We are proud to announce the public launch of the Open Mobile Consortium.

The Open Mobile Consortium represents our collective commitment and shared vision to better serve communities around the world with high-quality mobile technologies.

So, welcome to the OMC!  Let me tell you why we exist, who we are, and how you can get involved.

Why We Exist

It is now widely recognized that mobile phones have become the computing platform for much of the developing world, with coverage, ownership, and utilization expanding across the globe at a breathtaking pace.

Even simple SMS text messaging can now be used to access news services, social networks, search, banking, personal health, and a rich array of services once available only to those with Internet access.

The mobile revolution presents national governments, social change organizations, and ordinary citizens with an extraordinary opportunity to bridge the digital divide and wield the power of technology for good at a global scale.

Yet even as the landscape changes, many old challenges remain. The very architecture of global development funding is often not conducive to organizations working on inspiring open source social change solutions wroking together instead of competing against each other.

Those who need to use technology for social change are often forced to choose between trying to retrofit commercial technologies that were not designed to work in the places where they are most needed, or building their own, with constraints of time, resources, and engineering expertise.

The results we see today were predictable - we've seen it in the past.  Many of the first generation of tools for social change available today are closed systems that do not interoperate. Many share features, but not the underlying code. They store and transport data using unique protocols and formats, making communication across platforms nearly impossible.  Many applications are difficult to integrate, localize, or adapt to a new purpose.

Who We Are

As mobile technology comes into its own, the many of the underlying conditions have not changed, and both practitioners and technologists today risk repeating the mistakes of the past. When the founding members of the OMC met last year at MobileActive08 in Johannesburg, we realized that we were kindred spirits, part of a new generation of social-technical "hybrid" organizations emerging at the forefront of the “social-mobile revolution.”

We were creating free and open source mobile applications and services to support humanitarian and global development efforts, while rapidly evolving the design of our technologies though close, daily interaction with their users. We were fans of Agile Software Development. We believed in grassroots change. Unlike our predecessors, our experiences using technology in the field had left us deeply optimistic about its potential. And we were tired of technology projects where “sustainability” in the end meant nothing more than ensuring the availability of local tech support.

By training our users to design, develop, and evolve these technologies themselves, we aspire to create a legacy of sustainable innovation, tapping into our users’ deep understanding of what works, what doesn’t, and why in their local environment, and leaving communities better able to adapt our tools to new requirements when we are gone.

As we began to compare notes, we recognized that our organizations were falling into a familiar pattern of competition for donor dollars, duplication of effort in our engineering, and stove-piping of the resulting data. We were each writing drivers for the same phones, inventing our own protocols and data formats for integrating web-based services with text messaging, and dealing with the technical and regulatory complexities of working with same mobile carriers. And the data our users were collecting once again ended up trapped in different databases, on different devices, in different formats.

As a result, donor dollars were not efficiently used, our software development efforts were siloed, and our users would ultimately suffer.

We knew we had to break the cycle of fragmentation, and that doing so would require trust, humility, and a new way of working together that allowed us to partner on projects, maximize value and velocity by sharing designs, code, protocols, data standards and lessons learned, and still compete successfully in our respective niches to drive innovation. And so the OMC was born.

What You Can Do

In the months following our inception, we’ve held regular, formative (and predictably….lively) discussions, two Working Group meetings, and a Technical Group meeting.  We already have a number of collaborative projects underway, with more to come.

If you would like to share ideas, attend meetings, support our efforts financially, or otherwise get involved, we’d welcome your joining the conversation!

Thank Yous!

The OMC represents the collective efforts of a number of OMC members, partners, and volunteers; please allow me to recognize a few members of the remarkable, dedicated team that has worked nights and weekends to make this site a reality.

First and foremost, I’d like to express, on the part of all of us, my deepest gratitude to Eric Gundersen, Ian Cairns, and the talented team at Development Seed for their generosity in designing and developing this site for us.  They did it pro bono because they believe in the mission and vision of the OMC -- and they did a spectacular job.

I’d also like to recognize two members of the OMC Working Group for their invaluable contributions. First, let me offer a huge note of thanks to Hajo van Beijma of Text to Change for his leadership in coordinating the deployment of the site and its hosting infrastructure. Finally, I’d like to recognize Katrin Verclas of MobileActive.org for her vision, guidance, editing skills, project management, and well-honed cat-herding skills.

Warm Regards, and Welcome!

Robert Kirkpatrick OMC Chair