Resting on our laurels?

Three weeks have passed since we took the new FrontlineSMS out of an extended period of beta testing and made it widely available to the NGO community. Three weeks ago we also launched the new website, and a new community section, and today we stand just one registration short of hitting a hundred members.

It's been exciting, interesting, informative and hectic since the launch, and we've learnt a lot. Releasing a mobile application to the world is no easy task, particularly when there are so many parameters out of your control. Just talk to anyone in the industry.

On the positive side the lessons learnt are going to come in real handy when I talk about mobile applications development at a number of conferences later this year, including the intriguing "A Better World By Design" event in November (where good friend Erik Hersman is also speaking). Our experiences will also be useful as we move forward with the exciting and equally challenging mobility project, announced last week.

FrontlineSMS is an interesting 'mobile' application in that, being PC-based its interface with the wider world is via an attached GSM device and not a much simpler internet connection. The core FrontlineSMS functionality has been thoroughly tested and, although not many of the new users have had much time to do anything with it yet, we know it holds up well. It's already doing great work in Malawi, and is even being used there to automatically and remotely top-up health workers' phones with airtime credit.The new HTTP POST functionality, and the ability to run external programs triggered by text messages, have gone down particularly well among the few developers who have had time to play with it. Ushahidi and InSTEDD are two of a number of high-profile organisations starting to think about how they might integrate FrontlineSMS into their wider projects.


Of course, it doesn't matter how much functionality you build in if FrontlineSMS isn't able to connect to the outside world. The first release, back in 2005, only supported a very limited range of phones, and this was always going to be an issue. We've expanded the list considerably by making FrontlineSMS fully AT-compatible, which means that any phone which communicates via standard AT (Hayes) commands will work. This covers a much wider range of phones on the market, but not all - Symbian phones, Windows Mobiles, Blackberry's and iPhones are not supported at the moment, but being largely higher-end devices we're not too worried about that. I've not seen too many iPhones floating around rural Uganda.

In just three weeks we've already come across a number of connectivity challenges caused by a range of driver problems (or no-driver-problems), faulty cables, fake cables, software locking communications ports and incompatible handsets, none of which technically have anything to do with FrontlineSMS. Most users have reached out to the online community to get their problem solved, and most have been resolved quickly thanks to help from a combination of other community members and the great team we have at Masabi. Once FrontlineSMS connects with the outside world most users have been quick to excitedly respond to its potential.

Developing something like FrontlineSMS was always going to be a challenge but, as my recent BBC article noted, if we're to really advance the use of mobiles for positive social change we need to stop talking and start building (something more and more people are beginning to do). Thankfully the software has a strong following in the ICT4D space, a dedicated and growing user base and an engaged blogger community. It has also received incredible support from the MacArthur Foundation and, more recently, the Open Society Institute.

The next step is to engage the wider open source community.

Time to rest on our laurels? Never.