One of the projects competing for the cup mixes OLPC and FM radio to overcome at least one of the major connectivity hurdles faced by the OLPC initiative. Griffen’s complete post is at http://sciblogs.co.nz/griffins-gadgets/2010/02/25/a-beeping-good-idea-for-low-cost-communication/

The idea is to leverage off the growing number of XO laptops available in third world countries as part of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) programme which is active here in New Zealand where a network of testers including Sciblogger Fabiana Kubke help refine the low-cost computer’s features.

There are 1.2 million OLPC laptops now in use, but there remains a big problem – third world countries don’t really have the communications infrastructure to get content out to those laptops in a reliable fashion. Mobile networks often don’t extend into rural areas, satellite and fixed wireless systems are too expensive options. Team Beep came up with a great idea – why not use the readily available FM broadcast frequency to send out a stream of data that can be picked up by a bog standard FM radio. The signal is then fed into the sound card of the XO latop and recorded using a small piece of open source software. The software then converts the audio signal, which consists of a stream of beeps representing letters, into text and assembles it as a document.

Radiotext-type services using the FM network are not a new idea, here’s one project from Europe seeking to offer similar services and digital radio is already rolled out in many countries delivering weather, traffic and channel information to radio users. But the innovative part of One Beep’s solution is the interface between an FM radio and the XO laptops used as part of the OLPC programme. With some refinements, this should be a piece of software that cna be simple to use and allow children in remote villages in Africa to be sent school lessons updated regularly.

Currently, the data throughput One Beep is achieving is fairly low – 2Kbps (kilobits per second). But the team is confident compression technology can increase this to 10Kbps. I think they’d find others are working in this area who may be worth partnering with to get the data throughput possible via FM radio even higher.

This is a solution that could be rolled out tomorrow – it requires use of a small sliver of radio spectrum, a radio transmitter to send out the signal (the further it needs to go the more powerful the transmitter needs to be) and the software has to be installed on each OLPC machine. Hopefully the competition and One Beep’s making it to the final will give the project the profile it needs to become reality.

Mobiles in-a-box doesn’t specifically address the use of mobile phones by local and community radio, but many of the tools and ideas it presents will nevertheless be useful. The toolkit is organised around a series of tactics, tools, tutorials and case studies. The tactics and the case studies are a source of ideas, and the tools and tutorials provide support for putting the ideas into action.

Tactics are organised in 4 categories, all of which have relevance for local and community radio stations. They are People’s Media, Outreach and Participation, Fundraising and Resource Mobilisation, and Coordinating and Mobilising.

I was immediately attracted to the People’s Media category as potentially the most interesting and directly relevant to combining radio and ICTs. The bad news is the category isn’t as well-developed as it might be, and it says nothing about combining ICTs with traditional media. The good news is that mobil media is set to be the subject of an upcoming toolkit, Message in-a-box. There have been some experiments with SMS messages and traditional media, for example the local news SMS project in Grahamstown, South Africa and other projects discussed in a survey of community media and SMS text messages that I posted a couple months ago. The short length of an SMS message is a challenge for reporting news, but encouraging listeners to become community correspondents by sending in their 160 character observations of meetings, conflicts, concerts or other events that a radio station is covering is a good way of getting fresh eye-witness accounts.

While novels have been written by SMS, there is no need to restrict use 160 character messages since many phones have audio and video recording capacity in addition to a still camera. This can be used by reporters or listeners to send information back to the station. While you can only play the audio on the air, the videos and stills can be described by on-air staff and placed on a the station’s website, even a mobile friendly website.

The outreach and participation category includes ideas for information services via simple SMS messages, interactive SMS messages and interactive voice response (IVR). The examples provided include monitoring elections and emergency situations, but interactive SMS services can also be used to provide information about schedules, to run surverys, etc.

Fundraising and resource mobilisation also offers some possibilities. Premium SMS numbers cost more for users to send a message to but the owner of the number keeps the extra charge. They are often used by services that reply to your message by sending you your horoscope or a joke, and charge 5 or 10 times the cost of a normal SMS message. A radio station can use a premium SMS number to receive announcements, music dedications or classified ads from listeners, automatically receiving a certain amount from the listeners pre-paid calling credit.

An enterprising radio station with a bit of technology can even make money by producing and selling its own ringtones or by making custom ringtones for advertisters or to support campaigns.

Finally, the toolkit has a category on coordination and mobilisation that explores how mobiles can help with coordinating station or public meetings or mobilising support for campaigns. Emergency communications also fit into this category, for example when an important public event occurs or an emergency happens an SMS message can alert them to turn on the radio for more information.

The boom in mobile telephones offers a vast array of possibilities for local and community radio stations looking for new ways to engage their listeners and to enable participation. Unfortunately, few stations have begun to exploit the possibilities. If the reason is a lack of ideas, know-how and tools, this toolkit might inspire them to start acting. And if it doesn’t, we can hope the new Message in-a-box toolkit will. According to the Tactical Tech website this was supposed to be released in September 2008, so we can expect it soon.

Click here to read and download the Mobiles in-a-box from Tactical Tech’s website

Download a Spanish-language version of this article

When the GSM mobile telephone standard was developed engineers included the ability to send short text messages, up to 160 characters, between phones. Operators were sceptical about the service’s ability to interest customers or to generate revenue, but consumers massively took it up as a convenient and inexpensive alternative to voice calls.  With time applications and services were developed enabling, for example, broadcast messages, mobile payments, polling and information services. In 2007 global revenue from SMS messages was more than $50 billion with more than 1 trillion messages sent.(1)

As mobile phones become increasingly common, SMS messages are being used by community media in a variety of ways.

At its simplest, announcers and journalists announce their phone mumbers over the air and invite listeners to send messages with comments on the news, questions, greetings, song requests… Some of these are then used on-air. In some cases, stations have devised ways of generating feedback via mobiles without the listeners having to pay even the cost of an SMS message. For example, Xtreme FM, a community-oriented pirate station in the UK, has a mobile permanently in the studio:

“It vibrates every few seconds like a faulty alarm clock, as listeners call and text. Scrolling through its inbox, I notice scores of “missed calls”. Big N explains that this is how pirates gauge a record’s popularity. If listeners like a tune, they call in and then ring off, so the studio mobile registers a “missed call”. This costs callers nothing. If Xtreme receives over 20 missed calls from different numbers before a track ends, the DJs play it again. This is why teenagers listen to pirate radio: it’s interactive in ways legal stations can’t match.”(2)

Another example is Interactive Radio for Justice, a radio programme in Ituri, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) that answers listeners’ questions about justice issues sent by SMS. Ethan Zuckerman points out that sending questions via SMS allows for anonymity, an important point when your question is: “Are soldiers allowed to stay at my house and eat my food without paying for it?”

Desktop software and web-based services allow stations to do more. International broadcasters such as the BBC make extensive use of these tools as do some commercial stations. However, there are few examples of local and community radio using them, even though they offer a low-cost and relatively simple way of stimulating participation and interaction.

There are various software and service packages available. Among them is FrontlineSMS(3), a programme that runs on a computer connected by a cable to an ordinary mobile phone. Unlike most other programs and services, FrontlineSMS does not require a connection to the internet – messages are composed, stored and processed on the computer and sent and received on the mobile. There are a variety of tools available with different capabilities and pricing.(4) Basic services useful for community media include:

• - Broadcast messages to dozens or even thousands of mobiles advising them of a special programme or an important community activity

• - Keyword response – when a listener sends the word “ocio” the station replies with a text message listing activities while “noticias” is answered with current headlines and “Colectivo a Lima” is answered with the departure times of the next six buses to the capital

Experiencies combining SMS services and broadcast radio can be found in moments of political crisis and natural disasters. For example, SMS and radio were used to help monitor the 2000 presidential elections in Ghana:

[V]oters who were prevented from voting used mobile phones to report their experience to call-in shows on local radio stations. The stations broadcast the reports, prompting police to respond to the accusations of voter intimidation. Had voters called the police directly, it’s possible that authorities might not have responded — by making reports public through the radio, voters eliminated the possibility of police announcing that there had been no reports of voter intimidation. Similar techniques have been used in Sierra Leone, Senegal, and even in the United States — American voters used mobile phone cameras and Websites to record reports of voting irregularities during the 2006 congressional elections.(5)

The ongoing political crisis in Zimbabwe provides another example of the complementarity of radio and SMS. Faced with one of the most repressive media environments in the world, Gerry Jackson founded SW Radio Africa located in the UK and broadcasting to Zimbabwe on shortwave. The signal is jammed in urban areas (thanks to Chinese technology, according to Jackson), but gets through to rural zones. The station also streams it programming on the internet and podcasts ara available to the very few connected to the internet from Zimbabwe, but increasingly important are the headlines sent to phones in Zimbabwe using SMS. According to Jackson:

Currently we’re most excited about our latest endeavour – sending SMS news headlines into Zimbabwe, via mobile phones. We generate news headlines on a daily basis anyway – so this is just another way of using what already exists.

It’s nice and cost effective… because there is only the one cost, actually sending the texts. In two months we’ve built up an address database of about 2,000 mobile phone numbers.

Like many, Zimbabweans truly love their mobile phones and of course what we’re banking on is the virus effect. We also get up to 100 requests a day to be added to the service so it’s growing rapidly.(6)

During natural disasters SMS and radio have been used to provide emergency communication, for example an earthquake Yogyakarta and Central Java in Indonesia  killed more than 5,000 people and displaced 1.6 million in May 2006. With support from Internews, a U.S.-based NGO, a radio station and SMS text messaging provided news about relief efforts.

The service was run through an emergency AM radio station, Radio Punokawan, established by the Indonesian Press and Broadcast Society, with support from Internews. In addition to radio broadcasts, important information was sent and received from the newsroom via text messaging. Outgoing messages warned of aftershocks and identified communities that had not yet received government assistance. More than 180 Indonesian journalists distributed and received information through the service.(7)

Some stations have incorporated SMS polling into their programming. During Kenya’s 2007 elections a local radio and television stations and newspapers used SMS to poll listeners on a number of questions. While the  results of the polls were posted on a website and discussed in the local media, the questions were designed to provoke debate about democracy rather than to measure public opinion. Examples included: “Have politicians done enough to fight corruption and mismanagment of public resources?”, “Do you think special seats should be created for women in parliament?”, “Does party politics foster national unity?” and “Do you feel your vote has the power to make a difference?”.

A new project in Grahamstown, South Africa proposes to use SMS to create a network of citizen journalists for a local newspaper. Eighty high school journalists trained as citizen journalists will send their news and views via SMS messages. A selection of the messages will be printed in the newspaper while others will be redistributed via SMS to community members. The project coordinator admits that it will be difficult to fit the news into the 160 characters that an SMS message can have, but they are already thinking of how to overcome the problem.

In the future, Berger hopes that the program will expand and possibly include other technologies like MMS (multimedia) messages. “We want to interface with the newspaper website, and we’re developing open source software to link the two,” he said. Berger said that there would also be research into the effectiveness of the project. “Then we’re also going to research next year the significance of this whole project,” he said. “Is it making a difference? What does it mean for democracy to have a lot of citizen journalism and to have young people contributing to the public opinion?”(8)

Projects combining SMS and radio have been enabled by the rapid takeup of mobile phones. Globally there is one mobile phone for every two people and in many countries of Latin America the majority of poor people now have access to a mobile telephone.(9) Internet connections and fixed line telephones are still out of reach for much of the world’s population, but mobile telephones have spread faster than any other communication technology in history.

“The only technology that compares to the mobile phone in terms of pervasiveness and accessibility in the developing world is the radio. Indeed, considered together, radios and mobile phones can serve as a broad-distribution, participatory media network with some of the same citizen-media dynamics of the Internet, but accessible to a much wider, and non-literate audience.”(10)

A study of mobile telephone use by people from low-income households in seven Latin American and Caribbean countries indicates high level of SMS by the region’s poor, apparently attracted to the technology because of its low-cost.(11)

Lessons learned?

We have not independently evaluated the experiences presented here, relying instead on accounts gathered from various media accounts and websites. As a result we are unable to clearly identify many of the enabling aspects or problems encountered. Certainly the rapid expansion of mobile telephony, the low cost of SMS messages and the aspirations of community radio stations to be accessible and participatory are important factors for enabling SMS messages for encouraging community participation and feedback.

The real question is not what has enabled the projects described here, but why are more community radio stations not making active use of SMS to communicate with their listeners? Certainly the very rapid take up of mobile telephony is one reason. In many countries the number of users has doubled over the past two years or so and it is understanable that radio stations will take some time to devise strategies for using the technology. Other reasons could include the limitations of 160 characters per message and users who do not know how to use SMS.(12)

While there has been some spontaneous use of SMS messages as a way of facilitiating communication with listeners and community members, more complex projects using SMS servers and applications have generally emerged as a response to political crises or natural disasters. There are few, if any, experiences of complex uses of SMS without external funding and technical support, even though the financial and technical resources required are minimal.

A joint research project of AMARC’s Latin America and Caribbean region and ALER, will establish “labs” to experiment with the use of various ICTs in community radio stations in Latin America. Including advanced SMS servers and services in the package of options offered by the labs should provide some information about the appropriateness and potential of this technology for the region’s community media.

Bruce Girard
July 2008
If you know about or are involved in an SMS/community media project, please tell us about it as a reply to this post or by email.  blog2[at]comunica[dot]org

Footnotes

1. http://www.portioresearch.com/Mob_Mess_Fut_brochure.pdf
2. http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0309/msg00107.html
3. http://frontlinesms.com
4. MobileActive has evaluated some of these tools and their use in campaigns http://mobileactive.org/wiki/Desktop_SMS_Campaign_Tools. Also see their comparison of various tools at http://mobileactive.org/wiki/SMS_Tool_Comparison_Matrix
5. Ethan Zukerman, Mobile Phones and Social Activism: Why cell phones may be the most important technical innovation of the decade” http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/index.php?s=vastly+exceeds+internet+usage
6. Texting news to bypass censors, http://www.mediahelpingmedia.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=142&Itemid=1
7. Wireless Technology for Social Change: Trends in Mobile Use by NGOs http://mobileactive.org/files/MobilizingSocialChange_full.pdf
8. Local news with SMS http://mobileactive.org/spreading-news-sms-0
9. A study of 7,000 low income households in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Jamaica, Mexico, Peru, and Trinidad and Tobago found that in every country except Mexico a majority of respondents had used a mobile phone in the past 3 months. In 4 of the 7 countries a majority of respondents owned their own mobile phones. http://www.dirsi.net/espanol/content/view/197/71/
10. Ethan Zuckerman http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/index.php?s=%22vastly+exceeds+internet+usage%22
11. A DIRSI study of 7,000 low income households in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Jamaica, Mexico, Peru, and Trinidad and Tobago found that in every country except Mexico a majority of respondents had used a mobile phone in the past 3 months. In 4 of the 7 countries a majority of respondents owned their own mobile phones. http://www.dirsi.net/espanol/content/view/197/71/
12. The DIRSI study cited lack of knowledge as the main reason given by people when asked why they did not use SMS. According to the study, this is “not surprising given that most respondents are relatively new users (two years or less). In fact, our results suggest that adoption of services beyond voice increases over time, as users advance along the technical learning curve.”

I haven’t tried the software (although I have requested it and we want to test it at a community radio station somewhere in Latin America) but Sanjana Hattotuwa gave it a pretty good grade in a blog post on mobileactive.org, although she questions whether it might be too complicated for some grassroots organisations and complained about compatibility problems with her Nokia 3110 (one that FrontlineSMS does NOT claim to support fully).

Fronline SMS is one of a number of packages for managing SMS from your computer. Mobileactive.org compares FronlineSMS with some other Desktop SMS Campaign Tools.

More information and download

The two packages have apparently been used together to establish low-cost virtual news agencies in Kazakhstan and Ukraine.

More info:
http://www.internews.org/newsletters/2006_05/spr06_inde.htm
http://www.ned.org/cima/CIMA-New_Media-Report.pdf

“Dialup Radio is a tool that distributes human rights and independent media via telephone. Brief radio-style audio files are uploaded and managed via the Dialup Radio website. These files are immediately available to callers who phone the project phone number. Our software automatically generates interactive voice response (IVR) menus that enable callers to naviage audio content using their telephone keypads. Dialup radio works with any telephone, and can be adopted for a variety of activist campaigns.”

http://www.dialupradio.org/

Frontline SMS is a text messaging system “conceived, designed and written firmly with the needs of the non-profit sector in mind”. Basically it is an SMS management and broadcast system that runs on a computer connected to a mobile phone with a data cable. All you need to do is insert a SIM card and you broadcast SMS messages to your listeners and classify and process messages received from them.

Being able to send SMS messages to your listeners informing them of programme updates, events, etc. is great (only to listeners who have requested your info of course. Don’t send SMS spam!), but better yet is being able to receive, classify and process messages.

Frontline SMS uses a custom database to automatically store and classify incoming and outgoing messages, so a message received in the afternoon with a question or comment for the next day’s morning programme will be flagged for the morning programme’s attention instead of getting lost among dozens of messages on a mobile handset.

The database also keeps track of phone numbers and owners and allows messages to be sent to customised groups.The system also includes a ‘Survey Manager’ module that allows the running of surveys, an unscientific but seful way of taking the pulse of your community on an issue. You can also use its ‘Reply Manager’ to provide text-based information services in which a keyword sent in by a listener sends back a message about bus schedules, cultural events, or programme highlights.

Frontline SMS got a high profile when it was used in February 2007 to help coordinate monitoring of Nigeria’s elections and it is being used this week to provide support for a campaign against General Musharaff’s imposition of martial law in Pakistan.

I haven’t heard of Frontline or any other SMS management system being used by rural stations yet, but I would be interested in hearing about any trials or even plans.