FrontlineSMS founder wins award for software in public interest

Ken Banks accepting the award at the Nonprofit Technology Conference. (Photo by JD Lasica)

Socialbrite partner Ken Banks honored at nonprofit conference

Guest post by Florence Scialom
Community Co-Ordinator, FrontlineSMS

Ken Banks, the founder of FrontlineSMS and a partner in Socialbrite, has been widely recognized for his work in giving grassroots groups the world over the capacity to interact, cheaply and simply, with people in remote communities via mobile. On Saturday, at the annual Nonprofit Technology Conference in Washington, D.C., Ken won the Antonio Pizzigati Prize for Software in the Public Interest.

The $10,000 Pizzigati Prize honors software developers who, in the spirit of open source computing, are fashioning exceptional applications for aid activists and nonprofits. Tides — a partner to philanthropists, foundations, activists and organizations worldwide — hosts the prize selection process.

Ken created FrontlineSMS because it speaks directly to a global communications reality: Millions of people in remote areas have no access to the Internet. But many of these millions do have simple mobile phones. FrontlineSMS enables grassroots groups to reach these millions, using only a laptop computer, a USB cable and a basic mobile phone or modem. And the constituents of these groups can use their own mobile phones to communicate back.

A multitude of mobile uses around the globe

Since Ken developed FrontlineSMS in 2005, nonprofits have downloaded the free, easy-to-use software almost 13,000 times for use in a strikingly varied assortment of projects across the globe. The first independent news agency in Iraq, for instance, is using the software to text message updates to readers in eight different countries.

Other users have a more targeted focus.Some groups are using FrontlineSMS to share fair market prices with local farmers, information that can help these farmers spot — and avoid — commodity traders out to cheat them.

In Azerbaijan, FrontlineSMS has helped mobilize the youth vote in national elections. In Zimbabwe, the software is enabling groups to monitor human rights violations. One group serving overseas Filipino workers is using FrontlineSMS as an emergency help line. (See Frontline SMS’s case studies section for further examples of how it’s used across the world).

Ken has based the FrontlineSMS effort on basic open source principles. This allows any organization working on grassroots social change to have “the ability to build on and take advantage of the code we’ve developed,” he says.

This devotion to the open source ethos goes beyond just working with software programmers. “We’re committed,” he says, “to involving even non-developers among our users in the ongoing improvement of FrontlineSMS.”

An anthropologist by training, Ken has lived and worked all around Africa since the early 1990s. A longtime computer coder, he first started thinking about connecting computers and mobile phones while working on a conservation project in South Africa. In 2005, Ken raised a small amount of money, bought some equipment and cables, and sat down, over five summer weeks, to write the first FrontlineSMS software. That October, Ken released his new code over the Web.

“What’s happened since,” he says, “has been pretty amazing.”

A number of groups and organisations, ranging from National Geographic to the MacArthur Foundation, have noted the wide and positive impact that FrontlineSMS hasmade. Ken himself is hoping that his work will have an equally positive impact on the next generation of software developers.

“Stories like this — developing FrontlineSMS with very limited resources over a five week period — can inspire younger developers,” he points out. “They prove that anyone with an idea can make a real difference if they stick with it.”

This year’s Pizzigati Prize judging panel included three previous winners of the prize — Darius Jazayeri, Yaw Anokwa and Barry Warsaw — and two veteran professionals who have each earned wide respect within the nonprofit computing world, Joseph Mouzon and Erika Bjune. The 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. Read more about the prize and its judging criteria at pizzigatiprize.org.

Republished from FrontlineSMS.