Mainstreaming ICT

On Tuesday I was privileged to go to Cape Town for the Launch of Net Tuesdays in South Africa. It was great to see many people working and interested in social media and mobile web developments. I really hope that this initiative will go from strength to strength and I am hoping for collaborations with Netsquared Jozi which I am organising in July (with lots of help) - see http://www.meetup.com/The-Johannesburg-Netsquared-Meetup-Group

If you are interested in ICTs for social change/social good then please join the group and get involved. In the meantime here is a summary of my presentation that I gave at the launch of Net Tuesdays in Cape Town.

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Intros and thanks …

Technology is a BIG driver of social change / social good - So many technology based changes throughout history have improved lives. Sometimes technology revolutionises the way people live - take electricity as a fundamental example and sometimes it just helps us to live healthier lives (consider pasteurization or antibiotics).

However we often need to have well thought out and well funded projects to use technology well and for social good.  A classic example is that we have technology for clean piped water and many people in developed countries consider this a right but there are still a lot of people who walk miles to collect untreated water.

When you look at the profound impact of electricity or radio/TV or roads it is interesting to consider that a lot of things that are often taken for granted are just a few generations old in human terms. It’s also interesting to consider that many of the new technologies that are now widely used have only really been introduced over the last 20 years.

Two of the biggest advances over the last 20 years

Of course both the Internet and Cellphones were around before 1989 - but 1989 was when Tim Berners-Lee kick started the Internet as we now recognise it. Also 20 years ago less than 1 person in 100 had a mobile phone.

Both of these are life changing technologies - they fundamentally affect the way we communicate and the way we can get and share information. While mobile phones are getting into the hands of people living in the poorest situations, the same can not be said about computers and fixed telephone lines. This is a problem because up until recently you needed an expensive computer and telephone to connect to the Internet.

Historical Problems with using the Internet for Social Development

Internet Use Circa 2002 - It is very clear from this map that it has not been easy to use the Internet for development projects in developing countries.

However, times are changing - The Internet and mobile phones are both communication and information technologies so it makes sense to try to integrate them. We’ve been trying to intergrate them for a number of years with limited success but finally the Internet is becoming widely available and usable on a large number of mobile devices and at a reasonably low cost in many countries.

Of course the mobile browser based Internet is a different experience. You have to think in a different way - for instance: -

• Instead of Email - Think SMS
• Instead of computer sized screen - Think Mobile Phone screen
• Instead of huge functionality - Think MOST IMPORTANT functionality and simplicity
• Instead of flashy stuff and high bandwidth - think SIMPLE design and low bandwidth

And also when you look at the Mobile Internet - you need to take into account different countries issues. This is my visualisation of the Mobile Internet around the world circa 2009

In Japan and some other parts of asia they have been using Mobile Internet applications successfully for a while. They developed iMode early 1999 and it was a big success around asia. In the USA the Mobile Internet was largely ignored until the arrival of the iPhone in 2007 (and to some extent Google Android). In Europe there was a failed launch of WAP around 2000 and then they sold the mobile data wavelengths to operators for billions of euros. Since then mobile browsing (in Europe) has been considered very expensive as operators try to recoup money.

But there are a lot of countries (some of which are shown in green on the map) which have never had much of an Internet footprint until the Mobile Internet came along. These countries have many more people who are primary Mobile Internet users than people who are primary Computer Internet users and these countries are primarily developing nations - India, Indonesia, South Africa, Russia and Nigeria all have considerably more Mobile Internet connections than computer based connections.

These changes around the Mobile Internet in developing countries offer huge opportunites; This forces us to ask questions such as “How do we take advantage of Mobile Internet for Social change/Social good?” and there are a lot of people trying to answer this question. There is the W3 initiative around Mobile Web for Development http://www.w3.org/2008/MW4D/ . There are well documented projects around Mobile Health and other projects using SMS for community conversation. The recent Netsquared challenges were all about Mobile and there are dozens of great projects/ project ideas in the Netsquared project galleries.

My view is that diversity of different applications and ideas is great. However, I belive that the single most powerful use of this technology is the ability to build mobile communities & build applications that empower communities.

How do we build these Communities and Applications?

It makes sense to initially look at linking in with the big social networks  such as Facebook/My Space & Ning - they all have Mobile Internet Interfaces but .. the sites weren’t originally designed with mobile in mind and IMHO it really shows.

There are also specially designed for mobile - mobile communities e.g. -

• Mxit,
• The Grid,
• Mocospace,
• Itsmy,
• Pepperonity,
• Mygamma,
• even SA NGO lovelife have Mymsta.mobi

These are all useful but … There are all owned sites and platforms and the source code is closed. When I was looking around at developing solutions in this area I kept on coming back to the same question

Where are the Open Source mobile community scripts and frameworks?

I looked around for a long time and couldn’t find much that I wanted to use. However, there were a lot of php scripts that did part of the job or covered a small piece of functionality so I decided to create a framework building upon everything I had found and this led to ….

Community Mobile Channels

The basic premise of Community Mobile Channels is to be a framework that is totally mobile and community oriented and will allow people to easily build mobile communities on top of - forget computers - this is all about people who only access the internet through their phones. It consists of a central website - PHP and MySQL which runs on most shared webhosting packages. Then the core framework allows community members to : -

• UPLOAD content from their phones and adjust it for mobile phone usage (e.g. an uploaded picture gets converted into sizes which are optimised for different mobile screen sizes)
• MANAGE their content (tag it and put it in channels) in a mobile friendly way
• PUBLISH their content (on channels) just useing their phone
• SHARE their published content (through SMS or email or other ways)

Some other useful features which include

• Secure Login (utilising SMS registration where possible)
• Administrator functions to make sure system isn’t abused
• Allow both user owned sites (blog style) and Wiki style sites where anyone can contribute/change information
• Allow public channels that anyone can see and private channels that only the community can see
• Make it easy to search and link to other sites

And there’s a bit of outside integration: -

• RSS Channels
• RSS Feeds
• Twitter Integration
• Allow upload via MMS/Email

What could Community Mobile Channels be used for?

• On the simplist levels it could be used as a community message board or personal mobile blog.
• It could be used for any mobile citizen journalism project or for community based mobile news.
• It could be used as a mobile wiki.
• It could be used as a community knowledge base.
• It could be used to interface with database applications or provide views of databases or reports to mobile
• It could be used as a classified ads network
• It could be used an educational resource
• & Much more …

And that is just where we are now - there’s plans for improving the system as described below

• Testing / Bug Fixing – Get people using it and building on it
• Internal Messaging
• Get some good documentation on how to use it.
• Improve the User Interface and User Experience
• Improve Admin Controls
• & Possibly create a Hosted Service to take away any installation pain - this is probably the biggest cost.

How to find out more about Community Mobile Channels?

• This blog has regular updates and a page
• There is a Demo at http://www.mainstreamingict.org/cmc (The demo user is number 1234512345 and the demo password is adapt)
• The source is held at Sourceforge (http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/communitymobile)
• There are project updates and the challenge entry at Netsquared.org
• Contact rob allen via @roballen101 on Twitter
• Write a comment below

If you are interested in getting involved please let me know.