Open Mobile launches humanitarian initiatives

The Open Mobile Consortium has launched a global development community to help organizations collaborate and share mobile phone technologies.

The OMC's development community compromises several organizations that develop open-source software tools that help organizations better serve the health, humanitarian and development needs of the "bottom billion" of the world's population.

"OMC's approach is a radical departure from how the traditional humanitarian and development works," said Robert Kirkpatrick, chief technology officer at InSTEDD, a humanitarian open-source project, and chair of OMC. "Typically, organizations must compete for funding grants, which frequently leads to 'silo' mentality and hesitation to fully share key technologies."

The consortium is building a set of open-source platforms that can be customized and used in various humanitarian settings. The founding members of the consortium are: Millennium Villages Project, Cell Life, Dimagi, D-Tree, InSTEDD, MobileActive, TextToChange, UNICEF and Ushahidi.

With almost 280 million subscribers in Africa, mobile phones are recognized as instruments of change in finance, agriculture, media and development work. The OMC is hoping to leverage this popularity. It is estimated that by 2010, one in three Africans will own a mobile phone.

By joining the consortium, members agree to share source code, standards, protocols, approaches and lessons learned in using the platforms. The members are also sharing development plans and testing each others' software; hoping to build a vibrant community and making progress in development work.

"The mobile technology explosion has put more than 4 billion phones in use around the world; in the hands of organizations working for social good, mobile phones can significantly improve the health and well being of people in developing countries," said Katrin Verclas, founder of MobileActive.org.

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, said 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.

The OMC team has already brought together a number of open-source mobile technology tools for collaboration and sharing such as; CommCare, a mobile-phone application that allows community health workers to provide better health care and improve coordination of community health programs; Mobilisr, an open-source enterprise class mobile messaging platform for nongovernmental organizations around the world.

Mesh4X is a platform for seamless cross-organizational information sharing between mobile devices, databases, desktop applications, and Web sites. RapidSMS is an open-source platform allowing for any mobile phone to use SMS to collect data the platform is currently used in Malawi, Ethiopia and Nigeria to collect information and provide rapid feedback to field workers.

GeoChat is a flexible open-source group communications tool that enables mobile field communications and situational awareness during emergencies. Ushahidi is a Web-based platform that any organization can use to set up to collect and visualize information, especially during emergencies.

This week, Ushahidi won the inaugural Kenya Open Source Awards, an event meant to honor open-source innovations and use in Kenya. Ushahidi was used to track and share information during post election violence last year.

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