A Free Catalog of Low Cost ICTs

Thanks to Tim Barlott for bringing this catalog to our attention.  It includes reviews and ratings for SMS, geospatial, and remote sensing tools.

Surveys with Farmer Communities in Batticaloa

Greetings Batticaloa lagoon and fort - a pleasant sight each morning while crossing the Kallady bridge, Batticaloa town. From May 1st, the SSHRC Sri Lankan Research Team spent 3 days in the Batticaloa District. We had to balance our work under the heat and humidity and the afternoon heavy thunder showers.

The core team comprised myself from LIRNEasia and Chandana (WUSL/LIRNEasia), Chandana was leading a team of students affiliated with the Wayamba University of Sri Lanka ICT Centre that combined with a team of local community members affiliated with Janathakshan. The Janathakshan members were facilitating and interpreting between the enumerators and the farmers. The teams surveyed the Verugal and Kathirveilli villages in Batticaloa District (neighbouring the Trincomalee District boarder). Both villages were quite devastated  by the ethnic conflict that ended in 2009.

The survey is designed to collect a baseline understanding of the farmer house use of ICTs. The survey was an adoption of LIRNEasia's 2012 Telliuse at BOP survey. The project introduced Tablet PCs and the FuidSurvey application for digitzing the data. However, poor Cellular Internet connectivity was effecting the data collection efficiencies. Web pages were slow in refreshing. Therefore, the enumerators decided to use paper and digitize later.

Answers from the farmers to the 50+ administered questions would provide insights as to how farmers may use mobile phones in their farming practices. The survey results are also a measure to understand the potential take up of technology by those communities after the short campaigns.

Janathakshana, in a previous project, has registered 300 Kathirveilli farmer households. The stratification was simply kathirveilli farmers; thus, giving us a random sample size of 75 households. Over two sessions, morning and afternoon, the team captured over 50 responses.Kathirveilli is a new village that was developed to rellocate beach resident fisher folk in land, following the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami destruction. Now they are taking up agriculture. Interestingly, in Kathirveilli we found several households to not own any kind of telephone. They would use the neighbours or their relatives' at the time of need. The farmers were no more than 1 KM from the main road, 2 KM from the nearest market, and 30 KM from the nearest town of Valachenni.

Comparatively, Verugal farmers who travelled to their plots across the Verugal river, all had a phones. Moreover, they were quite comfortable with using the phone.Janathakshan has registered 100 farmers in that community. There were 22 surveys recorded for that campaign community.

A common trait between the two villages were that each household had their own home gardens and, additionally, the Government had allocated plots on a long term lease. Non-governmental Organizations, such as janathakshan, are supplying resources to build farming infrastructure. Each family earns less than Rs. 100,000 per year. They sell more than 50% of their harvest from the leased and owned lands. 

turnkey enhancements, lessons from sept Kuru-Batti prototyping

Gordon, Chandana, and I drove across Sri Lanka (nearly 820km) mainly testing the FrontlineSMS software. At the Wayamba University Workshop, we had the opportunity to test the Ushahid mapping and FreedomFone interactive voice software.

From those prototyping and workshop lessons, the points below should be considered for future improvements, in relation to the turnkey solution:

1. localized mobile phones - we noticed many farmers to carry phones with keypad and screens in Sinhala and Tamil. It was evident that SMS text from these mobile phones in Sinhala or Tamil would not trigger keyword enabled FrontlineSMS message forwards. Hence, FrontlineSMS would need to be improved to handle those utf-8 characters. Perhaps GUIs may need to be localized as well with features to transliterate with any non-latin scripting language.
2. Freedom Fone - must be properly tested in; especially, with the dongles to make it cost-effective. The content upload feature must be simplified by introducing a well developed menu for instructional information.This is a high prioroty because both the Radio stations and the Department of Export Agriculture are keen in using it for localized (Sinhala & Tamil) large vocabulary continuous speech (descriptive) messaging to campaign with farmers.
3. Bundle Ushahidi - would mean to include Ushahidi with FreedomFone and FrontlineSMS boxes. Ushahidi instance should function as a local-host with fixed maps. Ushahidi and Freedom Fone (exceptional to FrontlineSMS 2.0) should be accessible through the Mini-PC wifi with the Mini-PC serving as a localhost.
4. Solar charger - farmers in Vakarai live on in the farm lands that are 10 - 20 KM away from their homes. They carry two batteries and charge the dead batteries when they go to town or visit home. We need to design a solar powered battery that can power the 20 Watt Mini-PC for daily use over 12 hours and an additional 5 Watts that can be used to charge phones when that capacity is not used to power the Monitor or other add-ons.
5. Grab-n-Go Box - Although all the equipment can be easily fit in a tiny back-pack; it is ideal to fit them all in to a tool box type plastic container for easy-of-use and rapid operationalization.

While  improvement no. 1 with localization would be more of a subsequent phase longer term activity, the remaining improvements 2 - 5 can be achieved during this phase of the project.

Mini-PCs to surve as low-cost Turnkey Mapping, Text-ing, and Interactive Voice Servers

The image on the left is a low hardware configuration PC (personal computer). It is capable of functioning in the capacity of a Server serving 2-5 simultaneous users. This is not a restriction on the number users on an application, rather it is a restriction on the number of web sessions such as more than 5 administrators accessing Freedom Fone to configure it. The box comes in two flavours: Windows and Linux.

We have tested it to serve as a FrontlineSMS, Ushahidi, and Freedom Fone host. A dongle or mobile phone can be connected to one of the USB ports to get FrontlineSMS activated. A mobigator modem or Freedom Fone recommended dongles can be connected to the USB to get the interactive voice solution activated. Ushahidi can be installed with a Static IP (e.g. 192.168.2.200/ushahidi) for anyone to access within a LAN by connecting through Mini-PCs WiFi. The box does have a RJ45 port to connect to a WAN or the Internet to function outside the local area.

• The beauty of it is that one can install FrontlineSMS for text-ing, Ushahidi for mapping, and Freedom Fone for interactive voice solutions, configure it, plug it in and let it run.
• It is small enough to squeeze inside a table drawer and lock it away; while it runs.
• The device has an area the same or less than the face area of a 10" tablet PC but about 5 times thicker than a tablet PC; nevertheless fits in the palm; like a think notebook. 
• It is cheap; a high end configuration would cost less than US$ 130.00 and a low-end configuration would cost around US$ 80.00.
• Unlike a laptop or notebook it does carry an expensive LCD screen because the screen is unnecessary for a server. 
• If the data storage needs to be expanded, the best option is attaching a 1-TB external hard drive(~US$80).
• Administrators or implementers can access the applications through the Wi-Fi (or a cross cable connected to the RJ45 socket) using tools such as "remote desktop", "team-viewer", SSH, so on and so forth; that is not hard. 
• A laptop consumes approximate 35-40W of energy and a desktop PC about the same; while the Mini-PC consumes 15-20W; making it relatively greener.

 We intend to use it in our Rapid Prototyping exercises; the steps are --

1. We would have a couple of these units pre-installed and configured; possibly a windows box for FrontlineSMS and  a Linux box for Freedom Fone; while Ushahidi could work on either one of them or both
2. At the onset of the meeting with the community, in a remote location, we can quickly initiate an instance or the 3 applications, by simply powering it up; then connecting to is through our laptops.
3. Then while interacting with the community determining their communication needs, implement those requirements to test it with them
4. Finally, leave the unit with them for several weeks for them to test their implementation; i.e. play with it.