Late last month Ken Banks was invited to meet up with the team behind Nokia Conversations, the handset giant's official blog. During a short six minute video interview, Ken gave his thoughts on mobile innovation in Africa, plans for FrontlineSMS (following the recent announcement of funding from the Hewlett Foundation), and the challenges of financial sustainability faced by many social mobile projects. The interview is available here
NEWS: Hewlett Foundation announces major kiwanja.net funding
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation have today announced a major grant in support of kiwanja's ongoing activities. The grant, worth a total of $400,000 over two years, will see the ongoing support and development of FrontlineSMS, the creation of an MMS (multimedia messaging) version of the platform, FrontlineSMS outreach, the creation of a non-profit online text messaging aggregator, and the scaling of the nGOmobile competition
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation makes grants to address the most serious social and environmental problems facing society, where risk capital, responsibly invested, may make a difference over time. The Foundation places a high value on sustaining and improving institutions that make positive contributions to society
The grant also represents the official launch of The kiwanja Foundation, a US non-profit organisation founded last year with the support of Perkins Coie. The kiwanja Foundation will act as a wider fundraising mechanism for kiwanja's work and, in the future, aims to become a source of seed funding for innovative "social mobile" projects
The Hewlett grant announced today follows previous grants from the MacArthur Foundation and the Open Society Institute. You can follow all the latest project news and updates via Twitter and/or the FrontlineSMS Supporters Group (on Facebook)
NEWS: FrontlineSMS updates now available via Twitter
Updates on FrontlineSMS - latest funding news, blog posts, news items, guest articles and case studies - are now available via Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/frontlinesms. If you're also on Facebook you can also join the FrontlineSMS Supporters Group
NEWS: kiwanja to speak at National Endowment for Democracy
Ken Banks has been invited to speak in Washington DC at an event organised by The Centre for International Media Assistance at the National Endowment for Democracy. The half-day workshop - "The Role of Cell Phones in Carrying News and Information" - seeks to answer a range of questions including how cell phones are being used as a medium of communication for news and information, who is using them to receive information, how journalists and NGOs are integrating them into their work, and which approaches have been unsuccessful and why. The ultimate goal of the workshop is to formulate recommendations for funders, policymakers and implementers on strategies for using mobile technology in conveying news and information
NEWS: kiwanja.net and FrontlineSMS featured on Danish Radio
An interview given by Ken Banks earlier this year at the Supernova conference in San Francisco has just been aired on Danish Radio's 'Harddisken' technology show. During the interview, Ken talks with Henrik Fohns about FrontlineSMS and the wider impact of mobile technology in the developing world. Parts of the actual interview remain in English, with added Danish translation and context. Since airing, dozens of requests to use FrontlineSMS have been submitted by Danish NGOs
NEWS: kiwanja.net lined up to appear at Rhode Island conference
Ken Banks has been invited as one of only twenty speakers to present at a conference at Brown University in Rhode Island this month. The conference, A Better World By Design, "asks the question today’s designers, engineers, and economists should be asking. How can we use technology to improve the world? Hear answers from world-class professionals and academics in this milestone conference that will change the way you think about global crises and push the limits of user-centric, affordable design"
Erik Hersman, a friend and supporter of kiwanja's work and the man behind the highly regarded White African and AfriGadget websites, is also lined up to speak, as is Paul Polak, author of "Out of Poverty" and founder of International Development Enterprises (IDE)
NEWS: kiwanja.net awarded 2008 Pop!Tech Fellowship
16th September, 2008: kiwanja's Ken Banks has today been named as one of sixteen Pop!Tech Social Innovation Fellows for 2008. According to Pop!Tech, "For the past year we have combed the planet searching for visionary change agents incubating breakthrough approaches to the world’s most pressing social, economic, and environmental challenges. We received more than a hundred amazing submissions from over thirty countries worldwide, and we’re proud to present the most outstanding sixteen - the 2008 Pop!Tech Social Innovation Fellows"
Ken joins friends Erik Hersman and Ory Okolloh of Ushahidi fame, and Nam Mokwunye, who he last worked with at Stanford University as a fellow Fellow on the Reuters Digital Vision Program in 2006/2007
The Pop!Tech Faculty will lead the Fellows through an intensive four-day "boot camp" just prior to the start of the "Pop!Tech 2008: Scarcity and Abundance" conference. Each Fellow will then be showcased at the conference itself, kicking off a year of access to mentors, influencers and resources
A copy of today's official Pop!Tech press release is available here (PDF, 170Kb)
Message pending
I've just spent the weekend in Paris. Lovely you might think - and you'd be right - but not because of the sightseeing or famous French cuisine (although we did get a taste of the latter). A few of us got together to share ideas and thoughts on Freedom Fone, a Knight News Challenge-winning project building a media distribution platform providing news and public-interest information via land, mobile or Internet phones. Since the "social mobile" space isn't a particularly big one, sharing project-level ideas and experiences over an intensive weekend workshop made a lot of sense. There was particular interest in the decisions and processes which lead to the redevelopment of FrontlineSMS, something I'm always happy to share, particularly with good friends and colleagues (old and new).
Today, activities such as this sit in stark contrast to the early kiwanja days, where I'd be largely asked to comment on what other people were doing. The last couple of years has seen a gradual shift, so much so that I'm now at the point where I rarely get invited to speak at a conference if the topic isn't FrontlineSMS, social mobile or grassroots mobile activity (see "Staying Connected. And Relevant"). With a number of new projects in the pipeline it's looking like this trend is set to continue.
Getting a social mobile product to 'market' can be a challenging and time-consuming business. The FrontlineSMS concept is well over three years old, but only now do we have something significant to offer grassroots NGOs (the earlier version was more a proof-of-concept). The challenge has now shifted from concept design, fundraising, project management and launch, to one dominated by outreach and promotion. Fortunately, people seem to want to hear what we have to say.
The next ten weeks are busy and exciting in equal measure, with a flurry of conference and workshop activity starting with a Telecommunications Industry Partners Strategy Meeting at the World Economic Forum in New York this week. Shortly after comes Open Source in Mobile (OSiM) in Berlin, where we'll be sharing our experiences developing mobile applications in the social mobile space. It's a new topic for the conference, and great that the organisers, Informa Telecoms, are beginning to take more of an interest in the subject.
Later this month sees a return to New York for the Clinton Global Initiative (CGi) annual meeting where we'll be announcing the new "FrontlineSMS Ambassadors" initiative. An invitation to sit on the technology panel at Social Capital Markets 2008 in San Francisco on 15th October is followed by an appearance in Maine for Pop!Tech. October comes to a close in London where I'll be talking at a Chatham House event - “Technology: a platform for development?” - about my take on non-profits and mobile technology.
Finally, November kicks off with the fascinating A Better World By Design gathering in Rhode Island, where twenty-five speakers have been invited from all fields to discuss a wide range of world challenges and issues. Then, after an invitation to sit on the panel of a public meeting at the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington, we finish off with something completely different with a presentation of our Silverback mobile phone game at Net Impact in Philadelphia. A nice way to end, for sure.
These are still early days (if you forget the last three years!). The new FrontlineSMS is beginning to make considerable inroads in the NGO world, and with increasing numbers of non-profits planning FrontlineSMS implementations, this is certainly not the time to take our foot off the gas.
London calling
In a sense, kiwanja.net is something of a deception. With so much going on so much of the time, it exudes the aura of a small, tightly-knit organisation, a team of people busily working their way through a range of mobile and ICT-related projects. If, back in 2003, I had called the site kenbanks.com as I originally planned - thank goodness it was taken - this confusion probably wouldn't arise today. Many people assume there are at least a couple of people behind kiwanja.net, nGOmobile or FrontlineSMS. The deception is well and truly driven home when I get emails asking to speak to someone from my London office. One day, my friend. One day.
The last couple of weeks or so - a few days either side of my return to Stanford, in fact - have been particularly productive. Here's a wrap up of some of the latest kiwanja.net News.
kiwanja.net was appointed a member of the Program Committee for the W3C Workshop on the Role of Mobile Technologies in Fostering Social Development. Scheduled for Sao Paulo in June, the Workshop aims to understand the specific challenges of using mobile phones and web technologies to deliver services to underprivileged populations in developing countries. A Call for Participation for the 2008 event went out at the end of February.
A talk on the uses of FrontlineSMS by grassroots health NGOs, and a live demonstration of the software, took place at Stanford University's Texting4Health Conference. This followed closely on the heals of FrontlineSMS's inclusion in a new UN "Compendium of ICT Applications on Electronic Government". The first in a series of volumes, this one focuses on the use of mobile technology in the areas of health and learning.
After a series of discussions which started last autumn came an appointment to the Advisory Board for Open Mind, a non-profit organisation which houses Question Box, a project developing a simple telephone intercom which connects rural people to the internet. After blogging about it a few days ago (see the entry below), Question Box was picked up by the popular Boing Boing website.
After successful outings with the Global Mobile Awards 2008 and kiwanja's own nGOmobile competition, 160 Characters appointed kiwanja.net a judge for the forthcoming 2008 Mobile Messaging Awards. FrontlineSMS, which was short listed for a 2007 Mobile Messaging Award, will be at the centre of a speech I'm giving in Cannes - where the 2008 winners will be announced, and where I'll be making the non-profit keynote address on the use of SMS by grassroots NGOs around the world.
On the subject of Awards, FrontlineSMS has been nominated in the "Equality" section of the Tech Awards, an international Awards program that honours innovators from around the world applying technology to benefit humanity.
kiwanja.net made its fourth appearance on the BBC World Service, this time talking about the recently announced winners of the inaugural nGOmobile competition. The interview, broadcast on Digital Planet, profiled the projects in Kenya, Uganda, Mexico and Azerbaijan and covered more broadly the continuing relevance of SMS as a tool for grassroots NGOs in the developing world.
The Social Mobile Group on Facebook, set up by kiwanja in November 2006 (and which has just hit the 1,400 member-mark) was praised in a blog posting by Social Media Guy in an entry titled "Facebook Groups Done Right". The use of Rotating Group Officers, relevant discussion topics, the presence of an external site for non-Facebook users and a voluntary Members Directory were all highlighted as innovative ways of developing and maintaining groups on the platform.
Finally, "Design Traditionalist", a blog run by Alan Manley (a lecturer in product design in India) has named the kiwanja.net website among several others in its "Good site" section. As someone forced to do their own web design and development (it would normally be a job for the London office, right?) it's always quite pleasing when a qualified observer has a "positive interaction".
Maybe I won't make those changes after all...