One of the biggest challenges facing field operations in the developing world is access to accurate, reliable and timely information. Innovative uses for new technologies are increasingly being applied to classic humanitarian and development challenges.

With the recent proliferation of technology throughout the developing world, the ability to improve this access has become cheaper and the tools to do so more ubiquitous. It is clear that a fundamental reassessment of the way we interact with emerging technologies is already occurring across the developing world and that simple devices, like the mobile phone, are revolutionizing the way people in developing countries interact within their communities and with the larger world.

This past month the RapidSMS community, hosted by UNICEF, led a mini-summit bringing together key programmers and project managers who have contributed to various iterations of a new data collection platform.

RapidSMS is a SMS-text message based framework that incorporates a host of diverse mobile applications on the same underlying piece of computer code to enable mass-scale mobile data collection, remote health diagnoses, logistics coordination and communication. Whether tracking delivery of Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food (RUTF) in areas suffering from famine or assisting rural health care workers provide better quality care, the ability to quickly collect, analyze and disseminate real time data is proving invaluable to everyone from operational managers to policy makers.

The current RapidSMS framework is a direct product of actual use cases from the field, crafted to solve specific and real problems. With successful pilots in Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, Somalia and Uganda, a host of UNICEF country offices and partners are requesting support for similar projects. The time had come to pool together the knowledge and experience from past implementations, consolidate gains, and coordinate a pragmatic way forward.

At the RapidSMS mini-summit, updates from field deployments demonstrated innovative uses of the RapidSMS platform, hinting at the paradigm changing shift in communications already occurring through new mobile applications:

In Kenya, Earth Institute ICT Coordinator Matt Berg has created an exciting way to empower community health care workers with a RapidSMS project that brings diagnoses, referrals and treatment out of the clinics and into the communities. A remote diagnostic feature automatically combines basic health biometrics such as weight for height and MUAC with risk factors including diarrhea, pneumonia, malaria, measles and HIV to provide diagnoses and treatment advice on the spot. Patients can also be tracked and gaps in treatment identified as the platform automatically sends text alerts when high risk patients are not followed up on.

UNICEF programmer Adam Mckaig recently took on the challenge of customizing a version of RapidSMS to address data collection needs in war-torn Somalia, a country which has functioned without a government for the past 18 years. Various aid agencies and community based organizations periodically collected data in Somalia through the Emergency Response Monitoring Checklist, a cumbersome set of approximately 400 questions with topics ranging from school attendance to prenatal care. However, data was only sporadically submitted, often with important information missing or potentially biased. Mckaig broke down the questionnaire into specific sections and made data forms optional, allowing stakeholders to send what information they were able to collect immediately after they collected it.

Cutting edge private sector companies are also playing a key role in driving the RapidSMS framework forward. For example, Dimagi supported development of RapidSMS Android, porting the server based version of RapidSMS on to open-source Android phones. Earlier this year, Dimagi also supported a RapidSMS pilot in northern Nigeria, monitoring the distribution of nearly 7 million bednets using toll free short codes. Additional RapidSMS related projects were presented by representatives from Inveneo and Winrock.

While the SMS mobile application field is full of small implementations and one-off pilots, there is no longer any need for proof of concept. Clearly, there is a growing demand for these types of applications and that the technology is already here. If we are going to achieve mainstream acceptance, what is needed is to demonstrate cost-effective, innovative solutions at large scale and with observable impacts.

Although the RapidSMS framework is highly customizable, in its current state RapidSMS requires a moderate amount of programmer support to adapt and customize it for specific projects. In order to make the platform more replicable at a lower cost, it is critical that a more generic, modularized version is created and supported. Built on a stable but flexible core, this platform should allow stakeholders to integrate already established applications while developing new tools to supplement their specific needs. Additionally, the RapidSMS community is working to create bundled sets of standard default applications for common use cases like nutrition surveillance that could be deployed at low cost with a minimum of programmer support.

To that end, the RapidSMS Steering Committee was created at the mini-summit to guide the process and extend outreach into the coder community. While RapidSMS is considered to be in pre-alpha stage, we expect a development release on July 1st, 2009. This will initially be followed by monthly alpha product releases to allow for an accelerated process of reconciling feature requests and bugs, improving documentation processes, and eliciting community feedback, while meeting the diverse needs of actual project implementations. The RapidSMS Steering Committee will also be launching a website, featuring information on past case studies, new projects, partnering organizations and opportunities for interested parties to get involved.

RapidSMS is at an exciting, but critical juncture. The RapidSMS Steering Committee strongly advocates for an open-source, or nonproprietary, approach to software development. Applications demanding even small royalties, or those preventing customization of core code, tend to be limited in their scalability and often incapable of reaching truly marginalized communities.

Working with bodies like the Open Mobile Consortium, the RapidSMS Steering Committee intends to convene an open space for progressive leaders in their respective fields to help drive this and other open-source initiatives forward.