For several decades now, the world has undergone wave after wave of transformation as part of the “Internet revolution”. Yet for all of its dreams of global connectedness, many were left out of this recent history and have remained disconnected from rich information, sophisticated tools, and vast virtual communities. There has been a persistent “last mile” problem, with millions of people in developing countries unable to “plug in” to the network for lack of access to computers – until now.
The Mobile Revolution
Today, a revolution is sweeping the world. As mobile phones become ubiquitous, more and more tools are being built that connect mobile users to data, to services, and to one another in ways that no one could have imagined. Communities affected by war, famine, poverty, illiteracy, and disease now have access to new tools, new media, and a means to self-organize from the ground up.
Humanitarian relief and development organizations have been quick to recognize the extraordinary opportunity presented by the mobile revolution, and many have begun using – or even developing – a new generation of “hybrid” software applications and online services that use SMS text messaging and other technologies to bridge the last mile and engage the “bottom billion” in global development efforts.
Mobile Solutions for Social Impact: Barriers
Yet, in adopting these technologies and adapting them to the needs of specific programs, implementing organizations face an uphill battle: The technologies are new and unfamiliar, many are still immature, and none are aimed at global scale.
Technologists developing these tools face challenges as well: for this new class of software, few standards exist, there are hundreds of different mobile phone models that would need to be supported, and connecting the Internet to SMS gateways is challenging for both technical and regulatory reasons.
Lastly, the lack of any widely-recognized “best practices” in incorporating mobile technology makes evaluation problematic.
The Open Mobile Consortium
During the MobileActive.org conference Johannesburg, South Africa in October of 2008, a group of practitioners, researchers, and organizations creating mobile technologies for social change came together to form the Open Mobile Consortium.
Each of these “hybrid” organizations – part implementer, part technology shops — was implementing programs in the field that depended, in part, on open source mobile software or SMS-based services that they had had to build from scratch.
Finally, since many of these organizations had been influenced by the Agile Software Development movement, they viewed “evaluation” as necessary not only to demonstrate impact to funders, but also to determine what new features needed to be added to their future versions of their software in order to further their program goals.
And it is working. The tools these organizations have created are already showing significant potential in areas such as health, education, human rights, community resilience, and economic development.
