Counting Mobile Phones, SIM Cards and Customers data sheet 2128 Views
Author:
Sutherland, Ewan
Publication Date:
Apr 2008
Publication Type:
Report/White paper
Abstract:
The GMSA reports that the mobile subscriptions worldwide is at 3 billion (2008) with 270 million subscriptions in Africa at the end of 2007. This policy paper considers the challenges faced by public policy makers in understanding the true number of individuals with mobile access. There are many reasons why customers might have more than one phone, phone number or SIM card, which results in the double-counting of customers. As a result, it is difficult to assume that the number telephone numbers or SIM cards translates into individual customers. The author discusses the issue of ambiguity in the estimates of mobile teledensity as an indicator for the MDGs and the subsequent challenge for public policy makers in interpreting the large numbers and how they reflect the reality of their countries, cities, towns and villages. Case studies in Bulgaria and South Africa are presented.
The use of mobile phones for quick-time data collection is proliferating around the world. To get a better understanding of the scale and scope of these new data collection efforts, we partnered with UN Global Pulse initiative to conduct a survey of present and planned mobile data collection efforts. The survey results will help identify new, quick-time data sources.
The first findings of the global survey have been compiled in an inventory. The inventory is a living document that will be regularly updated as we become aware of new projects. If you are managing a mobile data collection project and you would like to have it featured in the inventory, please contact us or leave a comment.
We are also currently conducting for UN Global Pulse a mobile phone survey across multiple countries including Uganda, India, Mexico, Ukraine and Iraq. The survey is being conducted via text message and uses simple questions to understand how populations in different parts of the world perceive. We are drawing on our extensive network of partners on the ground to conduct the survey and will make the results publicly available (albeit in an anonymous and aggregate format). The survey is an exercise in rapid, bottom-up data collection. Questions in the survey focus on economic perceptions, including:
Bubble Motion is a global provider of mobile messaging and social media applications: BubbleTalk™ service, a personal voice messaging service, Bubbly™, a voice-based social networking service, and BubbleCast™, an audio content broadcasting service.
A recently launched campaign at a popular youth radio program in Nepal focuses on the voices of youth - or at least, text messages of youth. Regardless, the SMS campaign seems to be making strides.
UNICEF in Nepal has teamed up with the popular Nepali radio program Saathi Sanga Man Ka Kura, which means "chatting with my best friend." The program, also called SSMK, is run by the non-governmental organization Equal Access Nepal. SSMK has been on the air for 10 years and reaches millions of youth listeners (primarily ages 13 to 26) throughout Nepal. In April, UNICEF and SSMK launched a campaign that allows young listeners to take an active role in a conversation, all via SMS.
Rupa Joshi, a communications specialist with UNICEF, explains the origins of the campaign.
Back in January, we covered two organizations that use mobiles for raising awareness of immigration issues. At the Mobilize Your Cause Bootcamp, held June 2 in New York City, Nicola Wells and Rachel LaBruyere gave a presentation about how Reform Immigration FOR America and the Fair Immigration Reform Movement coalition built a sizable and effective SMS campaign. Watch a video of their presentation below to see an example of how to pull off a successful, large-scale mobile campaign.
In part one of the videos, Wells explains how the organization initially became interested in mobile campaigning and organizing, and describes the three goals they had for a mobile community and list:
Recently, we’ve been seeing a lot of hype about citizen reporting with mobile phones during elections. It is often conflated with the term “election monitoring,” but this does a disservice to both citizen reporting and election monitoring, a discipline and field that has been around for some 20 years. These two approaches have markedly different goals, target audiences, and processes. We think it is time for readers to definitively understand what election monitoring is in contrast to citizen reporting, and what the role of mobile phone and mapping platforms are in regard to these two very different forms of engagement during elections. We aim to clearly differentiate between them once and for all.
We also urge the adoption of differing terms - citizen reporting during an election versus systematic election monitoring. Mobile phones, SMS, and mapping platforms play a role in both citizen reporting and election monitoring, of course.
June is exploding with events focused on mobiles for social change. Look at some of the places where the movers and shakers in the 'mobile world for good' will be gathering:
2 June, New York City, New York, USA: Personal Democracy Forum will host Mobilize Your Cause: A Bootcamp. The half-day event will provide insight into developing an effective mobile campaign, how to build an activist community, and new technologies that are making it easier to use mobiles for social causes. The event is followed by Personal Democracy Forum's two-day conference, (3-4 June) which will focus on exploring technology's impact on technology and government. MobileActive.org will host the mobile portion of the bootcamp.
This article was written by Bright Simons, Director at IMANI-Ghana and President of the mPedigree Network. It is re-posted here with permission.
Let’s face it: Africa is on the downward slope to perdition as far as technology is concerned.
Many people who are not directly confronted with this reality on the continent are usually lured into a false sense that things are looking up because of the fountain of good news that is the telecom sector.
The truth though is that the seeming proliferation of ICT success stories across the continent masks the real picture, which is one of a splattering of embers in a desolate patch of darkness.
For a casual browse through the latest International Telecommunications Union (ITU) ICT Development Index for instance should force you to conclude that ICT offers Africa no relief from its chronic state of technological pathology.
A large amount of news and information is produced around various events and topics. Mapping and visualization can be useful ways to track this content. There is a need for tools that allow users to search and track news and information, and republish some of that news and information. Both the back-end and front-end systems allow for mapping and visualization of that information.
Managing News originated as a news aggregation and republishing platform heavily integrated with RSS/Atom. Users can track a diverse set of RSS/Atom feeds, visualize them, and republish selected reports on a platform that allows for mapping and pluggable visualizations. Managing News has subsequently added SMS functionality to the system. The system is based on Drupal, and integrates several open source projects including OpenLayers, SimplePie, and many Drupal plug-ins.
Tool Category:
App resides and runs on a server
Key Features :
Aggregate RSS/Atom news
Republish news as RSS/Atom in customizable channels, or directly to Facebook, Twitter, or email.
Show news as list, map, timeline graphs, or visualized in other ways.
Search news.
Integrate SMS input with SlingshotSMS.
Configurable location tagging and mapping.
Main Services:
Location-Specific Services and GIS
Information Resources/Information Databases
Tool Maturity:
Currently deployed
Platforms:
Linux/UNIX
Mac/Apple/iPhone
Windows
Current Version:
1
Program/Code Language:
PHP
Organizations Using the Tool:
United States federal government, National Democratic Institute, Drupal. See the examples page.
Mapping incidences via SMS has been in the news lately. From the swine flu to requests for assistance to election data, visualization of data submitted and collected with mobile phones and via other channels is a hot topic. We asked our special contributor, Melissa Loudon to compare two platforms: Ushahidi and Managing News. While different, both offer powerful capabilities for mapping reports, news of incidences, and SMS-submitted data.
In this "How-To," we describe the installation process, SMS integration, and the mapping functionality of both platforms. If you have deployed either one of the platforms or have others to add for future reviews, please leave a comment! The full "How-To" article can be found here.
Mapping SMS Incident Reports: A Review of Ushahidi and Managing News data sheet 21378 Views
Author:
Melissa Loudon
Abstract:
In this how-to, we test out two systems for SMS incident mapping: Ushahidi and Managing News. Incident mapping is a simple but powerful concept that does what it says - using SMS to report a given incidence and mapping the data geographically. This article compares the two platforms, their pros and cons, and outlines when to use either.
In this how-to, we test out two systems for SMS incident mapping. Incident mapping is a simple but powerful concept that does what it says - using SMS to report a given incidence and mapping the data geographically.
It has been used in various scenarios ranging from reports from natural disasters to tracking violent crime, citizen reporting in elections.
Ushahidi, a platform for map and time-based visualizations of text reports, has been used most prominently in crisis mapping. The first instance of Ushahidi tracked the post-election violence in Kenya in 2007, closely followed by an instance covering outbreaks of xenophobic violence in South Africa in early 2008. Following the Haiti earthquake in early 2010, an Ushahidi deployment at Tufts University provided a platform for aggregating, translating and disseminating incident reports and requests for assistance. Ushahidi is an open-source PHP/Javascript platform.
Praekelt Foundation: Young Africa Live, SocialTXT, and TXTalert data sheet 8724 Views
The Praekelt Foundation was founded in 2007 as the nonprofit/NGO offshoot of Praekelt Consulting. The NGO now runs three programs that work to better the lives of people living in poverty in South Africa. Each of those programs (Young Africa Live, SocialTXT, and TXTalert) use mobiles to achieve that goal.
Two mobile tools that we have been watching with interest have new versions out and available for public beta and testing.
Freedom Fone
Freedom Fone, developed by Kubatana in Zimbabwe, is an interactive voice response system that allows callers to access audio information on their mobile phones. It is aimed at organizations who want to set interactive up audio news services for their audiences. Freedom Fone is now out in version 1.5 and available for public testing and use.
While there are many such interactive voice systems (Asterisk is the most well-known open source VOIP platform, with many commercial, open source versions such as Trixbox using Asterisk), Freedom Fone is focused on an NGO audience with easy install and setup that minimizes the need for technical expertise.
MobileActive hosted the inaugural FAILfaire last night, bringing together mobile technologists and NGOs to talk about failed projects in M4D and ICT4D. Presenters talked about their failed projects, answering the questions: "What was the project? What was the failure? Why did it fail? And what would you do differently next time?”
The event was filled to capacity with more than 70 people. The five presenters made us think (and laugh), and the audience asked some great questions. For those of you who couldn’t be there, here’s a quick look at the failed projects presented at the first (of what we hope will be many) FAILfaire.
Bradford Frost: MobileImpact.org? Not exactly...
Starting off the evening was Bradford Frost, who told the story of his failed non-profit venture, MobileImpact.org. The goal of his project was to bridge the gap between people trying to recycle used phones and developing countries. He felt he had a strong idea and a strong brand with the tagline “One phone. Change the World,” and that there was enough of an untapped phone recycling market (the current cell phone recycling market only captures about 25% of reusable devices) for the project to succeed.
However, the project didn’t work out as Frost had hoped. He used Facebook ads in order to target a younger, social media-savvy audience. He spent 1,000 dollars to launch an ad campaign and $5000 in a partnership with a phone recycling company. In the end, the non-profit gathered 131 phones valued at a sum total of …$252. And many of those phones were donated through word-of-mouth connections (friends and family) rather than people who saw the Facebook ads.
As we here at MobileActive.org have been covering ICT and mobiles for development now for more than five years, we have seen our fair share of failures. For every great project that changes how a community benefits from technology to improve the lives of its people, there seem to be twice as many projects that fail, and end up wasting time, money, and maybe worst, goodwill.
Too often in our field, we talk up our successes, overhype and overestimate the value of our projects, and sweep the failures under the rug. But, if we don’t talk about what didn’t work (and, perhaps more importantly, why it didn’t work), others will keep repeating the same mistakes.
That is why we invented FailFaire, a gathering that is happening tonight in New York City and that we hope will take place in other cities around the world. FailFaire is a place where it's ok to talk about what didn't work to learn from for the next project using mobiles for social change and development.
Many lament that mobile phones can isolate us from our immediate surroundings as we walk down the street texting friends and not paying attention. These three different projects are encouraging people to actively engage with what's around them - with and on their mobile phones. TXTual Healing, Amphibious Architecture and Pathways to Housing take regular text messages and turn them into an interactive experience.
Txtual Healing
In 2006, Paul Notzold showed the first presentation of TXTual Healing as his MFA thesis project for Parsons School of Design. The project consisted of speech bubbles projected onto the side of a building; viewers texted in messages to fill the speech bubbles. Since then, the project has been shown around the world, including France, Italy, Romania, the USA, the Netherlands and China.
Spring has us ready to get out and share new ideas, so it’s time for our monthly event roundup. Below are some of the mobile events happening around the world that we think might be of interest to the MobileActive.org community. If you know of any great M4D events happening near you, let us know over email (info at mobileactive dot org) or in the comments or on our Facebook page.
FAILfaire, April 14 New York, NY: Of course, we have to start off with promoting our own FAILfaire, which is taking place on April 14th, 5:00-7:00 p.m., in New York City. At FAILfaire, we want to learn from each others’ failures in ICT and mobiles for development – speaking openly about what didn’t work is the best way to improve for the future. Gather round with some wine and a sense of humor, and get ready to talk about FAIL! Sign up here.
Calling all failures! On April 14 we're hosting the first FAILfaire featuring a close look at ICT and mobile development projects that have crashed, burned, and simply FAILED.
While we often focus on highlighting successes and gains in this field, it's no secret that many projects just don't work - some aren't scalable, some aren't sustainable, some can't get around bureaucratic hoops, and many fail due to completely unanticipated barriers. FAILfaire is a platform to openly and honestly discuss failures so that we can learn from what hasn't worked in the past in order to make our future projects stronger and better.
This is where YOU come in. Have you been a part of a project that flopped? Maybe the project used the wrong technology for its region. Maybe it didn't engage the intended community. Did not take culture, people, or both into consieration. Or maybe the rollout was too rushed. Whatever the reason, we want to hear from you.
As we are getting ready for our event in Washington DC tomorrow that will focus on New Tools for Better Elections, we are excited to see that more open source options for mobile data collection and analysys are becoming available than ever sbefore. Development Seed, one of the most promising Drupal development shops around right now, has been an innovator in developing platforms for data analysis, in particular.
This article describes the latest release of its open-source platform Managing News, and its integration with a low-cost SMS gateway for mobile data collection. It was written by Development Seed's Robert Soden and is republished here with permission.
This release is particularly exciting for us because it ties together two of our core projects in such a way that each is made better. SlingshotSMS is a lightweight SMS gateway that can be run off of a USB drive, needing only a GSM modem and an internet connection to act as a bridge between mobile phones and the web. Managing News is a powerful data aggregator and visualization tool that lets distributed teams work together to make large amounts of information useful. Together, they provide an extensible framework for teams conducting mobile data collection projects in the field.
Extensibility is key here because we need this to meet a wide variety of use cases in order for it to be useful. We have been particularly focused on use cases related to election monitoring, but this is just one of many possible applications. Here's a graphic that Saman made illustrating how the system works:
This technology is meant to accompany your existing processes of data collection. You have people in the field, they have cellphones, you have a phone back in headquarters, and they can text in messages to you that are then relayed to a visualization space, which helps keep you and your team on the same page.
Since SlingshotSMS runs on a USB drive, you just plug it in, plug in your phone, and set up what website you want to have the SMS messages sent to. The SMS messages are turned into RSS 2.0 and PUSHed, like as a fat ping. You computer just needs internet to send these messages.
Going back to this election monitoring example, here you see the election monitor is texting in that the polling station is closed. You'll notice that the text message contains a few things: a polling station ID, the word "closed", and the word "security." These are key terms we are going to want to look for on the Managing News side to flag.
SlingshotSMS just pushes the data up to Managing News. The Managing News site will have a custom parser that will break up this text message, pulling out key words and numbers.
Customizing SMS parsing for each project
Out of the box, the Managing News/SlingshotSMS bridge simply accepts the SMS and incorporates it into the default Managing News workflow, ignoring important information in this example like the fact the polling station is closed and there is a security issue. This is where the pluggable nature of Managing News proves its worth. It is simple to write a custom parser that replaces the default parser that ships with Managing News. With some creative use of the Drupal taxonomy system to filter incoming results into Managing News channels and some very basic regex, you can quickly have a system that is able to capture this data and let Managing News users react to it. We'll publish a blog post soon explaining exactly how to do this.
Authentication
Authentication of incoming SMS messages is vital in these situations, and we took extra care to make sure the Managing News Slingshot feature will only receive data from authorized sources. The framework is dependent on the Drupal KeyAuth module which allows signed messages to pass between a SlingshotSMS installation and Managing News. When setting up the Managing News Slingshot feature, users are given public and private keys that they then copy into the SlingshotSMS configuration file. In the future we are considering switching to an OAuth based solution.
Editors Note: We will test-run Managing News and Slingshot in an upcoming software review but meanwhile congratulate Development Seed on the ongoing efforts in building better open source tools for mobile data collection and analysis.
The National Democratic Institute and MobileActive.org are hosting "New Tools for Better Elections", a conference on February 26th on new technologies for fair, representative and equitable elections. In preparation for the event, we sat down with Ian Schuler, Senior Manager of Information and Communications Technology Programs at the National Democratic Institute. Schuler specializes in the application of mobile technology for the advancement of democracy and human rights, He is the author of SMS as a Tool in Election Observation.
In this conversation, Schuler breaks down not only the differences between election observation, citizen reporting, and crowd-sourcing, but also explains why these distinctions matter and how mobile technology is changing the way elections are held. Read on for excerpts from our conversation, or scroll down to watch the interview in its entirety.
Q: You and NDI have done a lot of election monitoring around the world. Explain why election monitoring matters.
A: Elections are the main process by which people participate in their government by selecting their leaders. People expect that it’s going to be a fair process, and that it’s going to be an accurate process. So it’s important for people to have confidence to know that somebody is really systematically watching the entire process to make sure that it is good. Election monitoring prevents fraud by making it harder for the people who want to manipulate elections to do so; it detects fraud when it happens, and it lets people know if the process was good – and if it was not, what were the problems and what might be constructive, non-violent ways of remedying those problems, whether it’s simply improving the process for later or rerunning elections or whatever is warranted in that situation.
In December 2009, US Congressman Luis Gutierrez (D – Illinois) introduced the Comprehensive Immigration Reform for America’s Security and Prosperity (CIR ASAP) Act of 2009 in the American House of Representatives. The bill is a major step in overhauling the American immigration system, providing greater protection for immigrants while ensuring that employers use fair and legal hiring practices.
As the legislative debate about this hot-button issue heats up, interest groups are increasing their advocacy to protect the rights of both documented and undocumented immigrants. With reform on so many people’s minds, two organizations have been using mobile technology to spread the word.
Since SlingshotSMS runs on a USB drive, you just plug it in, plug in your phone, and set up what website you want to have the SMS messages sent to. The SMS messages are turned into RSS 2.0 and PUSHed, like as a 
