You See Names, We See Data
A few months ago I visited Haiti to learn about opportunities for NDI partner organizations to use mobile phones in community organizing, and met with volunteers from groups around the country working for community empowerment.
Just before the election, I returned to Haiti to run trainings for Initiative Committee members on how to use mobile communications. This was more than just training them on FrontlineSMS, the application we had chosen for this instance, although that wasn’t clear to all parties when I arrived.
Often when an ICT team member arrives in a country, there’s an expectation that we’ll set up a computer, teach people what to click on, and head off our merry way. It’s a natural tendency the world over to think of technology as a silver bullet, and it's often a struggle to convey to people how much work needs to go into strategy, planning, training, and deployment from afar.
How do we break down these assumptions to actually get real results? Pull way, way back. Start with as broad a topic as possible. Go back to the point of the whole thing - back to the partner's mission statement, if need be. Think about why it is that we're trying to do what we're doing. What's the method? What's the process? Ask the questions, and the groups have a way of collaborative arriving at the answers, and learning the process as they go.
For mobiles as a strategic tool, it's critical to situate them in the context of the objective they’re being used to achieve. What was the objective? Better, timelier communication directly to community members. What was it not? Using mobiles, using computers, or even sending lots of messages, sexy as that was. So we started out looking at the history of the groups, the importance of communications - from radio to telephones to printed signs - and narrowed down to the information itself that the groups were trying to communicate.
And as it turns out in Haiti, it's not just SMS that's useful. As we went through the training, and explored how the SMS was going to work, the groups had a tendancy to identify their own resources. That contact information they've been collecting?
It turns out it's not just a list of phone numbers to send SMS, it's also a relatively data-rich record of who is accessing services, what part of the community they're from, when they're coming, and what their needs are. It's a place to start thinking about what information is not being collected, how it could be counterposed against other forms of information, and how it could inform their future work.
By the end of the trip, I'd heard examples of how the contact lists and SMS could be used to do all sorts of things - track teacher and judge attendance at schools and courthouses, help organize the organizing bodies themselves, help find out where infrastructure development was failing. The tool was just that - a tool for achieving the community outcomes.
The SMS worked in the end - more on that to come - but instead of setting up a computer, installing a USB modem, signing up for a gateway, and leaving the Information Communities with a set of steps to execute, the Information Communities came out of trainings with an awareness of their resources, and a set of goals to reach.