Charting ‘The Rise of the Reluctant Innovator’

“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who come alive” – Howard Thurman (1899 – 1981)

When David Rowan, editor of Wired Magazine, invited me to write a short article for “Ideas Bank” in the spring of last year, it gave me a great opportunity to share something I’d been witnessing on an increasing scale since my days at Stanford University in 2007. The article had to be short – 600 words – and because of that I invited only a couple of friends to contribute their stories. But the seed of an idea was born, as was the concept of “reluctant innovation.”

It was that seed which, one year on, would turn into a book set for launch in a couple of months’ time. You can read the original Wired piece that inspired it.

The new book features the likes of Medic Mobile, WE CARE Solar, Ushahidi, PlanetRead and DataDyne, and comes with a foreword from Archbishop Desmond Tutu. “The Rise of the Reluctant Innovator” highlights the personal stories of 10 social innovators from around the world. Ten social innovators – ordinary people – who randomly stumbled across problems, injustices and wrongs and, armed with little more than determination and belief, decided not to turn their backs but to dedicate their lives to solving them.

Take Brij Kothari, for instance. Watching yet another Spanish movie in his friend’s apartment to avoid writing up his doctoral dissertation, Brij makes a throwaway comment about subtitles, which plants the seed of an idea and spawns a literacy initiative that has had, in Bill Clinton’s words, “a staggering impact on people’s lives.”

Worried about the political turmoil in Kenya, and concerned at the lack of information that is forthcoming from his adoptive country, Erik Hersman mobilizes his own five-strong army to conceive, create and launch a Web-based facility that revolutionizes how breaking news is disseminated worldwide.

Parachuted into the middle of sub-Saharan Africa with a brief to collect public health data, and confronted with a laborious, environmentally wasteful paper-based system, pediatrician Joel Selanikio finds the perfect outlet for the skills he acquired as a Wall Street computer consultant.

Intending to ground himself in the realities of global health during his internship in rural Malawi, Josh Nesbit discovers that it is hard to sit on the sidelines and soon finds himself proposing a solution to overcome the difficulty of connecting patients, community health workers and hospitals.

After watching local doctors and midwives struggle to treat critically ill pregnant women in near-total darkness on a Nigerian maternity ward, where an untimely power cut can mean the difference between life and death, obstetrician Laura Stachel delivers a solar-based solution that enhances survival prospects.

Observing how well the autistic son of a close friend responds to the therapeutic effects of a Chinese massage technique that she has advocated using, Louisa Silva is convinced that the treatment has the potential to benefit thousands of others, but she needs to prove it.

Haunted by the memory of being separated from her older sister during a childhood spent in foster care, and disturbed that other siblings are continuing to suffer the same fate, Lynn Price resolves to devise a way to bring such people back together.

An unexpected conversation over dinner leads Priti Radhakrishnan to build an innovative new organisation with a mission to fight for the rights of people denied access to life saving medicines.

Until a visit to the dermatologist turns her world upside down, Sharon Terry has never heard of pseudanthoma elasticum (PXE), but when she discovers that research into the disease afflicting her children is hidebound by scientific protocol, she sets about changing the system with characteristic zeal.

Encounters and conversations with leftover people occupying leftover spaces and using leftover materials, at home and abroad, led architecture professor Wes Janz to view them as urban pioneers, not victims, and teach him a valuable lesson: think small and listen to those at the sharp end.

Written with younger people interested in social innovation in mind

The book is aimed at a general audience, although I’m hoping it will particularly appeal to younger people interested in social innovation and social entrepreneurship, and schools, colleges and universities teaching the subject. It fills what I believe is a much-needed gap in the market, one which is currently dominated by books which – often at no fault of their own – give the impression that meaningful change is only possible if you’re an MBA, or a geek, or have money or influence, or a carefully laid out five-year master plan, or all five. Let’s be honest – you don’t need qualifications to change the world.

By highlighting the stories of 10 ordinary yet remarkable individuals, and the impact their work is collectively having on hundreds of millions of people around the world, “Rise of the Reluctant Innovator” will show us that anything is possible, planning isn’t everything, and that anyone anywhere can change their world for the better.

The book will be out on 20th November 2013, with a holding page up at reluctantinnovation.com. You can follow us on Twitter at @ReluctantsBook.

Thank you.

“If we can help anyone on their journey, then we should. Whether that be giving advice or a positive critique on an idea, helping raise awareness through blog posts, giving tips on fundraising, making introductions to other projects and people with the same interests, or offering to be a future soundboard as their ideas grow and develop. These are all things I didn’t have when I started out, and using them productively now that I do is one of the biggest contributions I believe I can – and should – make to the future growth of our discipline. Our legacy shouldn’t be measured in the projects or tools we create, but in the people we serve and inspire.”

— Enabling the Inspiration Generation, December 2009

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Outtakes from Mobile World Congress & a community engagement event

Last week saw me start out at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and finish up at an event focusing on the use of text messaging in the nonprofit sector in London.

It was a busy week but two new resources were the end result.

Pictures. If you didn’t make it to Mobile World Congress then here’s a Flickr set of 111 free-to-use photos to give you a flavour of the event. Mobile World Congress is the world’s largest mobile exhibition and conference and features CEOs and representatives from mobile operators, device manufacturers, technology providers, vendors and content owners from around the world.

Words. Last Friday, Credemus Associates ran an event in London attended by representatives from FrontlineSMS and Text to Change. “The World in the Palm of Your Hands: SMS & Mobile Communications” was the first in a new line of events which Credemus hopes will become a live platform for discussion and news on ICT to support community engagement for Local Authorities, Third Sector and Public Sector organisations. At Friday’s event, FrontlineSMS and Text to Change announced the release of a new resource on how to use SMS as an effective behaviour change campaigning tool:

Behaviour change campaigning is inherently interactive. In order to encourage positive behaviour change, it is important to not only push campaign messages out to people, but to listen to the responses. To run a campaign that has a real impact, you need to listen to ensure you’re being heard. This is one of the main reasons why SMS – as a widely accessible and inherently interactive communications channel – is an ideal tool for campaigning.

You can read the FrontlineSMS blog post announcing the resource here, or download it here (PDF, 700Kb).

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They say a picture paints a thousand words, and that may be the case. But if they cost the earth or you don’t have permission to use them, they end up painting nothing much at all.

When my mobile “career” kicked off in 2003 with multiple research trips to South Africa and Mozambique, I took the opportunity to start taking and collecting mobile- and technology-related photos. Back then people were beginning to take an interest in the impact of mobile phones on the African continent, and NGOs were looking to use photos on websites or in project proposals, newsletters and presentations. On top of that, people were just generally curious about what was going on.

That collection now stands at over 150 photos, and covers everything from people around the world texting or making calls to pictures of shops, signs, mobiles themselves and other interesting examples of mobile entrepreneurship in action.

The images are free to use – with attribution – by nonprofits or any other organization seeking to profile the social impact of mobile technology. Visit the kiwanja Mobile Gallery for the full gallery of images, and for details on how to credit their use.

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If you were thinking of designing or building a website, you’d be in luck. If you were thinking of writing a suite of financial management tools, you’d be in luck. If you were even thinking of creating the next big video game, you’d be in luck. Visit any good bookstore and the selection of self-help books and “how-to” guides leave you spoiled for choice.

Unlike the plethora of self-help guides on the more established topics, if you were looking to do something with mobile phones, you’d likely have mixed results. There are plenty of books available extolling the virtues of Java, Python, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, C++, Symbian, Android and just about any other development environment or platform out there. Combine that with the growing field of mobile UI (user interface) design and you’d think that pretty much everything was covered. But there is one thing missing, although you’d probably only notice if you’re one of a growing number of developers turning their attention to the developing world.

I’m talking about a guide on “Building Mobile Applications for Social Good.” Although just a start, this article – written for The Testing Planet – in part aims to fill that gap. At conferences and seminars I often talk about our experiences developing FrontlineSMS, and the thinking and field work behind it, but until now much of this wasn’t particularly well captured in written form in a single place.

A PDF of the “Building Mobile Applications for Social Good” article is available at the kiwanja website (2 Mb). A PDF of the full edition of this month’s Testing Planet is available on their website.

The Testing Planet is a magazine produced by The Software Testing Club and its community members. The magazine is published in print, ebook, Kindle, PDF and web format. You can follow them on Twitter at @testingclub.

Further reading
Check out an earlier article, “Mobile Design. Sans Frontieres,” co-written with friend and colleague Joel Selanikio, and the array of articles on mobile apps development.

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Rethinking socially responsible design in a mobile world

Last Monday was an exciting day for us when we picked up the prestigious 2011 Curry Stone Design Prize for FrontlineSMS. The Curry Stone Design Prize was created to champion designers as a force for social change. Now in its fourth year, the Prize recognizes innovators who address critical issues involving clean air, food and water, shelter, health care, energy, education, social justice or peace.

This award follows closely on the heels of the 2011 Pizzigati Prize, an honourable mention at the Buckminster Fuller Challenge and our National Geographic “Explorer” Award last summer. It goes without saying these are exciting times not just for FrontlineSMS but for our growing user base and the rapidly expanding team behind it. When I think back to the roots of our work in the spring of 2005, FrontlineSMS almost comes across as “the little piece of software that dared to dream big.”

You can watch our 5-minute Curry Stone Design Prize video, embedded above.

How socially responsible mobile technology is evolving

With the exception of the Pizzigati Prize – which specifically focuses on open source software for public good – our other recent awards are particularly revealing. Last summer we began something of a trend by being awarded things which weren’t traditionally won by socially focused mobile technology organizations.

Being named a 2010 National Geographic Emerging Explorer is a case in point, and last summer while I was in Washington DC collecting the prize I wrote down my thoughts in a blog post:

On reflection, it was a very bold move by the Selection Committee. Almost all of the other Emerging Explorers are either climbing, diving, scaling, digging or building, and what I do hardly fits into your typical adventurer job description. But in a way it does. As mobile technology continues its global advance, figuring out ways of applying the technology in socially and environmentally meaningful ways is a kind of 21st century exploring. The public reaction to the Award has been incredible, and once people see the connection they tend to think differently about tools like FrontlineSMS and their place in the world.

More recently we’ve begun receiving recognition from more traditional socially responsible design organizations: Buckminster Fuller and Clifford Curry/Delight Stone. If you ask the man or woman on the street what “socially responsible design” meant to them, most would associate it with physical design – the building or construction of things. Water containers, purifiers, prefabricated buildings, emergency shelters, storage containers and so on. Design is so much easier to recognize, explain and appreciate if you can see it. Software is a different beast altogether, and that’s what makes our Curry Stone Design Prize most interesting. As the prize website itself puts it:

“Design has always been concerned with built environment and the place of people within it, but too often has limited its effective reach to narrow segments of society. The Curry Stone Design Prize is intended to support the expansion of the reach of designers to a wider segment of humanity around the globe, making talents of leading designers available to broader sections of society.”

Over the past few years FrontlineSMS has become so much more than just a piece of software. Our core values are hard-coded into how the software works, how it’s deployed, the things it can do, how users connect, and the way it allows all this to happen. We’ve worked hard to build a tool which anyone can take and, without us needing to get involved, applied to any problem anywhere. How this is done is entirely up to the user, and it’s this flexibility that sits at the core of the platform. It’s also arguably at the heart of its success:

We trust our users – rely on them, in fact – to be imaginative and innovative with the platform. If they succeed, we succeed. If they fail, we fail. We’re all very much in this together. We focus on the people and not the technology because it’s people who own the problems, and by default they’re often the ones best-placed to solve them. When you lead with people, technology is relegated to the position of being a tool. Our approach to empowering our users isn’t rocket science. As I’ve written many times before, it’s usually quite subtle, but it works:

My belief is that users don’t want access to tools – they want to use the tools. There’s a subtle but significant difference. They want to have their own system, something that works with them to solve their problem. They want to see it, to have it there with them, not in some “cloud“. This may sound petty – people wanting something of their own – but I believe that this is one way that works.

What recognition from the likes of the Curry Stone Design Prize tells us is that socially responsible design can be increasingly applied to the solutions, people and ecosystems built around lines of code – but only if those solutions are user-focused, sensitive to their needs, deploy appropriate technologies and allow communities to influence how these tools are applied to the problems they own.

Further reading
FrontlineSMS is featured in the upcoming book “Design Like You Give a Damn 2: Building Change From The Ground Up,” available now on pre-order from Amazon.

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In short, a postcard consists of a photograph and short narrative that explains why the image is important – or how it relates – to that person’s work. The idea is to go beyond usual explanation and website narrative to reveal more personal insights and motivations of the people who work in our field.

Here’s a selection of five that have come in so far, in no particular order.

Jonathan Donner. Kigali, 2003 | Website | Twitter

In 2003, mobile phones were just appearing in Rwanda. Penetration was just 1.5 per 100 people (1.5%) then. It is over 33% now. I organized some studies to ask microentrepreneurs about how they were using their new phones. Everyone was quite accommodating, letting us ask details about each of the last 10 calls recorded on the phones call log. Though we learned a lot about business processes and productivity, our data also demonstrated just how intertwined these phones had already become into daily life – two-thirds of the calls were with friends and family. I suspect these trends still hold.  At this moment, the interviewer (Nicole K. Umutoni) was probably looking back at me and wondering why I was taking this picture. Now we know!

Jan Chipchase. Lagos, 2011 | Website | Twitter

That your and my cultural sensibilities about what is appropriate is irrelevant. That there are many ways to extend the internet – and that those that make the effort to do so, show us where the value is. That everything can, and will eventually be remixed.

Linda Raftree. Cameroon, June 2010 | Website | Twitter

This picture is taken on top of a large rocky hill during a workshop in Ndop, Cameroon. I love the young man’s rasta hat and the delicate lavender colored felt flower in the girl’s hair, the tender manner that they are learning together to film, and how the camera helps them see themselves and their surroundings in new ways. Up on that rock in the middle of the fields, breeze blowing under the giant sky, watching two young people teach other; the reminder that I am transient in this line of work and do not matter much in the larger scheme of things was strong, beautiful and comforting.

Erik Hersman. Liberia, 2009 | Website | Twitter

“ICT4D” represents a mental roadblock. A term that brings as much baggage with it as a sea of white SUVs, representing the humanitarian industrial complex’s foray into the digital world. It means we’re trying to airlift in an infrastructure instead of investing in local technology solutions. Like the SUVs, it’s currently an import culture that will not last beyond the project’s funding and the personnel who parachuted in to do it.

Heather Underwood. Kenya, 2011 | Website | Twitter

In August, 2011, I visited several health clinics in Kenya to determine the feasibility of using digital pen technology to enhance paper health forms. This photo was taken in a rural clinic in Mangalete. The woman using the digital pen is filling out a partograph – a paper tool used to monitor and detect prolonged or abnormal labors. She simply picked up the pen and started showing me how to properly fill out the form. When the pen’s audio suddenly informed her that she had crossed the alert line and should consider transferring the patient, her surprise and immediate understanding of the quality assurance and training benefits of this tool were incredibly gratifying. This interaction highlighted one of my core beliefs about ICT4D: big problems can often be addressed with simple solutions.

If you’re interested in taking part there’s still time. I’ll need the following:

1. A photo (high resolution if possible) – one you’ve taken, please. All it needs to qualify is to have a technology theme – radio, mobile phone, computer, solar lamp and so on.
2. Details of where it was taken and the year (if you remember).
3. A short description of what it is, and why it means something to you. Keep it short – think back of a postcard! We want personal stories – how you connect with the picture – not just a description of what it is.
4. A link to your website, blog or Twitter handle (or all three) so I can point people back to you and your work.

You can email all of this to [email protected] – I’ll collate all the postcards in the coming weeks and publish them online.

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Luxury Travel Stories is about the idea of connecting the world via ‘stories’ in postcard format. A photo with accompanying text no more than what would fit on the back of a postcard.

Last month I was invited to contribute a postcard to the Luxury Travel Storiesproject, and chose the photo and text above You can view the post, and those from other contributors, here. The whole site is based on the idea of “connecting the world via ‘stories’ in postcard format. A photo with accompanying text no more than what would fit on the back of a postcard.” Like “Dear Photograph” (which I blogged about here), it’s a simple but compelling idea.

One of the things I’ve always maintained is that we often know little about the background and motivation of people working in our field, and how they came to work in it. So in part as a way to rectify this I thought it would be great to put together a slideshow of ICT4D-related postcards to share online.

If you work at the intersection of technology and international development and have a favorite photograph – one you’ve taken – with a technology/development theme and would like to take part, send it to [email protected] with your name, a short description of when and where it was taken and what it means to you. Remember, the text needs to fit on the back of a postcard, so keep it concise. And if you know anyone who you think might want to take part, please pass this on.

Once I have enough I’ll pull everything together and drop it into Slideshare. If enough people contribute it might be fun to map the photos, and stories, on Ushahidi.

Looking forward to reading your stories and contributions!

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For the past two years I’ve been incredibly fortunate to work with some of the most inspirational, talented social innovators (aka Pop!Tech Social Innovation Fellows). This year, good friend Erik Hersman and I returned to Camden, Maine, to work with the 2011 Class. Sharing our own experiences of 2008 – when we were both fellows – and lessons we’ve learned on our journey is a large part of why we were there.

Here’s a brief summary of 12 key lessons I shared with the fellows before the retreat wrapped up late last week.

1. Don’t be in a hurry. Grow your organization on your own terms.
2. Don’t assume you need money to grow. Do what you can before you reach out to external funders.
3. Volunteers and Interns may not be the silver bullet to your human resource issues.
4. Pursue and maximize every opportunity to promote your work.
5. Remember that your website, for most people, is the primary window to you and your ideas.
6. Know when to say “no”. Manage expectations.
7. Avoid being dragged down by the politics of the industry you’re in. Save your energy for more important things.

1. Learn to do what you can’t afford to pay other people to do.
2. Be open with the values that drive you.
3. Collaborate if it’s in the best interests of solving your problem, even if it’s not in your best interests.
4. Make full use of your networks, and remember that the benefits of being in them may not always be immediate.
5. Remember the bigger picture.

What would you add from your own experiences?

Related reading

• Mobile applications development: Observations

• Social mobile: Myths and misconceptions

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The Tides Foundation is now accepting nominations for this year’s Pizzigati Prize. The Antonio Pizzigati Prize for Software in the Public Interest annually awards a $10,000 cash grant to one individual who has created or led an effort to create an open source software product of significant value to the nonprofit sector and movements for social change.

The 2012 winner will be announced in April at the Nonprofit Technology Network annual conference in San Francisco. Each year, starting in 2006, the Pizzigati Prize has accepted nominations for talented and creative individuals who develop open source software products that demonstrate impressive value to the nonprofit sector. Tides welcomes nominations from both developers and the nonprofits who work with them.

Earlier this year I had the honour of picking up the Pizzigati Prize in Washington DC on behalf of everyone at FrontlineSMS. According to the Pizzigati jury, we’d managed to:

create software that speaks directly to the reality that millions of people globally have only simple mobile phones and no access whatsoever to the Internet. The software they developed turns mobile phones into grassroots organizing tools for everything from mobilizing young voters to thwarting thieving commodity traders.

The 2010 Pizzigati Prize winner, Yaw Anokwa, led the development on Open Data Kit, a modular set of tools that’s helping nonprofits the world over on a wide variety of battlefronts, from struggles to prevent deforestation to campaigns against human rights violations.

“Open source software developers like these fill an indispensable role”, explained Tides Chief of Staff Joseph Mouzon, a Pizzigati Prize judge and the former Executive Director of Nonprofit Services for Network for Good. “The Pizzigati Prize aims to honor that contribution – and encourage programmers to engage their talents in the ongoing struggle for social change”.

The Pizzigati Prize honors the brief life of Tony Pizzigati, an early advocate of open source computing. Born in 1971, Tony spent his college years at MIT, where he worked at the world-famous MIT Media Lab. Tony died in 1995, in an auto accident on his way to work in Silicon Valley.

Full details on the Pizzigati Prize, the largest annual award in public interest computing, are available online.

Please nominate, share or enter as appropriate. Good luck!

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In the early days of Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) and m4d – and development more broadly – it may have been seen as a luxury to understand the context of your target users (many solutions were seen as “universal,” after all). Today I’d say it’s become a necessity.

In my earlier days I did a lot of travel, mostly to and around Africa. (One thing I regret never managing to do was walk across the continent, something I started tentatively planning a few years ago). As our organisation has grown and my role within it changed, I spend more time today travelling to conferences giving talks than actually doing the work. My last major piece of extended fieldwork (i.e. longer than a week) was back in the summer of 2007 when I spent a month in Uganda consulting with Grameen’s fledgling AppLab.

There’s more to it, though, than just getting out there. What you learn, sense, pick up and appreciate about the place you’re in and the people you’re with largely depends on the kind of traveller you are. The truth of the matter is you’ll rarely get a real sense of a place staying for just a few days in the capital city behind the walls of a four or five star hotel. Quite often the more you get out of your comfort zone, the more you learn.

I’ve been hugely fortunate to have lived and worked in many countries – mostly in Africa – since I set out to work in development 20 twenty years ago. And during that time I’ve developed quite a few “travel habits” to help me get the most out of my time there.

15 tips while doing volunteer work abroad

Here are my Top 15 tips for traveling abroad while doing volunteer work:

1. Stay in a locally owned or run hotel (or even better, guest house).
2. Spend as much time as possible on foot. Draw a map.
3. Get out of the city.
4. Check out the best places to watch Premiership football.
5. Ignore health warnings (within reason) and eat in local cafes/markets.
6. Buy local papers, listen to local radio, watch local TV, visit local cinemas.
7. Use public transport. Avoid being ‘chauffeured’ around.
8. Take a camera. Take your time taking pictures.
9. Go for at least a month.
10. Visit villages on market days.
11. Spend time in local bookshops, libraries and antique/art shops.
12. Read up on the history and background of where you’re going. Buy a locally written history and geography book.
13. Be sure to experience the city on foot, at night.
14. Wherever you are, get up for a sunrise stroll. It’s a different, fascinating (and cooler) time of day.
15. Don’t over-plan. Be open to unexpected opportunities.

Finally, if you’re looking for advice on what to take on a trip to Africa, good friend Erik Hersman (aka WhiteAfrican) has an excellent post here.

(This entry was originally posted on Ken’s blog here).

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