This week the new Open Mobile Consortium (very confusingly named since there are other groups which use very similar names like the Open Mobile Video Coalition – OMVC) has launched hoping to bring a set of free tools to make third world mobile networks more capable of helping with health and humanitarian aims.
It’s a sort of do-gooders club for mobile tools and the idea is to develop free to use, open source social collaboration tools for the “bottom billion,” the poorest billion users of mobile phones on the planet.
It’s hard to realize as we sit in Western civilization that the mobile phone might be an individual’s first experience of the internet, first means of communication and first source of electronic music and entertainment ‘ but for that 1 billion, it is. The OMC wants to make sure that it also becomes a support tool for communities and wants to remove one of the main stumbling blocks to this, the cost for an operator to add useful end user support applications.
So the 8 members are building a set of platforms for use, at no cost, with no restrictions. The founding members are the Millennium Villages Project, Cell Life, Dimagi, D-Tree, InSTEDD, MobileActive, TextToChange, UNICEF and Ushahidi.
With almost 280 million mobile subscribers in Africa alone, mobile phones are recognized as instruments of change in finance, agriculture, media and development work. The aim is to get mobile technology to provide data on food prices to farmers, patient information to remote medical clinics, and help track supplies and logistics. By 2010, 1 in 3 Africans will own a mobile phone so most villages will have some form of access to these applications.
We’ve seen similar efforts coming out of Nokia and Qualcomm but these have always been tinged with creating a need for their brands among operators or consumers ‘ and this effort, which we suspect will grab attention fast from equipment and software suppliers, due to its slightly purer motives.
“OMC’s approach is a radical departure from how the traditional humanitarian and development works,” said Robert Kirkpatrick, Chief Technology Officer of InSTEDD and chair of OMC. “Typically, organizations must compete for funding grants, which frequently leads to ‘silo’ mentality and hesitation to fully share key technologies. By contrast, we are agreeing to work together to share source code, standards, protocols, approaches and lessons learned. We’re even sharing development plans and testing each others’ software. As a result, we’re building a vibrant community and making very rapid progress.”
Katrin Verclas, founder of MobileActive.org and a founding member of the Open Mobile Consortium, says, “The mobile technology explosion has put more than four billion phones in use around the world. In the hands of organizations working for social good, and with easily available and accessible software, mobile phones can significantly improve the health and well-being of people in developing countries around the world. But there are technology and collaboration barriers. The Open Mobile Consortium aims to eliminate these barriers by developing interoperable, free and open source mobile platforms, and we encourage others to join us.”
“Mobile technology can make a huge difference in key areas like access to health care and education, and UNICEF helped form the Open Mobile Consortium to challenge the open-source community to play a role in this process,” says Erica Kochi, co-lead of UNICEF’s Innovation team. “OMC is a forum to pool expertise and develop partnerships to empower those most in need and to use mobile technology to improve their lives.”
OMC has already brought together a number of mobile technology tools for collaboration and sharing. These include, among others: CommCare, an application which allows community health workers to improve coordination of community health programs; Mobilisr, an open source mobile messaging platform for NGOs around the world; Mesh4X, a platform for information sharing between; RapidSMS, an open source platform allowing for any mobile phone to use SMS to collect data; GeoChat, a flexible open source group communication tool during emergencies; Ushahidi, a web-based platform for collecting and visualizing information.