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.
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.
The legal system in the United States is daunting to an ordinary Joe. It is even confounding to a newcomer seeking redress, and, according to the Legal Services Corporation, over 80 per cent of the civil legal needs of low-income Americans remain unmet. For organisations offering legal aids, data on the outcome of the services provided to clients becomes hard to quantify. Using SMS technology can help solve this problem.
Messaging is by far the best channel for attendees to engage on-site, and it also provides a natural connection point between art lovers and the artists. Craft Contemporary's On the Inside exhibit is not only supporting powerful new art, it is finding new and innovative ways to connect its audience to artists and the show’s cause.
Last month our friends at the iHub celebrated their 5th anniversary (happy birthday!) with a fittingly grand celebration in the Nairobi Arboretum. The tech conscious of Nairobi, from senior organizations to aspiring developers came along and a great day it was.
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.
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.
The University of Alberta, MARS lab and the Centre to End All Sexual Exploitation (CEASE) have been using FrontlineSMS in a ground-breaking pilot to assess the impact of using SMS to engage women who are trafficked and exploited in Edmonton, Canada. They have very kindly collaborated with us on an in-depth case study, looking at how the system was designed and set up, its impact, and what's happening next.
FrontlineCloud has been out in beta for just over a month, and we’re proud to have over 450 users signed up already, sending and receiving thousands of messages. The newest addition to the Frontline product set has had an incredibly warm and supportive reception on social media and in the many lovely emails we’ve received from friends, users and donors. To everyone who has retweeted, liked, emailed and signed up to look around, a huge thank you.
Here at FrontlineSMS, we’ve been making software for a long time. When we first released Version 2 of our software, a little over a year ago, we were one of a few SMS management platforms available- one of even fewer that was free and open source. At the time, we were proud to have around 25,000 downloads and an active user community. You can imagine our surprise when we checked our download numbers last week and learned that FrontlineSMS has been downloaded more than 100,000 times- more than 75,000 times in a little over a year. We were so excited, we got a cake. You have to understand, when things get serious at FrontlineSMS, we get serious about getting a cake.
Here at FrontlineSMS, we love data. Like, a lot. If data had its own Facebook page, we’d ‘like’ it and if we took a picture with data out one night, we’d probably make it our profile picture. Data empowers, and we’re all about empowerment o/. In fact, to empower people is the why for the what we do. One thing we’re always wanting to know, of course, is how we are doing. Well we SMSed our friend data to find out – Welcome to the 2013 FrontlineSMS survey results post!
The landscape of NTT is largely rugged and infertile with a short and intense wet season. In this environment subsistence farming, the predominant livelihood, is marginal with many communities experiencing periods of hunger through the dry season. The provision of services to the rural population is difficult because there the few roads are generally of poor quality and frequently impassible in the wet season due to flooding or landslides. For many accessing health services requires walking long distances and the use of public transport where available. It is not uncommon for people in need of emergency care to be carried by a group of villagers to a point where road transport is available.
