Cultivating tangible change
Mobiles Phones and SMS
Situation: By November 2007, the total number of mobile phone subscriptions in the world had reached 3.3 billion, or half of the human population. There is no doubt that improving mobile access to information is increasingly important. Whether used to collect news, transmit survey information to a website, receive alerts about breaking news or disasters, or create a bridge from an organization’s web presence to real life experiences, mobile applications are becoming increasingly important. In 2007, over 798 million people around the world accessed the internet from their mobile phone. That is a huge communications market that is still relatively untapped.
Solution: Our release of the SMS Framework 1.0, along with the road map for a 1.1 version, is making Drupal a more attractive platform for organizations that need powerful, decentralized data collection tools. We’ve been the lead developers of the SMS Framework for Drupal for over a year and have built the infrastructure that allows people to interact with websites via SMS messages and then in turn allows websites to interact directly with people via SMS notifications. This infrastructure integrates with major third-party services like Clickatell and, most recently, the open source service Gnokii, which allows a two-way SMS gateway to run off a USB drive.
developed SMS Framework for Drupal
Work
developed SMS Framework for Drupal
Strategy Focus
Demo of Two Way SMS Gateway on a USB Stick with Drupal Integration
New Open Source Tools Will Make Decentralized Data Collection More Effective
New Open Source Tools Will Make Decentralized Data Collection More Effective
The release of the SMS Framework 1.0, along with the road map for a 1.1 version, is making Drupal a more attractive platform for organizations that need powerful, decentralized data collection tools. This recent work shows that using Drupal can give you a serious foundation to integrate sms applications and tools with a website. I want to expand on Will’s recent post about building a two way SMS Gateway on a USB drive and show how Drupal can act as a data hub for collecting data and messaging via sms.
We are interested in this because tools that can integrate with sms like this will be especially helpful for international development agencies with on the ground operations. For example, this functionality could allow an election monitoring organization to use sms to track reports from observers at polling stations or help a public heath organization to monitor when patients take medicine via sms messages sent from personal or public cell phones. It could even assist a disaster response organization to track the status of its team on the ground team through their handsets.
Proof of concept:
Let’s look at the election monitoring example to put this in more concrete terms. Will pulled together a screencast to accompany this post that shows how it all works, riffing specifically on how an integrated solution could help field workers like election monitors.
Situation Example:
Your organization is monitoring an election in a developing country in Africa. You have local election observers with cell phones at polling stations, a centralized headquarters to coordinate the the staff on the ground, and a Drupal site set up to collect reports in a centralized space where people from around the world can track the election turnout. To really get a sense of how the data can move, there are three main areas I want to point out:
- (1) the set up of the hub creating a relay point
- (2) sending messages to field workers
- (3) collecting data from field workers
