, all plug-ins are available to the public. Describe your implementation plan. What are the priority milestones you intend to achieve in years one (1) through three (3)? As FrontlineSMS has grown from a good idea into a full-fledged organization working to provide comprehensive mobile communications solutions for rural NGOs, crafting a strategy of growth and engagement has been a key part of our work. While we allow users to download the software for free, we make an effort to engage with those projects that we believe are using our tools in the most exciting and potentially transformative ways. These implementing partners fall across a variety of program areas, from election monitoring campaigns in Afghanistan and Nigeria to agricultural market information systems in Indonesia and El Salvador. We see our role as not just putting out a useful piece of software, but helping experts throughout the developing world take full advantage of the mobile communications revolution. Our three-year strategy puts these partnerships front-and-center, as we aim to not only increase the usage of our software (we aim to grow from around 8,000 downloads this year to at least 10,000 next year and continued growth beyond), but also our engagement with our users. We are currently in close contact with more than 100 projects using FrontlineSMS, representing NGO users on all six populated continents, and hope to at least double that number in the next 12 months. Please provide details regarding the team and/or partners you have assembled, the team’s experience and qualifications, and your ability to execute your implementation plan. If applicable, include details about external validation and/or support your strategy has received to date. Behind FrontlineSMS sits a talented and committed core team, built up over a five-year period of collaboration and innovation. Ken Banks, our founder, combines over 22 years in information technology with more than 17 years of experience living and working throughout Africa. Ken sits on Vodafone's "Social Impact of Mobiles" advisory panel, and has written about development applications of mobile technology for many global publications. Josh Nesbit, the leader of FrontlineSMS:Medic, which supports public health implementations of FrontlineSMS, has implemented SMS networks in Malawi, Haiti, Uganda, and Cameroon.The rest of our staff combines expertise in humanitarian policy and software development, and, most importantly, a dedication to the vision of empowerment of the poor through mobile technology. It's not just our core team that makes us special. We also benefit from an ecosystem of users and supporters that work together to maximize the impact of our work. Those partners include the FAO and WFP, Internews, CARE International, and countless other organizations, large and small, who have put FrontlineSMS to work in extraordinary ways. Our innovative model has also drawn the attention of a number of private

foundations, including the MacArthur, Rockefeller, and Hewlett Foundations, OSI, and the Omidyar Network. What are the primary obstacles that might prevent your initiative from being realized? How do you plan to overcome them? Utilizing energy storage on the electrical grid in a multi-directional manner, i.e. turning the The challenges facing FrontlineSMS and our vision of mobile phone-equipped, empowered rural communities are synonymous with the challenges facing the mobile revolution itself. There is always a risk that the growth in mobile penetration will slow or stop, leaving some communities still out of reach of even the modest infrastructural requirements of mobile communication. We don't believe this will be a limiting factor, as even through a worldwide economic recession, mobile use has grown unabated. More acutely, the communities that need empowerment the most are often in the grip of hostile or authoritarian regimes, who can limit the free flow of information, intercept transmissions through cell towers, and shut down cell service at times when it is most crucially needed. There is no easy way to overcome this challenge, but the next phase in the development of the FrontlineSMS platform will tackle these challenges, offering message encryption and other features. What range of funding is needed to bring your project to fruition and from where do you anticipate funding will come? What is the total annual budget and explain how your initiative will financially sustain itself? FrontlineSMS is in the middle of an exciting and challenging evolution from a good idea and a chunk of code to a full-fledged, self-sustaining organization capable of supporting all of our users, small and large alike. As a result, we have an acute need for funding to carry us through this transition period, both from foundations that have supported our work and implementing partners who are willing to compensate our team for our technical expertise with mobile tools. As we move towards a self-sustaining model, where larger organizations with specific technical and system design needs compensate FrontlineSMS for that work, we face a significant gap in resources to fund our transformation. In other words, in order to become self-sufficient, we need the financial ability to put an effective infrastructure in place.

Different ways FrontlineSMS is being used.

Easy start up

FrontlineSMS Interface

A low-cost laptop running FrontlineSMS

Testing FrontlineSMS at a workshop in Malawi

Kenyan schoolchildren do their impression of the FrontlineSMS \o/ logo during a Plan International workshop on social media

Interview with Ryan Jones, Ken Banks, and Laura Walker of Frontline SMS   _______________________________ FrontlineSMS empowers frontline social organizations to leverage the power and reach of mobile technology to enable positive change. We provide organizations in remote, rural regions of the developing world with software that turns a laptop into a mass messaging hub, without any need for Internet connectivity. What is the preferred state model that you are envisioning for this communication platform? Ryan: Early on when doing development work, unless you were out in the field, you didn’t quite know what was needed, and for me there was a very glaring and obvious gap with the projects I was working on, in Kruger National Park in South Africa, with the league of conservation. They needed this ability to communicate and connect vital information quickly with the organization they were working with in the community. My hunch was, well if they need this with the last mile here there must be other NGOs around the world that are doing the same thing and need this, and I guess my hunch was right. Now that you understand its opportunities, how do you see it operating in the future? Ken: I think one of the things that surprised me was that as soon as I released the tool it got picked up by large international NGOs and the state department and other large actors. They weren’t really the target audience. I never thought the UN would need to use something that we had created. So we’ve got the wide spectrum of use now, but we need to focus on the last mile, because when you look at mobile development, people are still building it in specific areas, initially I would have thought of it in health, agriculture, human rights, election monitoring, education, legal services, media, radio stations and so on. So I think while we work on being sure that the tool remains relevant for the last mile users, we’re also building functionality in the platform where it really can be used up the scale. Not just for the organizations deploying it, but also in the sectors they work in. There will always be a general communications element to what we do, as we go forward and I think the direction we’re heading in now that we are being asked to deliver specific functionality that meets specific needs for specific sectors as well as just being that general tool. So we are finding the software being used in almost every conceivable way imaginable, and that’s been quite exciting to watch. We’re finding ourselves now

“As soon as I released the tool, it got picked up by large international NGOs and the state department and other large actors. They weren’t really the target audience. I never thought the UN would need to use something that we had created.”

spending more and more time to ensure that the software is relevant and useful to those organizations working in those sectors, that’s what we’re spending our time on now. Laura: What we’re seeing is that the data that Ken has worked on five years ago was really at the frontier where communications technology of any kind are available, and where this work is tough and still moving all the time. The mobile networks are growing exponentially, and that means the borders are moving, but there are new areas, new organizations, new sectors, new innovations and I think there is still work that needs to be done, which is great. What we’re learning is that in the mobile market, in developing countries, the growth rate is higher there than anywhere else. Because private companies are given an opportunity and people need to have that priority because this is growing as a new market. The other thing is that people are understanding how to use this in their work, some people understand it well, and others not so well and they have to understand what the best process might be, so that is something we will be working on for the next five years as well. Given the rapid change in communication technology, what are the guiding principles that help you adapt? Ken: The software is based around SMS at its core, and that still remains hugely relevant if you look at the figures and the amount of SMS traffic that’s still going on. You look at the research that’s coming from The Gambia that shows that only three percent of the people surveyed actually went online with their phones, and that leaves SMS a way of getting data, so SMS still remains strong. But as you point out, mobile technology is progressing, there are new things coming out. I think a good example of how we’re moving with that is the recent addition of MMS multimedia messaging, which allows you to transmit pictures and video, which we built into the platform recently with the support of the Hewlett Foundation. That was primarily around the health and agriculture projects, health and services functions as well, to do MMS you need a data connection, DTRS or 3G, some connection over and above having nothing at all. Users who are finding themselves in places where there is the potential to get online and can start to use the MMS functionality. So one thing that we were very keen to do from the beginning was actually build the user platform up as the users find themselves increasingly exposed to new opportunities. One example of how we are integrating smart phones is with Freedom Phone in Zimbabwe, who have been using FrontlineSMS almost from about the second week I released it in 2005, as a way to collect information. They built software called Freedom Phone, which is a voice system that gets around all kinds of challenges, illiteracy being the most obvious one. So we’re talking to them about integrating FrontlineSMS and Freedom Phone together, to allow platforms, which are very strong in that field to work together. We are also working on building a FrontlineSMS version that works on Android phones, again Android is not hugely prevalent in areas where we work yet, but in Uganda recently, and there are signs that smart phones are coming, so it will be there. We are building in functionality and ensuring that we have tools that work for all those organizations when they become available. It’s also worth quickly mentioning that the increased use of FrontlineSMS the online mapping tool, it can collect messages from a local mobile phone, and then post them with an internet connection to a mac, or a web based database or a ticker that may run

across the screen somewhere, or send it by email. It actually as a standard package does leverage internet and basic connections if they are available. We’re certainly not anti-internet, but many of our users just don’t have access at this point. Can you expand on a few projects you are engaged in that are using your tools in innovative ways? How has this informed your service? Ken: I think the thing to bear in mind is that it’s the users that dictate the use, we have provided and built a platform that allows any organization that has communication needs to deploy it in whatever way they see fit. One thing that I’ve always felt is that the people closest to the problem are the best placed to actually solve that problem. So being somebody from the UK who doesn’t have a particularly strong understanding of malaria or local health issues or local human rights problems or domestic violence issues in such places, it’s probably not a good idea for me to try and solve that problem. I think from the very beginning one of the things that really astounds me and a lot of people get kind of taken aback by are the uses. I find this very exciting, one thing that I’ve seen a lot are all the kind of domestic/violence against women projects that are using the platform to allow women to report violence, there was one in Oklahoma that was very successful and in the first three months, they saw all this text message evidence that came into this system, and it cost 1000 dollars for an employee to build that system. So it is all about lowering the barriers and making it useful. I think that’s exciting because it didn’t cost much money, and it solved what appeared at the time to be a very serious problem. In the same vein there are anti-human trafficking projects, one in Cameroon, Vietnam and Haiti, which are using FrontlineSMS as an outreach communication tool for that community. It allows them to report concerns and to be educated through SMS. These systems are embedded within the community, they’re not thousands of miles away at the headquarters of a large NGO, these are systems that are locally owned and run. I think that is a very important point to make. It’s become increasingly used in agriculture projects as well, so the SMS component is getting market prices to farmers, allowing them to text in and receive information regarding crop disease or questions. I think the election monitoring in 2007 was another interesting one, which was a breakthrough for the project. In April 2007 during the Nigerian elections, a loose coalition of five Nigerian NGOs formed a platform, and it’s believed to be the first time that actual NGOs have monitored their own elections by SMS, which is usually done by the international community and they only went to the places where they were expecting things to go wrong, that’s the only news they really wanted. I think this really was quite important because it showed that these tools can be very powerful if they get into the right hands, and if the context is right they can deliver some very important information.

“It’s the users that dictate the use, we have provided and built a platform that allows any organization that has communication needs to deploy it in whatever way they see fit. One thing that I’ve always felt is that the people closest to the problem are the best placed to actually solve that problem.”

On the mapping side, this is also being used increasingly by their users to collect local text messages that can then be posted onto a map, it’s being used in the Democratic Republic of Congo and many other countries. You find now that every election in developing countries is monitored in some way. Perhaps the bigger more recent use of this software was in Afghanistan in 2010, when it was used by journalist groups and local media to report on the election; the security alerts they use, something as simple as 160 cap SMS sent to the right person at the right time can save lives. NGOs are using it quite successfully to coordinate and ensure that their staff doesn’t get themselves into places where it might be too dangerous at certain times. So the software has been very useful for that, and because it runs in these very remote places, and is much closer to where the problems are, is much more useful to deliver in that kind of context. What countries have the farmers been using SMS in? Ken: There is an international project that was funded by the Gates Foundation working in El Salvador that has used it. They have set up a core center and other structures around an agriculture project. The SMS project has provided the MMS side of that so there are still people who are answering the phone where people send in text or receive text go through the SMS platform. There is a project at the University of Canberra in Australia who have been working in Cambodia who have been working with SMS services by basically using the mobile platform aspect of the agricultural project. And the UNDP used it after the tsunami a few years ago. When people were trying to rebuild the livelihood of the coffee farmers, they used SMS to keep information from small farmers by keeping them posted on how they can start growing coffee again. Laura: And for the coffee farmers in Rwanda and Uganda, informational SMS are sent to. One of my favorite examples, is a tiny little NGO supported by a slightly larger Ugandan NGO to send out messages to farmers, and they send out an SMS every two weeks with information about pests that might occur at that time and what they look like and what to do about them. The farmers subscribe to the number and they get a text message every two weeks, so that’s one of my favorite uses. Is your platform set up for you to know who is using it? Ken: When you download the software from the website, which is our delivery mechanism, it asks you a few brief questions, who you are, where you are, and what you intend to do with the software. 99 percent of people fill it in properly, so we’re quite lucky in that respect, there’s not a lot of headbanging on the keyboard just to get past the screen. So we know the point of delivery where it’s gone, and what it going to be used for. And there are now tracking tools, which counts up messages received, and every once in a while there’s a screen that pops up that says “do you mind sharing this information with FrontlineSMS HQ” and on that screen there’s a couple of things they can fill in. We do have a newsletter and an online forum, which is very active, it’s about 1800 members now, where people go to find support and join specific groups. So out of those few ways of keeping in touch we can, generally speaking, know where the tool has gone, but of course if somebody burns it to a CD, and passes it round to 300 people at a conference, we need them to come to us after and say we’ve got your software, we’re using it for this etc. So, we’ve got a pretty good take on the geographic deployment at this point, it’s geo-tagged. When it’s downloaded we know the countries that they’re in.

It’s being used in over 60 countries, certainly in terms of where the downloads and activities are coming from. You have a user base of 8000, is that still current or relatively current? Laura: Yeah we estimate about 10,000 unique downloads, so it’s hard to say, but we’ve just done a survey to try to figure this out. A huge caveat is that these surveys tend to be self-selecting. We wouldn’t say that that means that there are 6 or 7 thousands organizations about there because once people start using it they tend to keep up with the later version. I think the 200 or 300 that we know of are the tip of the iceberg, in terms of the organizations that are using this, but in terms of finding active users, I would be very happy to say we have 200 or 300 organizations that we know are using us, and there are a lot more out there. Ken: I think it’s a great example of the challenges of this was when I was at an agricultural conference and met the CEO of Farm Africa Kristy Peacock, and she said oh we should be using this for our teams on the ground, so she reached out to her teams in Africa, and it turns out they were using it already and she didn’t even know. So there’s a lot of stuff happening out there that we get to randomly hear about. A health organization in Nicaragua was using a telecom service I found using a google search and they were using it as a last mile data collection to map dengue fever outbreaks. We know there’s some very interesting stuff out there, we just need to find out how. How do you translate 200 to 300 active organizations using it to a reach of use in the millions? Ryan: I think that number is based on a few of the larger organizations that have used FrontlineSMS in the past and the size of their campaigns, and the numbers of users and text messages that they have sent are the ones that we’re familiar with, so it’s based on the fact of one instance using SMS is going to reach a lot of people at once, like the International Organization for Migration in Pakistan. I know they had a huge base that they were reaching. Laura: Yeah, they said 1.2 million people, which we were staggered by, and we asked people to self-report the number of users that they were reaching with FrontlineSMS and the active users came back with a figure at 12.5 million, and we would be conservative about that, but we were pleasantly surprised. Ken: I think if you just even look at a few examples, SMS Medic which we started by using the SMS with hospitals, by empowering that hospital with SMS helped them serve the full community, which was about a quarter of a million people. A quarter of a million people then had 911 and medic services. People then had better information on drugs and illnesses. The scope and the potential reach of the services delivered through that platform covered that many people. Are there other scenarios or fields that you envision where this could be useful in the future? Laura: Well one thing that we find is that mobile technology is not something that everyone gets. Not all of them have the vision to have practitioners who will be working

in the field to use this software to do their jobs better and faster. So, we don’t want to reach the techies, we want the people who do the work. There are a lot of practitioners though, that for one reason or another are not posed to follow what’s happening in technology. I would say that one of them are lawyers, as a lawyer myself I can say that that’s true, so there is one who speaks the language who is working to bring the attention of this to the people they’re working with in the legal sector, to work with people in the developing world who could use SMS to help then with case management potentially. Another area I would say is a humanitarian aid agency, and often they are very resistant to change or to even look at the new tools that come in. So I would say it takes someone who speaks their jargon to be able to say to them, these are the programs that would benefit and this is the way that this tool could help. So what we were talking about today was actually Ken’s backyard. Ken: I think some of the things that we’re finding that the software has been very useful in agriculture, and health, and some of the examples that Laura has mentioned, it can be used to provide wider access to services to legal services and so on. One of the things that is most exciting to me is its use in Media. So we’re looking a little more at citizen journalism and how people interact with the media, it can be specifically used for that. We have been working with Cambridge University to create a radio module to empower grassroots radio stations in developing countries, to facilitate two-way interactions with their audience. We’ve also done some work with government transparency and the delivery of government services, some organizations are looking at how they can use that to define their constituencies and help them get their services through a little better. Again, we’ve been in these areas in the past but it hadn’t been particularly major. Also security based stuff, this is very timely because many activist organizations are trying to work in areas, like Egypt, where it’s very tough because many nonprofit organizations and activist organizations trying to work in countries where there are restrictions on what you can say and people are worried about using these kinds of technologies as part of free speech. We’re looking into how you can build security into the platform and how you can make it more secure, how you can protect the data, protect the anonymity of the users and the people sending the messages. There has been a lot of interest in that as well and again we haven’t pushed that too far yet, we haven’t really been asked to look into it until now. If we could sort out the platform and the security issues and allow it to open up more for citizen journalists, and it would allow them to do it more freely, it would work in places like Tunisia and Egypt maybe Yemen and other countries and I think it’s hugely timely for us react to this snowball effort in that part of the world and we can provide what our users need to do their work. It’s what the users have wanted in the past and we continue to do that with these ideas now.

“The software has been very useful in agriculture and health, and it can also be used to provide wider access to services to legal services and so on. One of the things that really exciting to me is its use in Media. We’re looking a little more at citizen journalism and how people interact with the media, and how Frontline SMS can be specifically used for that.”

What relationship does FrontlineSMS maintain with the governments where participating non-profits operate? Laura: I would just say that we work in two ways, really. When we’re working with organizations that are trying to monitor the work their governments are doing, we are a neutral tool provider. We will provide the tool, and then make clear to users that use of SMS in a controlled environment may lead to risk for themselves and others, and that’s as far as we go. The information enters the database on the hard drive of the computer, so that’s a risk there on the SMS network, and of course on the handset with the recipient, that’s another risk. All we try to do is be clear that those are the pathways, and that we don’t make use of the data, and then make clear that they must think of that when they think about security, and there we stop, because that’s all we can do from our Ivory Towers here in the UK and the US. We have relationship with governments in the sense that we work with governments here in the UK and the US and others who are interested in using the tool and teaching others to use the tool because they see benefit in using it for a service provision for health and education and legal services and the rest of it, that typically doesn’t involve any desire to see the information exchanged. They just want to see the tool used. Ken: If you look at the project, the Australian Agricultural project in Cambodia is Australian government funded. The US State Department uses this software in countries where there are security risks and dangers for sending information. In a similar way that was done in Afghanistan and with other NGOs, so we do have direct and indirect government uses and certainly a very strong awareness by many of what it does and how useful it can be. There’s also plenty going on in DC where there’s a great awareness of SMS. We take a step back from governments, we don’t work directly with them, we’re happy to help and work with them on how to deploy it, but not been approached by a government directly that actually say they want to work with us. Ryan: Usually it takes the form of working closely with a contracting organization, whether its USAID funds or another government development agency which has received funds to implement a specific project for the government and they come and ask us for help rather than working directly with government officials on field implementations. In addition to just being users, how have participating non-profits helped improve the technology and advance the system? Ken: It’s been a very interesting challenge over the last five years, in that you genuinely want to create a tool that empowers and just allow people to run off and do their own thing without any dependency or need from the organization that provides it. You lose a certain degree of control over where it goes and what people use SMS. I think we’ve done pretty well though with the ones that want to keep in touch, in the Middle East and other places such as Afghanistan. Other users are simply not willing to say much, because it’s not safe for them to do so and they don’t particularly want to tell us, but those who do want to keep in touch we do collect information from the downloads as I mentioned earlier. Before we had that system I used to keep an email list of all the people who contacted me about the software. We reach out with regular emails correspondence, we have a newsletter now and an online forum. Any users that have any question or suggestion or would like to keep in touch we will connect them with the

online. We try whenever possible to point them toward the forum, so other users who have the same problem or questions can tap into that, so someone can say oh that user in another country has the same problem as me, they can contact them directly. Of course that helps in a capacity way, that we don’t have to respond to every inquiry, and it’s helpful for us to keep improving the software, and it also creates a self-sustaining culture. So that’s been important. So we do know the users, we know some of them, we keep in touch with them, we send them downloads and relevant information to them as we can. They would be able to pass that on to other organizations they work with. We have a great number of people around the software such as Tactical Tech who go around and do trainings on the platform for us so that extends the reach even further. When we have new builds and we have new versions coming out and looking to improve functionality or want to get a sense of how people are using SMS, we can email everybody, put things on the forum, tweet about it. Although I don’t know how many of our users are on twitter. We can use the blogging contacts. We have many friends in the blogosphere, Global Voices and other popular bloggers, getting them to engage in a discussion of how we can improve the platform. We’re actually doing this right now we’re planning a major rewrite of the platform this year, and we’ve got a usability guy who is coming in to help us so we’re connecting with users. I think users appreciate that they’ve got this tool, which was developed and provided for free, and that we provide this support and we’re very much behind them. I think one of the things they really like is that we understand NGO work, we’ve all worked for an international aid organization. I’ve been eighteen years on an off working in Africa at a grassroots level, and they like us because they know we understand what life is like for them. As a result, they’re very open and willing to have a discussion of what we could be doing better, what we need to add to the tools that they use, what they don’t like, what they hate, it’s been very good for us over the last five years. And continues to be so. Ryan: This is an area that we use and we’re looking to expand as time goes on in the tool growth. We’ve spoken about other ways of getting users together while it’s not just the community forum, we’re looking at ways of working in the same region or sector in a more formal and regular way, so that they can share what we’ve learned. As Ken says the users have the real expertise in using the tool so we go out of our way to make sure that they can connect to each other as much as possible. When it comes to software, as Ken says basically every iteration of the software that we’ve worked on in the past was pretty much entirely informed by what people who use the software are telling us about their needs, or people who haven’t used the software yet telling us what they want. Does the introduction of new versions force people to buy new phones? How are you managing the relationship between new versions and the availability of the existing hardware base to run those versions? Ken: Well luckily for us SMS runs on a computer, so we use an operating system on the computer that is much simpler thanks to windows having a very dominant position. Love it or hate it, you know if you’ve got the windows application its going to run on them. So when we do upgrade we do test the compatibility, we make sure that it’s compatible with the phone that attaches to the computer so that people don’t need to buy new machines. I think you would expect that when you buy Microsoft Word. The only machine you have

to worry about is the one that actually connects to the computer, the one that connects you to the mobile network, which allows you to do the two-way messaging, and everything has been entirely compatible that way. We of course have to be sure that we can support increasing numbers of devices as they come out, but that’s our problem, not the user’s problem. Every phone in the world can send and receive a text so as far as the user is concerned it doesn’t matter what phones are out there, because every phone can do it. Ryan: It’s cross platform, it’s written in Java, so I run it on my mac, and I know it works on low cost linux machines, and I know people have even gotten it working on low OLPC laptops in the field. Ken: There’s a guy that we work with in the field and he’s a bit of a techie and we have a built in device that he’s gotten it to work on, to try to achieve that. So from talking to him we know it will work on very, very cheap 200 dollar netbooks. And this is important to us, of course, it’s important to be lowering the barrier to entry, not requiring people to buy expensive equipment. Can you describe your business model in more depth? Laura: So we have in the past been funded by grants and awards, and we are still doing those things when we’ve got a new project or when we feel that we have something people might be interested in, but we have got the opportunities that we’ve mentioned already, helping people to customize the platform for their own use, and how to design a program around SMS. Training staff and training the trainers, providing tech support at whatever level is necessary, whether they want to speak to someone over the phone, or whether they actually need someone to come out and set the thing up for them. So those things we’re looking at providing on a consultancy basis, and that’s been increasingly successful. Ryan: An extension of looking at consultancy at larger organizations, I don’t have any plans to stop offering this for free for individuals or those at smaller organizations that don’t have the resources, or the demand a larger implementation might have. We are often working with the same organizations who are writing and preparing proposals for large government contracts or large NGO field projects that might have need for mobile tools. This has grown out of the relationships we’ve had with other organizations, they might already be using the tools and they realize that it makes sense for them to have us onboard as an active implementers. So we have it in our time and resources support local implementation go to the field to actively train the trainers. We usually train the trainers we don’t actively train users since we think that’s the best way to leverage the time of our team, which is five or six people at this point and we will send one or two people to help with those projects, which is at a nascent stage right now. This whole side of what we do and working toward sustainability is less than 12 months old because before then we were really just working off the tools we had and the popularity of it. A big focus for us going forward is to get going on this sustainability and it’s been a really big focus for a lot of the people we have reached out to so far. Just to try to frame the financial parameters, how much funding has gone into it from inception? Currently, what percentage of this is from earned revenue? The third part of that is what do you think is a realistic objective in the near term,

say one to three years for that earned revenue component, and in that timeframe whether you think the solar based sources will be at? Ken: In terms of what’s been raised so far, in total about 1.2 million has been raised up to this point from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Hewlet Foundation funds. That’s how much we’ve generated through donor grants, through our contacts up until this point, and there are plans for the income to increase based on some of the things that Laura and Ryan have mentioned, I’m not sure on the actual numbers but they may have them handy. Laura: If you define earned revenues as including the kind of partnership working that we would do with larger organizations funding base, the consulting work we can do that with modifications to the platform, we actually hope that this year we’ll see a 50/50 split between grants and awards, and that kind of income. And we hope that next year it will be more on the order of 2/3 to 1/3. The year after that we really hope to be fully sustainable. Ryan: That would include a corresponding decrease in one off grant funding because since 2005 when Ken got his first grant, obviously that was to build up the software itself, and now we recognize that obviously it’s our responsibly to show the real use of the tool by making it sustainable. Laura: For you to conceptualize earned income if you like with restricted income program expenditure. You can see that funding by USAID would provide a program for example if we’re training librarians in Romania to use SMS to create public transparency, I would kind of conceptualize it that way. In terms of new projections for the end of the last year, we would definitely see something over. Once everything is paid off, which we can just reinvest, obviously. But that would be in 2013 that we would be able to start doing that. Ken: On the income side, I think the advantages of this are key. On the expenses side, it’s worth mentioning that we’re an open source tool and we are beginning to open up our access and develop a community around that the tools, so in theory if you build up a vibrant open source community you can tap into a lot of free or very low cost platforms and resources. So the development costs don’t always have to keep increasing, and we’re looking to build up costs around a community so more and more community members are motivated to provide support for themselves and contributing to it, rather than depending on us to do it, so we can work on lowering our time and development commitment and giving more over to the end users themselves. How do you envision FrontlineSMS operating 5 years from now? Ken: I think one of the challenges with mobile technology is the sort of rampant innovation we’re seeing, it’s very hard to know what’s going to be around in 5 years, no one saw twitter coming, and it’s sort of rewritten a lot of the tools for social media. So, how mobile phones will behave and what a mobile phone will even mean, all the different functionality and options that we have now we didn’t see five years ago. I think mobile phones may look nothing like mobile phones we have now in five years. I don’t have any idea what they would be. I think many of the problems that exist today will hopefully become less and less prevalent but I think there will always be relative poverty, there will

always be human rights abuses, there will always be farmers who could lose their crops within one season of a crop disease, someone with a medical conditions that could be cured, so I think the technology will be there in whatever shape or form that’s in, because we’re growing with these users. We will certainly be up to date, and we will certainly be leveraging what becomes available to them, I’ve already seen lots of discussion around the ipad, but I don’t think they’re particularly useful development tools right now, maybe in five years everyone will have an ipad, or there will be a new way of delivering data, maybe wi-max will take off across Africa and suddenly everybody will have coverage no matter where they are, and that will have an impact. However, that won’t happen overnight, as we’re seeing with the multimedia messaging that we’re seeing on the android platform versions that we’ve built, but as we’re going to find with the rewrite that we’re doing this year that will make the platform much more module so that people can add functionality when they want it. If we remain that flexible and that nimble we’ll be able to go with where the industry goes within the next 5 or 10 years. I can imagine that we’ll have some very strong handset based tools, that could go with the tool wherever it goes over the next five or ten years, which would mean that you wouldn’t even need the computer at all to run the kind of functionality that FrontlineSMS can provide. I think there’s a few things that may well happen but I think we’re well positioned because we’re so flexible in our approach, to take advantage of these tools when they come out. We are working with people like the GSMA, the representative body for mobile phone companies throughout the world. We’re meeting with them actually in two weeks at the mobile phone congress. Which is a new way of supporting mobile projects in developing countries, so we have a very strong relationship with Nokia, we’ve worked with google and so on, so we have some very strong partnerships that will enable us to at least see what’s coming before it comes, and combining that with what the users are telling us puts us in a very good position. What impact would winning the Buckminster Fuller Challenge have on FrontlineSMS? Ken: A huge one. Two years ago we won the Tech Award, which is great if you know the Tech Awards and you’re part of the community, part of Silicon Valley, humanitarian work, it’s a big deal. But beyond that community no one’s ever heard of Tech Awards, so when you’re recognized by an established well-known awards program, it’s really a great thing. Of course a large part of what we’re doing is we need people to know the platform exists in order to get the uptake that it warrants, and with the Buckminster Fuller Challenge,

“What’s great about FrontlineSMS isn’t just that it’s approaching the problem of giving voice to rural populations in the developing world, but sort of the way that it does it, building on existing systems. There is an elegance in the way that FrontlineSMS creates these systems in which it interacts so smoothly with the way that people are already using their cell phones. The fact that FronlineSMS is such a simple and elegant solution that I think Bucky would be proud, personally.”

everyone’s heard of it, there’s a currency behind awards which carry much more weight, and I think yours are certainly one of those. Ryan: For me personally, I mean Buckminster Fuller, I’ll talk for Ken who wrote the software in the first place, what I think is so great about FrontlineSMS isn’t just that it’s approaching the problem of giving voice to rural populations in the developing world, but sort of the way that it does it, building on existing systems and there is an elegance in the way that FrontlineSMS creates these systems in which it interacts so smoothly with the way that people are already using their cell phones. Cell phones have spread so quickly into the developing world and it’s far beyond anything that anyone could have predicted, and the fact that FronlineSMS is such a simple and elegant solution that I think Bucky would be proud, personally.