Election monitoring technology is changing - driven by two, key developments: ‘digital sovereignty’ and ‘Internet shutdowns’. Now is the time to ensure those changes are for the better. For the last 14 years, Frontline has helped support election monitors communicate using messaging. When you absolutely need to reach everyone, there’s simply no substitute for SMS.
The arrival of COVID-19 in Africa promised to claw back gains made in the education sector, as schools remained closed and curriculum interrupted. To keep learning happening during the lockdown, stakeholders in the industry have come up with numerous policies and guidance, such as rolling out online-based courses, and use of television and radio broadcasts. More than often, the majority of the students are left out as their households cannot afford these platforms. We interviewed Ellen Carney, Geneva Global’s Associate Program Director in Uganda and Ethiopia, on the Frontline+Education platform that offers possibilities of addressing these challenges.
As it turns out - most of human infrastructure is built on (arguably) secure, dumb pipes. It’s what enables us to rely on infrastructure without constantly worrying that it’s being used against us. Confidence in the security of dumb pipes is why we drink water from taps (or bottles), trust pharmacists, and express some of our most personal things to our loved ones, over the phone. In fact, one of the things that makes Signal such a growingly popular app is that its lack of commercial motivation means that it doesn’t have to make the revenue-driven turn to user exploitation. Signal can stay smart about being intelligently secure, dumb (wilfully ignorant, really) pipes.
There is no perfect set of data governance principles or practices, yet - and like most governance, we are a long way from realizing our espoused ideals. But, when policymakers and service providers and frontline technologists work together to advance the common goals of realizing our values in digital ecosystems, we bend the arc just a little closer to justice.
Radio is the world's most powerful broadcast platform that unites communities. South Sudan’s Sawa Shabab (Together Youth) is one of many radio stations that use FrontlineSMS to provide entertainment, host community dialogue, and support targeted educational messages. The result is increase in listenership, positive impact of its educational goals and enhancement of peace and stability among the youth.
Over the past couple years, I’ve had the privilege of co-managing World Vision’s Speed Evidence Project, which seeks to improve information management in the immediate aftermath of a disaster. After most disasters, reliable field data is significant challenge - what we can find is normally incomplete and/or inaccurate.
Starting today, we’re making it even easier to engage, everywhere. We’d like to introduce you to FrontlineSync, our first, free Android app, available now on the Google Play Store. FrontlineSync turns any Android phone into a gateway - meaning that users can now use local phone numbers to send, receive, and manage SMS, and - for the first time - missed calls using FrontlineCloud and FrontlineSMS.
One of the most asked-about features of our apps (FrontlineSMS and FrontlineCloud) is regarding the ability to handle sending and receiving messages through a third party application or web service. Many of our users want to build apps for a wide range of application areas which talk to our apps so that we can handle their SMS functionality. Using any language that can call normal API methods many successful integrations have been developed with great success and with limited input required from us.
We recently completed a team retreat, in which we discussed our strategic vision for the future of our Frontline products. You'll see a number of major improvements coming throughout 2014 to our products. We've even created a web page so you can keep track of them over time: New Features and Updates in FrontlineCloud. Back in the office, we did a short, 1-week improvement sprint and challenged our developer team to make as many useful improvements as they could in that time. We're impressed with their output, and we think you'll find the below improvements will make the application even easier for you to use.
We want to say thank you to all of our users and supporters for a tremendous and inspiring 2013. Your ideas, input, and investments helped us achieve so many accomplishments over the past year: we topped 100,000 downloads with FrontlineSMS. We launched FrontlineCloud. We received a Google Impact Award for our work with our partner Landesa to secure land rights for 80,000 families in India.
A few weeks ago, we were invited by the Knight Foundation to join with other Knight News Challenge winners and discuss the various successes and challenges faced by our organizations. It was a terrific opportunity to recognize that many start-ups and small organizations go through nearly identical growing pains. The meeting was more than group therapy; our sessions provided some key insights into how different teams have tackled similar problems in their own contexts.
