October 19th, 2008
Before I Submit MobiChange to Google’s Project 10^100
Welcome to Gauravonomics Blog! Subscribe to my combined feed in a feed reader or by e-mail and you'll never miss a single post. Thanks for visiting!
I’m all set to submit MobiChange to Google’s Project 10^100 (see my earlier post on Project 10^100), but before I hit the submit button, I want to ask for your help in improving the idea. So, here is my complete submission. I’ll be grateful if you take out ten minutes and tell me what you think about it.
- The name of the idea: MobiChange
- The category of the idea: Community
- The idea in one sentence: An open-source mobile social networking platform, accessible by voice and SMS, designed to support local communities and help mobilize social change.
- The idea in more depth: Communications technologies play an important role in development by enabling better economic decisions, building capability at both the individual and the institutional levels, and having multiplier effects across economic sectors. The mobile phone, by the virtue of being the only truly accessible and affordable communications technology available in many developing countries, is increasingly being seen as the key to bridge the digital divide and unlock the economic potential of developing Asia and Africa.
However, group forming social networks (that follow Reed’s Law) are exponentially more powerful than telecommunications networks (that follow Metcalfe’s Law). For instance, for a network with 100 users, a mobile telecommunications network can have a maximum of 4,950 connections while a mobile social network can have a maximum of 1,267,650,600,228,230,000,000,000,000,000 connections. Mobile social networks can, therefore, leverage the ubiquity of mobile phones to support local communities and help mobilize social change.
The idea behind MobiChange is simple. MobiChange will be an open-source mobile social networking platform, accessible by voice and SMS, designed to support local communities and help mobilize social change. The social network, built on the values of collaboration, community and user generated content, will exist in the cloud, like other social networks. It will be designed to be accessed exclusively by mobile phones via intuitive multi-lingual voice and text message based menus. It will be open source to support customization by NGOs to create local cause-based communities. These cause-based communities themselves will be connected with each other to enable knowledge sharing. The open source MobiChange API itself will link into other grassroots micro-change projects (like Kiva) to create new ways to connect communities and create change opportunities.
- The issue addressed by the idea: Even as the ubiquitous use of mobile phones bridges the digital divide between the developed and developed countries, another digital divide — digital divide 2.0 — is opening up between the haves and have-nots. Digital divide 2.0 is not about access to communications devices; it’s about the ability to leverage the power of group-forming social communications technologies to collaborate with others, self-organize into grassroots communities and create crowd-sourced content that is relevant for these communities. MobiChange will enable disadvantaged communities to leverage the power of group-forming social networks by bringing these technologies to the $50 mobile phone that can only be used to make voice calls and send text messages.
- Who will benefit from the idea and how: There are 3.66 billion mobile phone users in the world, compared to 1.46 billion internet users. Therefore, there are at least 2.20 billion mobile phone users across the world, mostly in developing Asia and Africa, who don’t have access to the internet. As mobile phone penetration is expected to grow faster than computer penetration in the coming years, mobile phones will continue to be primary computing devices in most of developing Asia and Africa. Not only that, most of the mobile phones in these countries will continue to be low end $50 devices that can only be used to make voice calls and send text messages. MobiChange will bring the power of group-forming social networks to these 2.2 billion mobile phone users and bridge the gap between the digital divide 2.0 haves and have-nots.
- The initial steps required to get the idea off the ground: In the recent past, SMS Gupshup has built a subscriber base of 7 million in India for their group SMS service, Twitter has demonstrated that a rich social network can be simplified enough to be used almost exclusively on mobile pones, Laconica has built an open source federated micro-blogging platform, and Drupal has built an open source SMS integration for its content management platform. MobiChange should build on these initiatives to develop its open-source mobile social networking platform. However, it is critical that the development of the platform is based on extensive ethnographic research conducted amongst mobile phone users and NGOs in developing Asia and Africa. This will ensure not only that the user interface is intuitive for the sometimes semi-literate users but also that the functionality addresses real non-trivial problems in their everyday lives.
- Measurement of the outcomes of the idea: I would consider MobiChange to be successful, if it is widely adopted by NGOs and mobile phone users in developing Asia and Africa and used to solve real non-trivial problems. I would measure MobiChange’s success in terms of three quantitative metrics — the robustness of the developer community for the open-source code, the adoption of the mobile social networking platform amongst NGOs, and the adoption of the applications built on the platform amongst mobile users in developing Asia and Africa. The most important measure, however, will be a qualitative one — if the application developers, NGOs and mobile phone users are using MobiChange to solve real non-trivial problems.
Finally, here is a presentation on MobiChange –
– based on which I made the 30 sec video for the submission –
Once again, do take out a moment to share your feedback with me, either in the comments section, or via e-mail.
Update: I submitted MobiChange to Google’s Project 10^100, after factoring in some of your feedback. Thank you for taking out the time to share your suggestions with me.
It looks great. You might want to minimize data emphasizing the number of users since the readers will be well-aware of that data already. Then focus on another angle: increased robustness of tools through lowest-common denominator design, then seeing if that leads us in any interesting, innovative directions. Maybe I'm wrong though.
[Reply]
I feel the word non-trivial is being used too many times in the last part of the write up. The PPT helps clarify things. Also, it would be good if you give an example in words and not just diagrams. So take an NGO by name and say how it will connect to everyone else. The idea is easy to follow, but making it simpler will not reduce its value.
[Reply]
The idea is really great. All the best.
I have a few questions. What are the actionable deliverables for this great idea?
Everybody wants to learn but doesn't want to be taught. So, how do you address the challenge of providing relevant content for the idea?
I want to be a part of an effort to spread financial literacy in India. I have been using free technology like Joomla, Moodle, Twitter, Blogger, Wordpress, Zoho. Would mobichange be another platform which I could use for my efforts?
All the best! Btw, the new theme is cool!
[Reply]
you might find this interesting http://silkcharm.blogspot.com/2008/05/ngos-mobi...
[Reply]
sorry for the spam too.. came across this just now in my reader
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/mobileacti...
[Reply]
Dear Gaurav,
You have done an excellent job, it has got tremendous potential and can really enhance
the economic condition of billions in Asia and Africa.
All the best wishes.
With Warm Regards,
Debashish Bramha.
Calcutta.
India.
[Reply]
@Ben/ Lavanya/ Ranjan/ Manuscrypts/ Debashish/ Jana/ Solomon/ Abhilash: Thanks for your comments.
@Ben: You hit the nail on the head. Lowest common denominator design is indeed the key to MobiChange.
@Lavanya: You are right. I should illustrate the idea with examples of use cases. Coming up soon.
@Ranjan: Thanks for pointing me to Moodle. I'm sure that learning/ teaching will be one of the use cases for MobiChange, but I don't think that it will be its primary use case. When I think of how MobiChange will be used, I imagine a twenty-something carpenter or plumber or shop assistant or courier boy in Mumbai who has spent two weeks worth of his salary to buy a $50 mobile phone. He can read the English alphabet but doesn't know how to write or speak a full sentence in English. He has seen a computer but doesn't know how to use it. I imagine him struggling with the supposedly intuitive multi-lingual SMS based menu of MobiChange because one of his friends has told him how useful it is. After a week or two, I see him learning how to use it and doing some of the things we take for granted on social networks — meeting new people with common interests, finding new ways to entertain himself, benefiting from new opportunities for learning and earning, even sharing his own knowledge and skills with others. I don't yet know how MobiChange will look or work, except that it has to be simple enough to be intuitive to the lowest common denominator, but I that's how I imagine it being used.
Jana Branch wrote to me by e-mail —
@Jana: Yes, you totally got it. I'm sure that designing the open-source code base for MobiChange will be only 10% of the work. The other 90% of the work will involve working with local communities offline to build functionalities that solve real problems in the context of their everyday lives.
Solomon-Hopewell Kembo wrote to me by e-mail –
@Solomon: Thanks for your offer; I'll take you up on it immediately. I'm more of a thinker than a coder myself, and I'm looking for geeks who can build on some of the projects I have mentioned in the post and develop the open-source code base.
Abhilash commented on Slideshare —
@Abhilash: I'm sure that MobiChange will not go viral and spread on its own. A project like this will require grassroots outreach in local communities with the help of organizations that already have an offline outreach infrastructure. For instance, if I was to pilot MobiChange in Mumbai, one of the first people I'll speak to will be Karmayog.
[Reply]
[...] reader or by e-mail and you’ll never miss a single post. Thanks for visiting!Originally posted as a comment by Gaurav Mishra on Gauravonomics Blog using [...]
[...] in a feed reader or by e-mail and you’ll never miss a single post. Thanks for visiting!Apart from Google’s Project 10^100, I’m also submitting MobiChange at the Knight News Challenge. Here is the full text of my [...]
Gaurav, have you tried RockeTalk, a mobile social networking and media platform with its strength in basic multimedia messaging and networking? We just recently launched in India. As the 'Evangelist' for RockeTalk, I get the opportunity to interact with and observe hundreds of users on a daily basis and have seen the network being used for creating better understanding, education, users helping each other out of goodwill and can see that platform being used by NGOs and the not-so-formalized groups that would love to see a change come out of peer to peer interactions- in a group or one-on-one - without any interference from the Press or the politicians. Sometimes, more can be achieved with just simple interactions in the form of Mushairas, Topic of the day than groups like Global Peace.
[Reply]