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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Progress in the social mobile field will come only when we think more about best practices in the thinking and design of mobile projects and applications, rather than obsessing over the end products themselves. By then most of the damage has usually already been done. In my experience, many social mobile projects fail in the early stages. Lack of basic reality-checking and a tendency to make major assumptions are lead culprits, yet they are relatively easy to avoid. I would argue that successful mobile projects — those aimed at developing countries in particular – have a better chance of succeeding if some or all of the following are considered from the outset.

Firstly, think carefully if you’re about to build a solution to a problem you don’t fully understand.

Check to see if any similar tools to the one you want to build already exist and, if they do, consider partnering up. Despite the rhetoric, all too often people end up reinventing the wheel.

Be flexible enough in your approach to allow for changing circumstances, ideas and feedback. Don’t set out with too many fixed parameters if you can help it.

From the outset, try to build something that’s easy enough to use without the need for user training or a complex manual, and something which new users can easily and effortlessly replicate once news of your application begins to spread.

Think about rapid prototyping. Don’t spend too much time waiting to build the perfect solution, but instead get something out there quickly and let reality shape it. This is crucial if the application is to be relevant.

Never let a lack of money stop you. If considerable amounts of funding are required to even get a prototype together, then that’s telling you something – your solution is probably overly complex.

Learn to do what you can’t afford to pay other people to do. The more design, coding, building, testing and outreach you can do yourself, the better. Stay lean. These tasks can be outsourced later if your solution gains traction and attracts funding. The more you achieve with few resources the more commitment and initiative is shown, increasing the chances a donor will be attracted to what you’re doing.

Don’t be too controlling over the solution. Build an application which is flexible enough to allow users, whoever and wherever they may be, to plant their own personalities on it. No two rural hospitals work the same way, so don’t build an application as if they did.

Think about building platforms and tools which contribute to the solution for the users, rather than one which seeks to solve and fix everything for them. Let them be part of it. Think about how your imported solution looks to a local user. Are they a passive recipient of it, or can they take it and turn it into their solution? A sense of local ownership is crucial for success and sustainability.

Ensure that the application can work on the most readily and widely available hardware and network infrastructure. Text messaging solutions aren’t big in the social mobile space for nothing. And, for the time being, try to avoid building applications which require any kind of internet access, unless you want to restrict your target audience from the outset.

Every third party the user needs to speak to in order to implement your solution increases the chances of failure by a considerable margin, particularly if one of those parties is a local mobile operator.

Be realistic about what your application can achieve, and wherever possible look for low-hanging fruit. Remember – big is not better, small is beautiful, and focus is king. A solid application which solves one element of a wider problem well is better than an average application which tries to solve everything.

Bear in mind that social mobile solutions need to be affordable, ideally free. Business models, if any, should be built around the use of the application, not the application itself. Easier said than done, so try to engage business studies graduates at universities, many of whom are always looking for cool social-change projects to work on.

Leverage what local NGOs (or users) are best at, and what they already have – local knowledge, local context, local language and local trust among local communities. Remember that it’s unlikely you will ever understand the problem as much as they do, and that it’s always going to be easier to equip them with tools to do the job than it will ever be for you to learn everything they know.

Don’t waste time or energy thinking too much about the open sourcing process (if you decide to go that route) until you know you have something worth open sourcing. (And, by the way, the users will be the ones to let you know that).

Don’t build an application for an environment where it may politically (or otherwise) never be adopted. For example, a nationwide mobile election monitoring system would need government buy-in to be implemented. Governments which commit election fraud to stay in power are unlikely to adopt a technology which gives the game away.

Consider controlling distribution and use of your application at the beginning. Not only is it a good idea to be able to contact users for feedback, donors will almost always want to know where it is being used, by who and for what. Neglect to collect this data at your peril.

Promote your solution like crazy. Reach out to people working in the same technology circles as you, post messages on relevant blogs, blog about it yourself, build a project website, try and brand your solution, and make use of social networking tools such as Twitter and Facebook. Although your target users may not be present, many are likely to be fairly resourceful, and the more people talking about your solution the more likely news is to filter down to them.

Finally, build a community around the application, encourage users to join and share experiences, and to help each other. Don’t be afraid to reach out for additional information, and work hard to keep it active, engaging and growing. Communities are notoriously hard to build, but when they work they’re worth it.

This blog post is also available as a PDF.

Note: I followed up on this post with an article for PC World – “Social Mobile Applications: The Missing Book“. (An index of all kiwanja PC World articles is available here.)

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We’re happy to launch today with the news that our lead developer, Esteban Panzeri (above), is releasing a new WordPress plug-in to the WordPress community. It’s called Creative Commons Reloaded, and it lets individual blogs or group blogs assign Creative Commons licenses on a post-by-post basis.

That’s especially useful at sites like Socialbrite, where some of us (me, Beth, Ken) release our works under a CC Attribution license, while others (Amy, John, Katrin) use a CC Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike license. Creative Commons lets you fine-tune your copyright, allowing others to reuse it as you specify.

I asked Esteban, a tech guru/analyst at Lenovo in Buenos Aires, why he developed the plug-in on his own time. “I think the old copyright model is outdated,” he said. “It does not fit the digital era. I’m convinced that it strangles creativity and it is bad for business. Creative Commons is a good step in the right direction. With so many excellent blogs out there, I thought it would be a nice way to help all those authors get a simple way to license their work. That and ‘giving back to the community’ that has helped me achieve so much.”

He cited Michael Geist’s recent post pointing to a new Harvard Business Chool working paper that suggests weaker copyright protection has benefited society.

Esteban — who happens to be the most capable programmer I’ve ever worked with (he Twitters in English here and in Spanish here) — was quick to credit Nathan Yergler (whom I worked with four years ago when he developed the original CC Uploader app for Ourmedia), who created the original WordPress plug-in, WpLicense, which applies to an entire site and which CC Reloaded is built upon.

Some details about the plug-in:

• Esteban is aiming to post it on the WordPress.org plug-in directory on July 6. It’s already fully functional on this blog (see below) and he’s now working on the documentation.

• On your Add New Post page, you’ll see a “Creative Commons Licensing” area that lets you check boxes sayng whether you want to allow others to remix your work, to allow or prohibit commercial uses and to require Share-Alike usage. You can also choose a jurisdiction for your license if you’d like.

• You can customize the look as you’d like. We chose a brighter Creative Commons logo, and styled it with a top border and tinted background by tweaking the CSS.

Thanks, Esteban, nice to see that your development work on Socialbrite is already paying dividends!

Update:

• See Socialbrite developer releases CC plug-in

• You can find the plug-in here: WP License Reloaded

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Leila Chirayath, founder and CEO of Samasource, has been popping up at nonprofit events everywhere lately. Samasource is a nonprofit organization in Silicon Valley that connects small and mid-size businesses with individuals and firms in the developing world that can perform outsourcing work (such as data entry) in a socially responsible way.

They now have pilot programs in Kenya, Nepal and rural India, and their goal, as their website says, is “to catalyze sustainable economic development and poverty alleviation by creating a thriving, active market for socially responsible outsourcing to developing regions.”

The 4-minute interview was conducted on a very windy day at the 2008 Craigslist Nonprofit Bootcamp in San Mateo, Calif. (though I do need to get a fabric microphone cover). I caught up with Leila a few minutes before her jam-packed talk. As Leila says, there’s a lot of misinformation in the media about outsourcing, and Samasource can help you sort through the best options.

Watch or embed video on Vimeo
Watch video in H.264 QuickTime on Ourmedia
Download video from Archive.org

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• Samasource Brings Socially Responsible Outsoucing to Facebook Application Development (insidefacebook.com)
• Leila Chirayath Janah in an audio podcast with JA and RG (teabreak.pk)
• 2009 fbFund Winner Samasource Gives Work, Not Aid (insidefacebook.com)

The post Samasource enables socially responsible outsourcing appeared first on Socialbrite.

A little over a year ago I found myself sitting in the San Francisco offices of an international humanitarian NGO. Their main focus at the time was a major human-rights treaty, and they wanted advice about mobilizing rural communities to lobby their governments to ratify it. There was clearly great potential for a mobile phone-based solution, and they wanted me to help them understand how text messaging – and FrontlineSMS in particular – could be of use.

So, it came as something of a surprise when I recommended they look more closely at rural radio instead. Although I’m a great fan of mobile phone technology, it isn’t by default the best tool for reaching out to rural communities. Radio – far from being outdated and irrelevant – remains a powerful, relevant and far-reaching medium. Unrivalled, in fact.

Radio stations existed in Africa long before many of its countries reached independence. Over the last twenty to thirty years, however, liberation of the airwaves in many of these countries has opened the door to a new wave of broadcasters including commercial, private, community and public radio stations. This expansion has created some new and exciting opportunities.”

kiwanja’s latest PC World article looks at the potential of mobile phones and rural radio stations to jointly deliver relevant, timely and useful information to rural populations in developing countries, and allow listeners to engage with radio programmes in a new way. Projects highlighted include initiatives in Africa by Farm Radio International and Developing Radio Partners.

Head on over to the PC World website for the full article.

This post originally appeared at Kiwanja.net.

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