ICTworks by Inveneo

Matt Berg has published the mobiles 4 development technology trends he forsees in 2011 as M4D Tech Trends 2011: What to expect and hope for. Here are two open questions worthy of discussion:

This year’s Ushahidi?

It’s hard to imagine a breakout project capturing the public imagination like Ushahidi has this year (even though I think the iHub is the bigger innovation).  To me there are no clear or apparent frontrunners.  Perhaps 2011 is meant to be more incremental.

What has me most excited is Shreddr, a project created by Kuang Chen, a PhD student at Berkeley.  What Shreddr allows is to take a picture or scan of a filled out form and shred into individualized data components representing individual parameters of that form.  These form elements can be combined with OCR and presented in a way that changes the dynamics of digitization of paper forms from data entry to data validation.    Furthermore, since the forms are shredded, forms containing sensitive medical records could safely be farmed out in the form of microtasks for a local CHW or retiree sitting in Iowa to complete.

This year’s mHealth?

ICT4Ag.  Mobiles have tremendous unexplored potential to improve the livelihoods of small scale farmers.  Applications like Kilimo Salama show the use of mobiles is not just limited to providing market price information to farmers.  As for me, I’m going to be shifting some of my thinking in 2011 to farms.  They are a lot easier to count and don’t move around!

My good friend Matt Berg has a brilliant idea to increase coordination between the ICT community and the international development industry - a monthly ICT4Drinks Happy Hour.

Matt Berg in his element

To quote Matt:

The idea is to organize a monthly event where people working both the development and technology and development spaces can meet. While it's a small community I get the feeling there are still a lot of great people in NYC that haven't actually met yet. Look forward to seeing if we can make this happen.

The first event will be Tuesday, November 2 at 6:30pm at 288 Bar, better know as Tom & Jerry's on 288 Elizabeth St
New York, NY 10012. Be sure to RSVP.

I know that if I were in NYC on November 2, I would join Matt in a toast to the idea and future meetups.

Recently there's been a good discussion about cloud computing in Africa, where Ken Banks asks if its "Inappropriate" appropriate technology? Ken starts by suggesting that:

If we take anything that uses “the cloud“, for example, then I’d argue that it’s largely “inappropriate” unless you’re working in predominantly urban areas or in predominantly ‘developed’ countries.

7.47 Kbps download speed in Nigeria

Why? Well cloud computing relies on realtime server interactions with low latency, high bandwidth, and a stable connection. None of those are common in most of Africa. As an example, 193 Kbps in Ghana is the best bandwidth speed I've found in my Africa travels. Or as Miguel says:

The Cloud is predicated on having an "always on" connection to function. While it's fine to design a web architecture that centrally stores user data and handles all the heavy lifting when it comes to processing, the issue of access is going to block off Africa and whole lot of the rest of the world because of this. Designers (if they can be nudged to care) need to build applications with this in mind for probably the next 5-10 years. It's building in "graceful degradation" to a system.

But why live in the now? Others look to a brighter, more connected future with announcements like 3.5G in rural Ghana. Specifically, Matt Berg makes the point that we should not close our minds to the rapid growth of bandwidth options that make cloud computing possible:

The data quality of GSM networks in places like Africa is improving dramatically and will soon offer (if they don’t already) performance comparable to the West. Assuming the well funded operators can weather the growing pains of widespread data adoption, I think we can expect the quality and reliability to improve. Also in terms of GSM networks rural areas will increasingly = urban areas as operators extend services.

In addition, the quick spread of technology infrastructure can reduce some of the connectivity constraints that Miguel described. Alice Liu points out that much of the long distances data must now cover to reach American or European server farms is shortening as infrastructure moves onto the continent:

The cloud doesn’t necessarily mean connecting back to California as another person mentioned. MTN in Kigali, for instance, offers data center/hosting services and many governments are setting up their own data centers and IT service centers to serve other government units. I’m hoping this takes off, because in govt they’re all competing for the same scarce IT resources.

But I think the best point in the whole discussion is made by Michael Downey, when he says that, like politics or the weather, all technology is local:

“Appropriate” technology is based 100% on context of who users are and the environments in which they will work and live. Thus, there’s a danger of over-generalizing any technology, such as emerging platforms like cloud computing, and even more proven platforms such as mobile devices.

Choosing the right solution for a given situation is what's paramount, not any one specific technology. In high-bandwidth areas where users have devices that can browse the Internet quickly and cheaply, cloud computing can make great sense. I used my mobile phone web browser more in Accra, Ghana than the USA. Yet in Nigeria, Internet bandwidth is so poor and unreliable, VoIP intranets beat Skype for voice communications and cloud computing would be a joke.

So its best not to watch international news for the right technology solutions to implement in your specific project. Like the weather, its best to be local and look out the window to see what's appropriate for your day - be it cloudy or not.

Everyone knows how SMS works - you can send an email to one other person. And there are SMS aggreators like FrontlineSMS that allow you to send text messages to multiple people. But now we have RapidSMS, which promises to take SMS text messaging to a whole new level.

RapidSMS

RapidSMS is an open-source framework for dynamic SMS communication developed by Matt Berg, the UNICEF Innovation Team, and a core team of volunteer programmers (with a little help from Inveneo).

Developed over the past year, in the field and in code sprints, RapidSMS promises to be an innovative platform for SMS-based solutions using server-side logic.

RapidResponse

The first solution, RapidResponse, is a unified mHealth malnutrition monitoring platform that includes screening for malaria and diarrhea - major killers of children under 5 years old in Africa. Here is a great video on the RapidResponse benefits:

Jokko

Tostan has rolled out their own RapidSMS soltion, according to MobileActive. In a year-long pilot with UNICEF, several Senegalese communities are using "Jokko" as a low-cost system to encourage group decision-making in the villages.

Jokko utilizes the RapidSMS functionality dubbed 'SMSForum, as MobileActive explains:

Joining the Jokko community

SMSForum allows community members to access a server in the Tostan office by sending their text to a “magic number”. This number feeds directly into the server or computer which then forward the SMS to a group of community members phones.

The platform supports easy and dynamic creation of multiple groups of people. For example, one village  has created a discussion group exclusively for youth. The basics of this system work much like a group list for text-messaging, however, the sender is only charged for the cost of one local text message. The cost of text messages sent to the “magic number” are covered by the administrator, in this case Tostan.

Innovation Opportunity

Now let us take these examples and think of new applications for RapidSMS. Personally, I think the SMSForum functionality is quite empowering. I can see self-assigned groups starting up, much like a listerv or Yahoo Groups and Google Groups, but all SMS-based.

This would be great for both development projects as well as commercial enterprises. Make the inbound SMS a premium short code and add advertising to the outbound SMS and you could recover costs or even make a small profit on such a system for general community use.

But enough of my ideas. What are yours?

Matt Berg, of Millennium Villages Project, and an interesting video on how MVP and Inveneo installed a large WiFi intranet network in Ruhiira, Uganda, to connect 5 clinics, 3 schools, and several other community institutions to the nearest Internet connection 35KM away:

Matt says, "The network is adding tremendous value by enabling free VOIP calls between sites and is also being used by the clinics to facilitate a central medical records."