The whole is more than the sum of its parts. – Aristotle.

Recently, while working in Haiti for our Notre Dame Haiti Program, I had an incredible opportunity to meet some amazing folks doing great things in aid and development to assist the Haitian people. This group also shared a common interest in the FrontlineSMS application in their respective work. It’s quite an interesting story on how this came together and the resulting benefits.

FrontlineSMS users gather in Port-au-Prince

This all started when I found I’d be traveling to Haiti and two additional Tech Change TC105 students were already working in the country, so we discussed an informal lunch meeting to discuss mobile tech and more specifically, FrontlineSMS. Our TC105 moderator for Team Deserts, Flo Scialom (of FrontlineSMS in the UK), offered her expertise in community building to help pull us, and others together. Each day, as we criss-crossed Port-au-Prince and Leogane with meetings at various ISP’s and Mobile Network Operators, I’d get an email from Flo, “Tom, do you have room for one more?”, “Do you have space for another?”…etc…So what started with three or four for lunch, turned into 17 individuals, representing five continents and eight countries – and a full blown FrontlineSMS user group luncheon at the Babako Restaurant in Port-au-Prince. We had organizations at the table representing public health, microfinance, sexual violence, IDP camp resettlements, human rights abuses, education, and others. It really was inspiring to look around that table and realize how many Haitians were benefiting from the work of these individuals and their organizations. A true force multiplier! Of those at lunch, there were only a couple of groups that had FrontlineSMS instances up and running, but the others were interested in using it in their respective work, including us with the Notre Dame Haiti Program.

Discussing mobile technology for development

After some not-so-brief introductions (remember we had 17), we discussed issues around getting started with the software. This included everything from modem hardware compatibility, to running FrontlineSMS on MacOS and problems sending and/or receiving SMS messages. We also covered local resources within Digicel in Port-au-Prince that can prove helpful in choosing the right modem, and any possible setup issues.

Next, the talk revolved around other mobile and open-source tools in the development space, such as RapidSMS, Ushahidi, OpenMRS and more. So this group was not so much about a single software application, but more about affecting change with any technology – a community of practice around ICT4D/M4D.

ND Haiti staff discuss FrontlineSMS

Finally, as we finished lunch – btw the food at Babako was as delicious as the conversation, we talked about the importance of working together, sharing our successes & failures, and staying in touch. The big win was looking around the table, as diverse as our needs and applications are; we all shared a common purpose, enthusiasm and a collective knowledge, to affect positive change with mobile technology.

Call it community of practice, collective passion, or human synergy. This was a testimony to The Awesome Power of Connecting People! We are stronger together!

Haiti FrontlineSMS user group

peace,

Tom

\o/

So, I’m finally getting around to writing up some of my thoughts more than two weeks after returning from Haiti. First of all a little history is in order about my involvement with the program. In late Summer of 2010, I began working with the Notre Dame Haiti Program on an advisory basis for some of their technology needs. As I was already busy with video services and IT project management at Notre Dame, most of this engagement was done on my own time – including nights and weekends. From my early observations, the program was doing incredible work, but was lacking in many areas of technology, which I thought, with my interest in technology for social good, could really prove beneficial to their goals. I began meeting regularly with several of their leaders, as well as the contacts in Haiti, and over the course of a few months was able to gain a better understanding of their goals and how the program operates. In doing so, I was able to dive more deeply into the question of how and where Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) could help.

ND Haiti Program

One of the first topics I started investigating was the use of mobile money for the program in making payments to the workers in the salt fortification plant. This was just as mobile money services were being launched in Haiti, so much of this was very new and exciting – this is something I wrote about in a previous post and again here. Of course there were some small scale IT equipment donations, Wifi routers, printers, projectors, etc…but I was really looking for big impact. What could we do as an IT organization to amplify their affect of their mission.

Eventually, after all of the discussions about where their needs existed, we started developing some direction on how exactly we could help the program from a technology perspective. This led to the recent visit to Haiti by two of us from my department to conduct further research and development on these ideas.

The main objectives of the visit included the following:
1) Overall IT assessment of the four facilities used by the program.
2) Use of FrontlineSMS for mobile data collection.
3) Mobile money and payroll for the salt factory employees using Digicel Tcho Tcho Mobile.
4) Meetings with ISP’s, Mobile Network Providers and other technology stakeholders.

Even though we are still processing much of this visit, we are working towards the final report for our leadership and that of the ND Haiti Program. We hope this is the start of forward progress with technology and some great things for the ND Haiti Program.

More posts to come on this topic.

peace