We continue our conversation with Ken Banks of FrontlineSMS. In the first part of the interview, Ken gave us some of his background and how he came to get involved with mobile technology and how the FrontlineSMS project began. In this second part we delve more into FrontlineSMS…

Ken Banks, founder of kiwanja.net, devotes himself to the application of mobile technology for positive social and environmental change in the developing world, and has spent the last 17 years working on projects in Africa. Recently, his research resulted in the development of FrontlineSMS, an award-winning text messaging-based field communication system designed to empower grassroots non-profit organisations. (Read the full bio)

Afrinnovator.com: SMS is thought of by some as a very limiting technology in terms of what you can do with it. Do you agree with this? What it the potential of SMS?

Ken Banks (FrontlineSMS, Kiwanja.net): SMS is without doubt very limiting, but it also has a number of unique strengths. Okay, it’s expensive for what it is, and the limit of 160 characters can make messaging challenging, but at the same time all phones – even the cheapest ones – support SMS out of the box, people understand SMS, they know how to send and receive them (on the whole), and they understand the charging model.

SMS is also ‘push’, so you can get a message to someone who might not know they need it (a security alert, for example). Many other alternatives, in addition to requiring smarter phones, are based on the user ‘pulling’ the information, which is not always ideal. The funny thing with SMS is that it’s been written off for years. Since 2006 I’ve been answering questions at conferences about what we’ll do once SMS is made redundant, yet we see steady increases in use year-on-year.

I believe SMS will always be a part of the mobile messaging mix, even if the whole world owned iPhones and had unlimited data plans. It’s also worth remembering that many new and innovative services, such as M-Pesa, actually work off the back of SMS. I think there’s a lot more we can do if we think about it. Innovation is often more interesting when resources are limited, and this case it’s the 160 character limit that’s driving it.

Afrinnovator.com: What are some of the major hurdles you had to go over in developing FrontlineSMS and how did you overcome them?

Ken Banks (FrontlineSMS, Kiwanja.net): We’re very open about the challenges we face with FrontlineSMS, and I blog about them regularly. I think, for a start, there’s a lot of misconceptions about writing tools like ours. One online review refers to the phones which we only partially-support, for example, saying that the availability of the source code will allow other people to correct the code and make them work. Well, in fact, it’s the phones themselves which block access to various functions, so it’s the phone operating system which needs changing. This is probably the biggest challenge for end users – finding phones that can be plugged into their computers and ‘driven’ by FrontlineSMS.

The mobile ecosystem is badly fragmented, with a whole raft of operating systems and protocols in use. We have Windows Mobile, Android, Blackberry’s, iPhones and Symbian, and then different versions of more ‘standard’ Nokia/Motorola/Ericsson phones. GSM modems are generally standard, but again there are variations so nothing can be guaranteed. Other than us becoming a hardware supplier and selling devices around the world, it’s largely down to the user to get hold of something that works – and guidance from our website and the online Community which is there to help them.

Other challenges include getting the message out about the software – something we’re now becoming better at – and keeping track of how it’s being used. I blogged about this recently in a post about ‘missing metrics’. Our model, which allows users to download, install and deploy FrontlineSMS without having to talk to us, is often very empowering to the NGO, but it does leave us play catch-up when we try to understand its impact. We’re currently talking to two or three people who are interested in helping us solve this, and to help develop metrics for other mobile projects. This is a problem most projects have, and we need to address it as a community of users, projects and developers.