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 are excited to announce a new release of FrontlineSMS, our free and open-source desktop product. When we launched FrontlineCloud, we made a promise to continue to develop and support our desktop application. Thanks to generous support from the Open Society Foundations, we have released Version 2.3, which has a number of particularly exciting features and improvements.
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.
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.
Landesa and FrontlineSMS are delighted to welcome and share the announcement today of a US $1.5m Google Global Impact Award, which will enable them to use mobile technology to transform the way that the government in the Indian state of Odisha helps landless families gain secure rights to their land and homes.
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.
Coming to you from the University of Cambridge's Centre of Governance and Human Rights, we are pleased to feature a short film about the Africa's Voices project. This research pilot project supported local radio stations to use FrontlineSMS for audience participation, in an effort to continue to enhance citizen-based dialogue. Radio is still the killer app in Africa for sharing information. Adding mobile turns a one-to-many medium into a two-way interactive opportunity, empowering people to ask questions and hold their leaders to account.
According to the report, with support from the Foundation to Promote Open Society, Developing Radio Partners (DRP) launched the one year pilot project, working with three local radio stations in each country. The primary aim of Zachilengedwe Tsogolo Lathu, as the participants named it ("Our Environment, Our Future"), was to empower rural Zambians and Malawians to address key climate change issues, especially local deforestation, by improving their access to information on the subject via radio and mobile phones.
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.
At the heart of our project is the community of practice concept, which refers to a group of like minded people connected through a process of social learning. A CoP does not necessarily conform to organizational boundaries but rather to interests and interactions, and during our meetings we discovered some important relationships between organic farming movements in Sri Lanka and other organizations, including the Department of Export Agriculture.
Every few weeks, as we release new improvements and features, we'll let you know on this blog about all of the updates to FrontlineCloud. If you’re curious about our development process, you can read my colleague Sitati’s excellent blog post on the subject, Our Brand of ‘Agile’.
