Most mobiles…

A little while ago, Ken Banks and Kiwanja.net announced the winners of the first nGOmobile competition, designed to illustrate how grassroots use of mobile communincation (particularly SMS/text messaging) can be applied in creative and powerful ways.  You can find details on the winners in the announcement here.

Or, check out the press release

In Kenya, the Centre for Training and Integrated Research for ASAL Development
(CETRAD) will begin using SMS to work with local communities to promote the
protection and sustainable use of environmental resources.

In Uganda, NETWAS will launch an SMS-based service for rural communities allowing
them to ask a range of water-based questions on topics such as sanitation, hygiene,
water harvesting and water technologies.

In Mexico, The Equilibrium Fund will deploy a range of SMS services to help rural
Central American and Mexican communities solve problems of deforestation,
poverty, malnutrition, unemployment and the marginalisation of women.

In Azerbaijan, Digital Development will begin helping grassroots and politically
excluded people understand their human and legal rights, and to engage them
further in the political process, through their mobile phones.

Each of the winner’s models contains a plan to leverage the flexibility and interactivity of the medium in a way that extends beyond pushing bulk SMS messages to otherwise passive receivers.  The Uganda and Kenya models deepen the two-way interactions between the NGOs and their communities; in the Mexico case, the NGO will host a system that will allow small Maya Nut producers to coordinate with customers. In Azerbaijan, the messages start as get-out-and-vote reminders, but participants are encouraged to forward the messages to 5 of their friends/family, creating potentially powerful network effects.

It would be great to see updates from some of these winners as the projects go live. 

Sara Corbett just completed a lengthy piece on mobiles and economic development for the New York Times Sunday Magazine.   Its primary focus is the interesting and influential work of Jan Chipchase and his colleagues at Nokia, and it also touches on other exciting developments in the field, including Grameen Village Phone and M-Pesa to kiwanja.net, and the World Resources Institute. 
This paragraph, in particular, is a nice summary of what a lot of us are up to:

This sort of on-the-ground intelligence-gathering is central to what’s known as human-centered design, a business-world niche that has become especially important to ultracompetitive high-tech companies trying to figure out how to write software, design laptops or build cellphones that people find useful and unintimidating and will thus spend money on. Several companies, including Intel, Motorola and Microsoft, employ trained anthropologists to study potential customers, while Nokia’s researchers, including Chipchase, more often have degrees in design. Rather than sending someone like Chipchase to Vietnam or India as an emissary for the company — loaded with products and pitch lines, as a marketer might be — the idea is to reverse it, to have Chipchase, a patently good listener, act as an emissary for people like the barber or the shoe-shop owner’s wife, enlightening the company through written reports and PowerPoint presentations on how they live and what they’re likely to need from a cellphone, allowing that to inform its design.

A few years ago, the World Bank ICT Department estimated that nearly 80% of the world’s population lived under a mobile phone signal. I’m sure it is higher by now.  I also have often wondered what proportion of these people have access to mobile data (GPRS), since sometimes GPRS has been limited to cities and more prosperous areas.

I saw this on the DigAfrica listserv today — Celtel has announced that GPRS will be available nationwide on its network in Sierra Leone.  This does not mean that there is 100% coverage (by population or area) in Sierra Leone yet (see map), but it does help blur the rural/urban split, and provides a way to connect a laptop or community PC to the internet in some places where landline/dialup will not reach. 
 

MSR was one of the Platinum sponsors for ICTD2007—the 2^nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development— which wrapped up this weekend (Dec 15-16) in Bangalore.   It was a great program, and it was a treat to welcome so many researchers from around the world to Bangalore.

Veeraraghavan, R., Yasodhar, N., & Toyama, K. (2007). Warana Unwired: Mobile Phones replacing PCs in a rural sugarcane cooperative.  This is a project by some of my MSRI colleagues, in which an existing (and successful) agricultural information system was updated, streamlined, and extended via mobile phones.  The upshot has been greater convenience at lower cost to farmers in the cooperative. While we’re waiting for the papers to go live, some details on Warana Unwired are available here.

Mpoeleng, D., Anderson, G., Asare, S., Ayalew, Y., Garg, D., Gopolang, B., et al. (2007). Towards a Bilingual SMS Parser for HIV/AIDS Information Retrieval in Botswana.   This poster is an example of the kind of detailed, patient work that, in the long run, helps make mobile systems flexible and powerful, without sacrificing the appearance (to users) of intelligence, awareness, and magic.  Can an SMS database ‘understand’ both English and Setswana?  If it is going to be helpful in Botswana, it had better do so.

Other researchers tackled broader issues of wirelesses and/or mobility (e.g., store and forward, mesh networks interactive radio), or mentioned mobiles as part of a discussion of user centered design. I’ll update these links when the papers go live. I expect we’ll see more mobile-related papers in future conferences.

Apologies for the lengthy absence – it’s been an unusually busy stretch. 

My paper on “The Rules of Beeping” is now available as part of the October 2007 issue of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13(1). 

I’ve had lots of fun this month speaking to the broader community about beeping and missed calls, and I’m grateful to many of you for your interest. A piece from Andrew Havens at Reuters kicked off this round of discussion, which has carried into German, Swiss, and Indonesian venues (at least), plus to the Scientific American Blog. 

I also had a chance to do a podcast interview with Kamla Bhatt on beeping/missed calls this week; part one of the interview is here.  I cover a lot of the same ground in the interview as in as the paper…in case some of you prefer just an occasional ‘um’ or ‘ahh’ mixed in with your communication theory.

It was a pleasure to compare notes with Andrew Heavens at Reuters about beeping and missed calls in Africa.  Andrew, based in Khartoum, has just completed an article: Phone credit low? Africans go for “beeping”  

I had not heard the Ethiopian term for the practice  – “Miskin” (Pitiful) — until now.  It’s perfect. Also good to hear  another datapoint on the proportion of calls on the network which are beeps/missed calls: 

“We have about 355 million calls across the whole network every day,” said Faisal Ijaz Khan, chief marketing officer for the Sudanese arm of Kuwaiti mobile phone operator Zain (formerly MTC). “And then there are another 130 million missed calls every day. There are a lot of missed calls in Africa.”

I’m sure it varies from network to network, but this instance of 25% of the total dialed calls per day is in line with other estimates I’ve found.

The article mentions an upcoming paper in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication.   It is not live yet, but tThe paper is a significantly revised version of my ICA paper from a couple of years ago.   I’ll keep the ICA paper on this site until the JCMC paper is available.

Some perspectives today from the Hindu Business Line on the needs of rural mobile phone users in India. The article covers a lot of ground; missed calls, sharing, livlihoods, and text-free user interfaces figure prominently.  I thought this quote was particularly interesting:

If you thought missed calls is a purely Indian phenomenon, think again. Says Sarup [from Nokia], “I too thought so but was amazed to see this phenomenon in Africa. There they call it ‘flashing’, and the basic message is ‘Call me back’.

Having spoken to users in both spots (India and Africa) about beeping/flashing/missed calling, I’ve been impressed by how people want to describe the practice as something unique to their region.  One of my interview participants started his explanation of beeping with: “you see, in Rwanda, we have a culture…”.  I think it has to do with how people learn to beep/flash/miss call.   They’re introduced to the practice by friends and family, not by websites or manuals.  Beeping is therefore perceived as a social practice, as a (re) creation of the people they know, rather than a property of the handset or even the network to which it connects.

The BBC reports that Ericsson is providing equipment to bring mobile coverage to the Millennium Villages in Africa.  These villages are the foci of major pilots/experiments in holistic approaches to poverty reduction.  The partnership is great news, as ICTs (and mobiles in particular) are part of the puzzle.

Many of my former colleagues at the Earth Institute at Columbia University are working on the Millennium Villages Project, which is coordinated in collaboration with the UN.

Thanks to a (rare?) confluence of market forces, steady innovation and careful regulation, Most of the world’s population now lives under mobile phone signal, yet the economics of reaching the remain poor rural populations remain challenging. Experiments and pilots like the one announced by Ericsson and the Millennium Villages will be very helpful at this stage.  It is imporant to carefully track how phone ownership and use takes off in the villages, since the patterns that emerge will give us more information on the strength of demand, and the conditions under which any micro/targeted interventions might be necessary (and feasible). 

While perusing Balancing Act (Issue #365), I found a link to this story on m-banking in Namibia and Botswana, centered on an interview with First National Bank (FNB) cellphone banking CEO Len Pienaar.  Among the quotes:

“In SA, we have a high density of banking options, such as ATMs, card-accepting devices, and even branches. In Namibia, for example, this is much lower and you have a huge rural population,” explains Pienaar.

He says the bank’s approach to cellphone banking has adapted to the needs of different countries, with customers in Namibia and Botswana having to register for mobile banking in-branch so they can be shown exactly how to use the technology.

“Mobile networks are well-established in most of the countries we are in, and the technology, such as SMSes, is well-known,” says Pienaar.

In the space of just a few lines, Pienaar has touched on many of the factors which will influence m-banking’s trajectory in Africa and elsewhere in the developing world:  an awareness of what m-banking offers, relative to alternatives, the need for some hand-holding to get new users comfortable with the system, and the relative familiarity that people have with the technology (SMS) already.  Sounds like a diffusion of innovations case study, and I mean that in a good way.

A recent piece in the Economist highlights the increasing importance of information technologies, particularly mobile communication technologies, to international aid and disaster relief efforts.  Most of the piece details the nuts-and-bolts of logistics, for which mobile ICTs are clearly a helpful new arrival. Responders can stay in touch and better coordinate their efforts. So too can displaced or fragmented families, who can find each other via electronic databases.

The article contains two other elements which make more sweeping claims about the “shifting balance” or reconfiguration of relationships between the aid community and those they are trying to help.  The more grounded example is that of the role of large remittance flows via m-payments systems and shop-at-a-distance sites like Makuru.com. I think this raises an important point: as families with overseas members become increasingly connected via mobiles and other ICTs, there are real opportunities for micro-level, family-centric responses to macro-level events like floods and famines.

The second point is less clear-cut.  The article leads with a quote from the Horn of Africa, in the form of an SMS delivered to UN officials in London and Nairobi. 

“MY NAME is Mohammed Sokor, writing to you from Dagahaley refugee camp in Dadaab. Dear Sir, there is an alarming issue here. People are given too few kilograms of food. You must help.”

It’s a great anecdote–though perhaps still more aspirational than descriptive–which the author(s) use to assert that “a familiar flow of authority, from rich donor to grateful recipient, had been reversed.” It will be interesting to watch how, over time, donors and other actors in the humanitarian space integrate mediated feedback and participitory input from ‘recipients’ into relief response. 

In the meantime, we can draw a different theme from the anecdote: the author of the SMS found the contact numbers at an internet café. And, conversely, you and I are reading the quote via the internet again.   This hybridity of media—an intermingling of SMS messages and internet content—is something I expect we’ll see more of in the developing world.