Mobile phones for development = grassroots innovations

July 20, 2008 | comment4 Comments

Recently, there seems to be a hype around mobile phones in developing countries. It is great to see the investments being made in mobile technology and communication. At the KM4DEV unconference Pete Cranston, Luca Servo  and I organized a little session around the potential of mobile phones for knowledge sharing. Obviously, mobile communication happens on a daily basis and already has a huge impact particularly in developing countries. Therefore, I am still eager to see what else will come in the foreseeable future.

In a recent article the New York Times went further by asking, “Can the cellphone help end global poverty?” It also described what a big difference a mobile phone could make:

“It’s really quite striking,” Hammond says. “What people are voting for with their pocketbooks, as soon as they have more money and even before their basic needs are met, is telecommunications.” Over several years, his research team has spoken to rickshaw drivers, prostitutes, shopkeepers, day laborers and farmers, and all of them say more or less the same thing: their income gets a big boost when they have access to a cellphone.

During the session we also collected various examples, which I categorized as the following:

I find mobile communications particularly promising because most ideas can and will be developed by the users themeselves, as well as being embedded in the local context. The NYT article also gives some nice examples:

 One Liberian refugee wanted to outfit a phone with a land-mine detector so that he could more safely return to his home village. In the Dharavi slum of Mumbai, people sketched phones that could forecast the weather since they had no access to TV or radio. Muslims wanted G.P.S. devices to orient their prayers toward Mecca. Someone else drew a phone shaped like a water bottle, explaining that it could store precious drinking water and also float on the monsoon waters. In Jacarèzinho, a bustling favela in Rio, one designer drew a phone with an air-quality monitor. Several women sketched phones that would monitor cheating boyfriends and husbands. Another designed a “peace button” that would halt gunfire in the neighborhood with a single touch.

Projects, such as Android, promised to have an open operation system on mobile phones, so own applications for specific needs can be developed and in a free open source fashion developed worldwide jointly by programmers. Twitter is a good example to show the ubiquitous of future web applications connected to mobile phones. Benedikt Foit writes about a new report from the W3C’s (World Wide Web Consortium) Mobile Web Initiative and Mobile Web for Social Development (MW4D). Two findings are particular interesting:

  • Mobile phones should be considered as an access mechanism, where mobile browsing is one way to access the content, but using Voice applications (through e.g. voiceXML) is another way, and SMS could be a third option. All of these options should be considered as different delivery channels of Web content. Using the Web as a repository of information could leverage replication and cross-fertilization between different projects by offering visibility.
  • Key barrier for having useful and relevant content is lack of local expertise to develop these. Empower local actors to become mobile service providers (technical knowledge, entrepreneurship and business models).

We also discussed during the session the different challenges such as equality, prices, the interface, energy, language and illiteracy rate among others. In that concern, an interesting project in India shows “while village textual literacy rates are low, visual and oral expression thrive.” The StoryBank project uses mobiles to share stories in an Indian village and underlines the potential for knowledge sharing through digital storytelling.

A village committee decides what kind of programmes to make and volunteers from the village, mainly women, undertake to research and record news items on health, education, farming and other topics that are broadcast alongside devotional music and public service announcements.

Lastly, Dr. Gary Marsden describes the changes through mobile social networking from South Africa with a fascinating example from collaborating children:

Most school-children in South Africa use a system called “MXit” MXit is a basic Internet chat application for the mobile phone, and five million people use it; because in South Africa, the cost of sending a single character via MXit is one ten-thousandth of the cost of sending a single character via SMS.  For two rand a day, less than 20p, these kids can stay all day on MXit, despite the fact that it has a terrible user interface that the likes of us wouldn’t put up with.

Many of the schools have banned use of MXit.  But Gary and his colleagues discovered that the kids use MXit to do their homework collaboratively.  Therefore, they added functionality to the MXit system, having reverse-engineered the protocol, and added these features and functions into some of the chatrooms. The kids loved it.  Remember, they have no Internet access.  They added an equation-solver, for solving quadratic and linear equations, and an interface to Wikipedia.

No surprise the MIT started an initiative called for the next billion mobile phone users:

Within the next three years, another billion people will begin to make regular use of cell phones, continuing the fastest adoption of a new technology in history. Soon, this next billion will make their voice heard—and connect to the global information network.

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From A-Z to Organization2.0: B - Blogging examples and success factors

July 2, 2008 | comment2 Comments

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Blogging, next to Wikis, is the most popular instrument of new social software in an organization. A blog itself is quite a simple application. The value of blogging comes by the engagement of its authors and readers. Implementing blogs in an organization is not an easy task and needs time, resources and patience. I have worked with blogs within an organization for over three years and this pretty much summarizes my key experiences (I previously posted this on one blogging project).

Blogging examples
Blogs can be used in different contexts and for different purposes. Once again, they are just a tool, which has to be embedded in the organizational culture. So, for example, if a blog is just an add-on to existing tools, then will you quickly hear the information overload argument. These are some ways to use blogs:

  • Project management: A project history with milestones, document references and discussions.
  • Public relations: An external blog to engage to different audiences.
  • Stakeholder management: A blog to keep a network together and communicate on transparent on peer-to-peer basis.
  • Employee: Let the experts in your organization speak on their behalf and create their own audiences or spheres of interests.
  • Department: A channel to communicate relevant information. A supply for all those emails and a forum to get together. Who knows what is happening three doors away?
  • Thematic: An overlapping blog for specific theme. It involves all employees who are interested or working on that particular theme.
  • Process: Use it for quality control to involve all employees in certain processes, to highlight problems and elaborate solutions.
  • Customer-relationship-management: Let your internal customers, for example of the accountancy department, engage openly, to send feedback and discuss with them potential improvements.
  • Do you know of any others? I am sure there are more additional examples.

Blogging success factors
Each of the above listed examples need a slightly different approach, but I want to highlight general success factors, which I separated into four different phases: preparation, marketing, engagement, sustainability. I have put in some vague percentage to show the kind of effort (time and resources), which have to be taken into consideration. Do you agree with this figures?

Preparation (30%)

  • In essence, to set up a blog is technically easy.
  • Emphasis on design: It is important that your authors and readers like the look of the blog.
  • Do not use the standard blog templates. Blogs are flexible applications, so design or adapt them to your specific needs. Embed carefully additional widgets (different information boxes).
  • The front-page is key to set incentives for engagement: Focus on well elaborated categories for orientation or offer tagging, highlight the recent comments, offer a search field and different ways for subscription.
  • Do not plan too much and wait too long! I know it is a contradiction to the points above. Most things shall be changed through feedback from your audience. Blogging is an ongoing experiment.
  • Think about a policy or some points for motivation to set a framework. IBM and Sun have some good examples.
  • From the start up leave the blog open to as many authors as possible and of course for any reader to comment.
  • Calculate long term resources (at least two years) for bloggers and to facilitate the endeavour.
  • Do not be afraid of user administration. It is very easy to do.
  • Elaborate how you can reduce other communication channels such as email for blogging.
  • Discuss with the management, what could be the incentives and obligations to engage.

Marketing (20%)

  • Get together a critical mass of motivated bloggers. These are the ones that bring your blog alive, particularly in the starting phase — best are multipliers. You should have at least 5 dedicated bloggers.
  • Create a little vision or story about why you create this blog and focus on the benefit for its users. For example, highlight synergy effects and public personal knowledge sharing.
  • Do a little road show in your organization to bring employees on board. Although word by mouth propaganda is in my experience the strongest success factor for this community driven endeavour.
  • Include, when possible, short trainings. We often use already existing frequent meetings for a half hour presentation. That was in most cases enough to start.
  • Establish a little help section with frequently asked questions and if possible a screencast of how to use the blog.

Engagement (30%)

  • Particularly in the beginning, it is important to motivate people to join. Comment on blog posts. Propose to publish content only sent by email.
  • Practice an open style of writing and set incentives for different writing styles to lower the barrier for participation. For example, formal announcement next to personal stories.
  • Think about the best way to let readers be notified about a blog post. Best would be a RSS (feed) option, but consider also classical email notification.
  • Give answers in blog post through emails instead and send only links to the post.
  • Encourage for discussions and pick up interesting developments happening on other communication channels.
  • Leave the blog content development open to discussion and the audience as an incentive.
  • Technical difficulties were mostly around missing tags or categories, file upload and large size photos.

Sustainability (20%)

  • Do not underestimate the facilitation throughout the blog life span.
  • Think about regular evaluation to get detail feedback. Why are users participation and why not?
  • Fluctuation is often high, so scheduled regular presentations or trainings are necessary.
  • Answer user requests and registrations as quickly as possible.
  • Integrate your blog into other existing web tools (e.g. Intranet) for example, though feeds.
  • Include other wanted features such as document folder, event calendar, etc.

This is a blog post series about my experiences on web2.0 in an organization, consisting of at least 26 different blog posts highlighting potentials and challenges and focusing on success factors. Please feel free to comment, contact me for further information and/or let me know which other topics within this context you would be interested on.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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