Over the last year or so, we have seen tremendous momentum towards the potential for mobile phones for development in low-income countries. This has followed a dramatic spread of phones throughout many areas where no prior method of electronic communication was stable.

It is not that everybody has a mobile phone yet—most of the poorest billion people in the world do not. But everywhere I’ve gone, even areas of extreme poverty, somebody local has a phone and many people have access to one. It’s clearly an expanding platform that gives us new reach.

The technological advances and the excitement around them have created a special opportunity to develop and test a wide range of applications with great potential to address the unprecedented inequities in today’s world.

The Open Mobile Consortium represents an attempt to coordinate our efforts so that we can avoid unnecessary duplication of effort, and that the whole of our efforts can exceed the sum of its parts. 

We can only achieve these goals, however, if we do not get caught up in our own hype, and be mindful of not making overly ambitious promises and exaggerated claims.

Along these lines, two particular cautions come to mind from my experience implementing a few m-health systems.

• Initial enthusiasm is easy, continued use is the challenge: In our work in South Africa and Tanzania, D-tree International has introduced many mobile systems to provide decision support to health workers. We always get initial enthusiasm from our users. PDAs and mobile phones are exciting, the potential for streamlining care is appealing, and at least in East Africa, there is a well-known advantage to tell well-funded foreign initiatives what they want to hear. And it’s all too easy to generate good publicity off of this initial reaction. What’s much harder to develop systems that will continue to be used once the initial enthusiasm has worn off. We have found this to be a much higher hurdle to reach, and it is only in this stage that we are finding out what works and doesn’t work.
•  Our designs are wrong: I am writing this blog from a smart little café on the upper west side of New York City. It’s a fantastic city but pretty much everything we design here turns out to be wrong for the field. If we are lucky, it contains some useful elements. Our increasingly preferred method is to get to the field as soon as possible, with a preliminary and partial application. Our motto is to hold our design meetings under the mango tree. We are having success by partnering with a small number of users and evolving our application piece by piece under their guidance and with their feedback. We meet in the field. We’ve been working with community health workers in Tanzania, and so these meetings are, ideally, held under a large mango tree.
• I recall a Buddhist saying “The situation is urgent, therefore we must proceed slowly.” We need to keep some of that in mind as we go for the big wins, not the quick ones. One of the most important roles the OMC can play is to improve the impact and relevance of mobile services. Through the OMC, I hope we can create an environment in which we can challenge each other without being perceived as attacking each other, slow down when necessary, and report our successes and failures alike. After OMC gets through its own initial enthusiasm stage (the easy part) in which it is natural to highlight the organizations and technologies involved, we can collectively help each other through the very hard work of refining and rolling out the ones that prove useful, and focusing attention on the beneficiaries and impact of our work.