In the past couple of days, I have had the great pleasure of having post-N2Y4 conversations with John Zoltner (a project representative from DatAgro) and Emily Jacobi (a project representative from Digital Democracy's Handheld Human Rights). Since Zoltner and Jacobi both represent projects that utilize SMS messaging in developing world populations, I asked them both what it was like to be focused on projects like these while so many people in the US and other post-industrial companies are all so smart phone crazy at the moment (a question inspired by my conversation with François Bar of Mobile Voices a few weeks back).

Both of their responses represent various dimensions of the work they do (contrasted against an increasingly smart-phone-obsessed developer culture), and both offer a great deal of insight into the SMS-developer-for-good scene. The second part of Zoltner's response, particularly where he highlights "that there is a lot of talent in the developing world for programming and creating technology and using technology in innovative ways," particularly reminded me of our conversation with Jonathan Gosier from Appfrica from a couple of weeks back, where he made a strikingly similar observation based on his work in Africa.

The question posed was this one:

In so many conversations I have had with US-based developers who were talking about "mobile development," so much of that talk is focused around smart phones. What is it like focusing on SMS in such a smart phone focused environment, and is there anything that we should pay attention to based on what you're learning in the field?

John Zoltner

There is a lot of interest in smart phones in the developed economies and we're not really there yet. Smart phones in the US are obviously big and growing but for the projects we're working on, we've got to focus on SMS.

[SMS is comparatively] problematic because you can only send 160 characters and it's expensive - which is the biggest problem of all - so nothing scales. Any time you're working government on designing a mobile tech project, a lot of time they want to be able to include these massive databases that include people's cell phones. They want to be able to communicate with these people and they're all excited, but then they cost it out and even if the messages are 10 cents a piece, [the project becomes] impossible to pay for. You have to be really smart and economical about the way you design projects so that you're taking advantage of SMS but you're not creating massive bills at the same time.

There's a pretty big gulf between strategizing how to build really cool applications using smart phones and figuring out how to build really lite applications using SMS messages.

Another thing to highlight is that there is a lot of talent in the developing world for programming and creating technology and using technology in innovative ways. I think the constraints on money even add to that. A lot of times I see that when there is not a lot of money involved and it is not so easy to just go out and make money professionally off of your skills, then people tend to dedicate their skills to innovation, as they have more time to sit around and think of and play around with cool stuff and ideas. It's like this: If you can't get a job working for a bank or working for an insurance company programming this stuff, and you're a relatively nice person, you tend to use it for better means, doing cool, socially relevant applications instead of banking queries.

Emily Jacobi

Here in the States I have a smart phone and I think that [the question presents] a false dichotomy in some ways because smart phones are great for all of the different things they offer, but we still use them to make phone calls and we still use them to [exchange SMS messages], so the value of SMS can be clear to most people familiar with mobile technologies.

Because we're working with really venerable populations in remote areas that often have very little access to technology where a mobile phone is not considered a personal possetion, we often [see mobile phones] considered a community resource. A phone might be shared by two or three families in a refugee camp or a few different people working in an office or a small portion of a village. For us the focus always has to be reaching people where they are and using the technology that is accessible to them. I actually think there are a lot of people in the field who are focused on this. You can go to the Mobile Active website and see so many case studies of SMS use. We have not created our own platform for human rights, but we're creating a mashup and a mesh of a couple of different ones. One is InSTEDD's GeoChat platform and that's how we're doing network SMS communication through groups. The second platform is [N2Y3 first prize winner] Ushahidi. Both were designed with this question in mind: "How do you reach people when they only have a basic mobile phone?"

As of yet I have found that people are excited by these ideas of using the most basic cell phones to reach people where they are.

A big thanks to John and Emily for sharing their insights!