Mainstreaming ICT

Okay, Spurred on by the “success” of Community Mobile Channels making it to round 2 of Knight News Challenge I have made a few useful changes and released a new version. This covers the following main changes.

* Overall CSS improvements
* Design improvements on home pages - both public and logged in
* Latest sites stream
* Channels page design improvements
* Improved way of managing existing sites
* Profile improvements and linking on sites
* Removed use of description and lengthened title on mobile sites (1 less field to fill in)
* Cut out a couple of unnecessary clicks on creating new mobile sites
* Minor bug fixes especially around activity and profile sites

This should give a better feel to the system and you can check out the demo site at http://mainstreamingict.org/cmc - you can create a user or use the demo user (phone no 123451345 and password adapt). The source is at http://sourceforge.net/projects/communitymobile

The second round of the knight news challenge is underway and the proposed project would benefit greatly from your constructive comments. The project proposal can be seen at http://j.mp/6cIrL5 - the proposed project plan is also graphically displayed below

Of course the projects described in the proposal are still my primary wishlist, however I have a new mobile design philosophy that I would very much like to try to integrate into this project. It really centers around one key idea - for mobile 2008 onwards the icon link is better than the text link for key functionality on the basis that the icon link is attractive, heavily optimised(must not be bigger than 2000 bytes except in special cases) and thematically consistent. Of course this is much more work but just requires a nice set of icons (e.g. Nuvola + others found at wikimedia commons), a Scalable vector graphics manipulator like Inkscape, time and patience. This design style is to a large part realised within wena.mobi

Okay so a new year is here and it is a year with a lot of expectations. Of course in South Africa the World Cup will be the dominant event but besides that there are a load of other things that will be going on with regard to Information and Communication Technology and how we get these to be used for development/community empowerment.

I’ve started off the year by releasing a simple mobile web portal for the casual South African mobile web user - It is called wena.mobi (for non-south Africans “Wena” means “You” in most South African languages). . It is my attempt to broaden mobile web usage and improve the experience of the large (and growing) causal mobile web-using population in SA. Through a number of conversations over the past month I have noticed that while many (mainly younger) people have used the mobile web the usage is limited. Many are just J2Me app based (Mxit, Mig33, Games etc..) and use “wap” (how is this name still used) just for downloads. A few also look at the vodacom portal and a limited number of sports or news sites or access facebook/twitter. However, no one I spoke to is using the mobile web extensively. All that wena.mobi does is make about 60 quality mobile websites (over half South African) accessible by a attractive optimised menu system - No downloads required and an easy to remember name. It also can be used a a shortcut for some of the more popular J2Me downloads. So please try it out and let me know what you think - If people start to use it then i’ll add a few more features.

Another interesting development is that Community Mobile Channels has been selected to go through to the 2nd round of the Knight News Challenge. See j.mp/comcha for the initial proposal detail. I have to get a full proposal out by the end of this month and if anyone would like to get involved now is a great time to do so - what would be perfect is to get a local community partner to agree to extensively trial it.

I have also been involved behind the scenes with another Knight News Challenge proposal which is exciting and I believe has a high chance of success - I will blog about this when more details are released.

I hope to have a lot to talk about this year but in the meantime - compliments and begin well in 2010.

For the last 2 years I have been actively following an open source project which is now called Open Object. It is a great Rapid Application Development platform (i.e. you can build applications using it very quickly compared to coding from scratch) written in Python. For the most part it is the platform used to customise and implement OpenERP solutions. I have put in a couple of systems using this framework and have another in the pipeline and overall the experience has been very positive - The systems tend to be very inituitive and easy to manage and customise.

I have also been actively working with Health related organisations for the past 6 years so I was very interested when Luis Falcon from Thymbra put together a Health Information System using Open Object. Initially I thought that this was just a brave attempt but it seems that the project managed to get some legs and was announced sourceforge’s project of the month in September 2009 - see here http://sourceforge.net/community/potm-200909/

Basically it is a a multi-user, highly scalable, centralized Electronic Medical Record (EMR) and Hospital Information System. The Objective is to provide a free universal Health and Hospital Information System, so doctors and institutions all over the world, specially in developing countries will benefit from a centralized, high quality, secure and scalable system. It includes a lot of international standards and is starting to take on HL7 for data transfer. Personally I believe that governments, health professionals and donors around Africa should take a serious look at this system in association with improving connectivity at clinics and hospitals.

Of course, there are a number of improvements that could be put in place which would turn this into an even better solution. For example it would take a few weeks work to get a decent HIV Management module together and another few weeks to integrate some degree of pharmacy management. I would also like to see some kind of mobile integration. This could all be achieved with a relatively small amount of funding and I consider this the best value health related ICT opportunity around at the moment.

More about the project and downloads are available here - http://sourceforge.net/projects/medical/

I have recently released a South Africa Mobile Classified Site (called AdAd.co.za) which uses and greatly improves upon the Community Mobile Channels codebase.

Of course  it may seem strange that my efforts around creating a new open source mobile community platform should have currently morphed into a closed source mobile advertising site. But having been through the learning journey I have been on this year this now seems like a logical next step.

To start off with - Community Mobile Channels has never had or generated any funding - not any. This in itself makes it a luxury side project. It has also failed in any attempts to gain a group of developers or large user base around it - It may have about 350 downloads on sourceforge but this is not enough. I identified 5 key projects that would now be needed - namely Stabilize, Document, GoodUX, Host & Community Outreach. Of course all of these take time and have costs attached so unless there is an angel waiting to give pots of cash they won’t happen.

So what do you do with a great start to a mobile community platform that doesn’t have support? - well I think you look at how it can be improved, how it can still fill the community needs and how it could pay for itself. This, I hope, has been realised to some extent by the creation of AdAd.co.za

Here’s a few general details about the new site

• Like Community Mobile Channels, AdAd.co.za is totally mobile web based - no computer is required
• Like Community Mobile Channels, AdAd.co.za allows the creation of local community content (in this case classified ads) that is of interest to other local community members.
• AdAd.co.za is a hosted service and no technical admin person is required and there is no need to set anything up
• AdAd.co.za has a more streamlined way of adding mobile web content - it has been made much easier to set up Ads made up of just text and pictures. It is also very easy to edit your content. In the process we have purposely lost audio and video content at the moment
• Most of the AdAd services are completely free - the premium services are aimed at businesses
• The 73 categories in AdAd.co.za have all been assigned pictures and are very similar to a channel in CMC
• We have added a whole host of bugfixes and extra features in AdAd which would never have made it into Community Mobile Channels.

In this change of tact I am attempting to create a socially valuable service that has the ability to be self sustaining - This is now very much akin to my feelings around the social entrepreneur as a local and socially responsible businessperson rather than a charity worker.

The 2 most problematic issues are that the AdAd code is not open source and that we have just focused on South Africa. Unfortunately the open source element is now not feasible although some of the bugfixes and enhancements we have done will filter through to Community Mobile Channels if AdAd.co.za ever makes a profit. With regard to the local nature we would like to find partners to operate modified AdAd.co.za sites in other countries or cities where it could be successful. This would operate on a white label licensing agreement. If you are interested then please contact us.

Okay - I didn’t go to Mobile Web Africa which appeared to be well thought of by all who twittered it. I had arranged to go to the SANGONeT Social media for NGOs conference later that week and honestly since (unlike the company/organisation sponsored people) I don’t get paid to attend - 2 conferences in a week is more than I can afford.

One thing that I found quite interesting is that the mobile web conference was that it was held in 5 star hotel in Sandton (the richest few sq miles of Africa) which I personally reckon not a great location to talk about the mobile web in Africa. The second thing I found interesting is that the most liked speaker appeared to be Marc smith who appeared to talking more about social networks than mobile web. In contrast one of the most liked sessions at the social media conference was actually on the mobile web.

Having spent a great deal of time analysing mobile web projects and in particular my own mobile web sites I have come to the following conclusions

A) Mobile web sites are hard to market & hard to find - Most popular mobile websites appear to be found in one of 3 ways -
1) As mobile companions to large popular web sites and advertised on those sites - facebook, twitter etc..
2) As bookmarks on operator portals or bookmarks on Opera Mini
3) Through word of mouth
B) The mobile user tends to want a more interactive experience than a traditional Internet user - The most popular applications / sites are all social network or chat related. An extension of this is that users like quick hits - fast and fun
C) Successful Mobile application appear to put the user experience ahead of functionality. Generally the app should follow the easiest path at all times and the number of options should always be kept to a minimum that will still keep the key functionality.
D) Mobile fits extremely well to local sites and services especially where the location is partial known and it ties in with existing community structures - Hyperlocal sites that are easy to access could get a strong local following very quickly especially through A3 and if they bear in mind B and C.

To me this means is that the mobile web is (and will continue to be) hugely based around just a few major sites - however as time goes by more and more hyperlocal portals will be major sites within their hyperlocal area.

I have gone a few steps on from this thinking with a new project I have set up - A purely South African Mobile Classifieds site called AdAd.co.za - I will blog a little about this in the next few days.

I am please to announce that version 0.1.7 of community mobile channels has been released at sourceforge, http://sourceforge.net/projects/communitymobile/

This is a fairly major release which now contains enough for the first beta (which will effectively be the bugfix of this release). One of the biggest changes is the User Experience Overhaul which provides for a complete change in look and feel for community mobile channels. Effectively the project is becoming geared up towards a generic platform for not just community publishing but also as a framework for whatever other community activity you may want to add.

Here are some new pics of the interface:

Of course the demo is still available at http://www.mainstreamingict.org/cmc

Here is a quick round up of what is new: -

• Improved installation and upgrade procedure - see the installation_0_1_7.txt file for more details
• Complete revamp of home page and other key pages including low data size icons for better user experience
• User profiles - Automatically generated and linked to users , all are held within a profiles channel
• Activity Channel - this is a bit like a public microbloging timeline for the site
• Comments allowed on m-sites
• Internal links in internal messages and more integration of the site using the internal messaging functionality
• users can report content / comments
• admin can remove content / comment

Many thanks to all who have made comments and provided ideas so far - If you would like to get involved in this project then the door is open (e.g)

1) Are you running a community group or NGO - This project needs testers

2) Are you a PHP coder - The code could do with considerable cleaning and commenting

3) Are you good at writing manuals - this project needs a nice load of documentation

4) Are you a graphic designer - Theming and Scheming around the user interface would be great

5) Have you got ideas - let’s hear them

Many Thanks - Rob [ at ) Ngobeni {dot) Net

I’ve been a bit quiet - It called being fully committed to projects at the moment, a rare and happy condition - but here is an update on a few things I should have blogged about.

1. Progress on Community Mobile Channels

I have been tied up with client projects so progress has been slow - the internal messaging functionality should be available by the end of the month.

2. The first Netsquared Jozi

Was on July 14th - This was a great session sponsored by Betavine, Sangotech and Netsquared and the Johannesburg Theatre Complex. In total there were 37 attendees which is great for a first meetup.

Betavine Social Exchange is piloting in South Africa in October so I have signed up - anyone can sign up here. The idea is to Get NGOs, solution providers, developers, donors and anyone else together to build useful tools - more about it here.

One briefing was from the had the Praekelt Foundation talking about their mobile phone based projects including the much lauded project Masiluleke which uses donated please call me ads to raise HIV awareness and get people accessing helplines. - more info here

Womensnet also gave a briefing on one of their projects - ‘keep your chats exactly that’ which aims to keep young women and girls safe while online. - more info here

There were also mini briefings from Betavine, a laughter project (Bill Gee) that helps with the psychological aspects of conditions, and from me of course.

Special thanks again to Steve Wolak of Betavine and Matthew De Gale of Sangonet for all their help - without them this event could of been 4 people in a bar discussing their mobile phones.

Feedback from the meetup has been mainly great with a few good suggestions - check here.

Now we need to come up with a plan for the next one which should be next month.

3. CiviCRM stuff - interesting new avenues

I have been spending a fair bit of time working on CiviCRM lately. For the uninitiated it is a system designed to allow non-profits/NGO to manage their constituent details, communications and events. It is a great system but it does require a bit of technical skill to set it up and manage it.

Well CiviCRM version 3.0 Alpha has just been released and it includes some excellent new reporting features (reporting was not its strong point up until now). http://civicrm.org/node/610

Also the CiviCRM team has been Scoping out basic CiviAccounts/CiviBanking http://civicrm.org/node/609 - this could be another great addition and could make civicrm just about the only system a fledging small NGO really needs - very early days though.

4. Twitter experiments

I’ve been running a few experiments around using twitter accounts to drive traffic to non-profit websites. The @bettermzansi account is basically a few feeds plus a few autotweets plus some manual tweets and it has managed to get quite a number of followers in the last few weeks - Even though the Making Mzansi Better site is undergoing a rebuild and is not being updated at the moment it is still experiencing a major traffic boost from the @bettermzansi twitter account. Will be great to see how it starts to develop when the site gets relaunched.

I’ve also connected up a community mobile channels demo site -> madnews.mobi with a twitter account @madnewsmobi which  is also experiencing a significant traffic boost from the twitter link.

My twitter account is @roballen101 - it is now in the siderbar

There are now so many applications on the internet or generally available that it can be very confusing to choose which one/ones to use.  Having looked at a lot of applications I tend to go with the less is more approach and my short list of recommendations is given below. I have split it into personal and organisational, if there are areas I have missed it is most probably intentional because I have no strong feelings around it - just go to you favourite search engine or look here or here or here or here

Personal

• Email - Gmail
• Keeping Notes - Evernote
• Blogging/Website - Wordpress or Posterous
• Microblogging - Twitter
• Bookmarking - Opera Link
• Browsing the web on a phone - Opera Mini
• Sharing docs and calendars - Google Docs/Calendar
• Documents - Open Office

Organisational

• Email - Gmail for your domain
• Keeping Notes/Organisational Docs - Central server
• Blogging/Website - Wordpress or Drupal
• Internal Microblogging - Laconi.ca
• Intranet - Open Atrium
• Contacts Management - CiviCRM
• Basic Project Management - Basecamp or Project Pier
• Organisational Applications - OpenERP or bespoke (Orange HR is possible for HR) - This area can get complex please leave a comment if you want some help on this or seek the help of a professional.
• Documents - Microsoft Office (It hurts but unless you have Major senior management backing for Open Office forget it)

One application I haven’t seen that I would like

An individual or groups based open source 2 way contacts program which works directly with all of the following - sms/mms/email/twitter/facebook/instant messageners and potential google wave - allows arrangement into groups, allows surveys, allows link attachment. Can work just on a mobile or on a desktop.

Community Mobile Channels is still in alpha but it is getting closer to a Beta edition - This post gives a quick overview of where we are and where we are going - Below is the Basic Feature Set of Community Mobile Channels (This is all total based around mobile and XHTML-MP)

Login/Registration

• Standard secure login functionality
• Registration confirmation via SMS sent ot phone
• Password retrieval via SMS
• All SMS is only Clickatel at present
• Auto identify country and country phone codes from IP address

Uploads

subject to phone - upload : -

• Text
• Pictures (resized to various different sizes - jpg and gif only at the moment)
• Video (small size - only 3gp allowed)
• Audio - only acr and mp3 allowed

Imports

• Import tweets from Twitter (via user/hashtag/mention)
• Import pictures from a gmail account via IMAP (also works if pictures MMSed to the gmail account)
• Import RSS into a channel - uses magpie RSS)

Content Management

• Tag and set permission on your content
• Organise content into channels
• Search for your/public content
• Put content onto an m-site (micro-site/mobile site)
• Rearrange content in an m-site

Publishing

• Publish/Unpublish an Msite
• Feature an Msite
• Mobile optimise links to outside content
• Quick links to other site content
• Publish in channels - Private (only registered members) and Public (and also RSS channels)
• Declare who can edit the site (anyone = wiki, otherwise only you and admin)
• Show site pictures in different sizes according to user choice

Sharing

• Send SMS link of m-site to another person
• Send email link to another person
• Twitter when an m-site is published
• Each public channel has an RSS 1.0 (basic dublin core) feed

Admin functions

• Set controls on the site
• Only admin can currently do imports
• Basic Reports on usage and uploads
• Rollback wiki m-site changes
• Set user permissions
• Create new channels and change channel settings

Currently in development

Basic internal messaging system

Next stage

I want to break the next stage into 5 distinct chunks/projects - these may run concurrently - they are

1. Stabilize - Testing, debugging, code cleaning
2. Document - Manuals for developers and Users
3. GoodUX - Make it look good and make it as easy to use as possible
4. Host - Community Mobile Channels must eventually have a Hosted service option
5. Community Outreach - Get out in the community and start using it/pushing its usage

The latest ‘State of the mobile web report’ produced by Opera was very interesting regarding its focus on Africa - http://www.opera.com/media/smw/2009/pdf/smw042009.pdf - If you consider that pageviews in africa increased by over 400% April 2008 to April 2009 you can be sure that this mobile internet revolution is happening and any statistics you see are probably out of date by the time you read them.

The Knight News Challenge winner were announced - This is a great challenge and again there are some worthy projects but the slate looks very small this year compared to previous years and the money is very US channelled. Also the only real mobile focus is the $200000 (less than 10% - isn’t the future of news going to be mobile???) given to Katrin Verclas and Mobile Active - The Mobile Media Toolkit will offer media production tool sets for download and use on a variety of phones across regions of the world. The toolkit will include applications for video and audio recording, a distribution tool for mobile content to social media sites and detailed how-to information that outlines what users can do with the phones they have. I sincerely hope they focus more effort on the cheapest Java/GPRS phones rather than higher end models.

Building for mobile at the margins - a must see video blog post from Ken Banks (Kiwanja - http://www.kiwanja.net/blog/2009/06/building-for-mobile-at-the-margins/) gives a good introduction for any mobile developer working in resource challenged setting - I agree with everything Ken says apart from ‘Forget the Internet’ (see state of the mobile web and note 1. that in most parts of africa chat by GPRS data is 1% of the cost of SMS and note 2. that higher end phones are getting into a lot of very poor peoples hands through castoffs, relatives and aid)

The Sunday Times (SA) has a piece on Marlon Parker and his team - (MXit put to some good use) http://www.thetimes.co.za/Business/BusinessTimes/Article1.aspx?id=1017017

This is an example of how mobile IM counselling should be done and its done by the community for the community and done on a shoestring. It is no wonder they are getting a lot of interest and hopefully many lessons will be learnt by the development community from this project.

Just a reminder that Net2 Jozi is happening July 14th 2009 (http://www.meetup.com/The-Johannesburg-Netsquared-Meetup-Group/) - We are up to 21 members and 9 definately coming - let’s get up to 40 by the end of the month.