• A User Guide for the system that we developed for UNICEF, IDS and RuralNet Zambia
• A Developers’ Guide for anyone wishing to build something similar
• Notes on lessons learned that may assist future implementers

Project goals

Automate the data entry part of a long paper-based survey, by replacing the paper forms with electronic devices.

Hardware and application selection

The survey has several long and complex questions, and long sets of multiple-choice answers. The data collection needs to be done in dusty rural Zambia, and the devices might need to be used for a full day without power. Collected data should be sent wirelessly to a secure data repository at some time after collection.

Text entry is required for many fields. That means either a real keyboard with keys, or a sufficiently large touch screen to type comfortably on. Use of the device camera, and presentation of reports and graphs on the same device, might be required in future.

Two possible hardware platforms were identified:

• Tablet laptops with touch screens
• Tablet mobile devices (iPad or Android tablet)

We selected the latter for this project due to lower cost, lighter weight, better usability and longer battery life.

The available software options that we identified were:

• EpiSurveyor (Java J2ME, partly closed source, we have used before and fixed bugs)
• OpenXdata (Java J2ME, open source, developed and supported by an Aptivate alumnus among others)
• Open Data Kit (ODK) (Android, open source, active community)
• Bespoke online/offline survey in HTML5

Of these, we eliminated EpiSurveyor and OpenXdata due to lack of compatibility with the hardware platform(s) we had chosen.

We chose ODK over a bespoke system due to limited time available for development, and ability to easily take photos and record GPS coordinates using the device’s hardware.

Of the available Android tablet devices, we chose the Samsung Galaxy Tab for the pilot project, due to its high quality construction. For future projects we would probably use a lower cost device; see the lessons learned for details.

Form creation

Since the survey is quite long (about 230 questions) we wanted an easy way to enter the questions. The ODK application requires the form to be in XForms format. We identified the following tools for creating XForms:

• ODK Build
• PurcForms
• Kobo Form Builder
• XLS2XForm (actually the pyxform fork)

We decided to use XLS2XForm, which enabled us to enter the large number of questions easily in Excel. The others all have graphical builders, which have advantages and disadvantages for less technical users:

• More visually appealing
• All available options presented visually (types of controls, groups, etc.)
• Less likely to make a mistake and produce an invalid form
• Cumbersome user interface slows down data entry

Unfortunately, none of these designers were able to import an existing form in XForms format, which means that the modifiable “source code” of the form must be maintained in a “proprietary” format in each case, and it’s difficult to switch between tools.

You can download the conversion tools, and the Excel spreadsheet with the completed questionnaire as we delivered it to RuralNet, here. RuralNet staff, please use the latest version of the spreadsheet that you can find locally. To use the tools, you will need to download and install Python 2.7 and Java (JRE). Then download the tools as a ZIP file and extract it somewhere. I recommend that you keep the master copy of the spreadsheet in Dropbox to ensure that it’s backed up, and it’s always clear what the latest version is.

For help in building surveys using XLS2XForm, please see the documentation. In addition to the question types listed there, we have used the following shortcuts, which also work in this customised version of XLS2XForm:

• text is short for add text prompt (a text field, such as a person’s name)
• note is short for add note prompt (a read-only field, providing additional information for the user)
• time is a time field without a date (for example, survey start and end times)

To compile the spreadsheet into an XForms form, run the build_and_validate.py script by double-clicking on it. If it works, it will show the message “Success!”, otherwise it will show an error message, usually caused by a mistake in the Excel spreadsheet. If it works, it will create (replace) the file called zambia-ranq-round3.xml in the same directory. If your spreadsheet has a different name, you can create a shortcut to call build_and_validate_custom.py with the name of the spreadsheet on the command line.

Software components

ODK Aggregate is the software that powers the Internet server. It is a repository for blank forms (designs) and completed forms (data). Our server is located at http://partimob.appspot.com/. This server is currently paid for by us, and will need to transfer to RuralNet at some point.

ODK Collect is the application runs on the device, and users interact with it to complete the survey. It’s essentially a user interface for XForms. It can download blank forms (designs) from an ODK Aggregate server, and upload completed forms (data) to the Aggregate server as well.

ODK Briefcase is the software that downloads completed forms (data) from the Aggregate server and convert them into CSV (spreadsheet) format, which can be loaded into

Customised ODK Collect

We are using a custom version of ODK Collect. You can download the source code for it here, or the compiled application here. You can also find it in the ZIP file download. If you prefer, you can use the latest official version of ODK Collect. The two are compatible, but our version adds the following useful features:

• Use supplied login and password by default to save a round trip and a prompt.
• Add keyboard navigation, useful for form filling on android-x86 because the mouse interface is pretty clunky.
• Restore ability to modify completed and submitted forms on the device, which was removed from the official version in 1.1.7.
• Improved error messages and progress indication during form uploads.
• Allow setting the instance name on the first page of the survey.
• Allow saving incomplete surveys on required questions (in case a survey is interrupted; almost all of our questions are required).

There are several ways to install ODK Collect on a device:

• Download it from the Android Market (official version only, not our customised version)
• Copy the APK file onto a microSD card, insert the card into the device, and use the My Files application find and open it from the SD card.
• Attach the USB cable from the device to a computer, enable mass storage mode on the device, and on the computer, drag and drop the APK file onto the device’s internal memory, then use the My Files application to find and open it.
• Attach the USB cable from the device to a computer, and use ADB‘s install command to install the APK file.

It’s useful to put the application onto the device’s desktop. To do that, open the Applications list, find ODK Collect, and press and hold it with your finger for a few seconds. The background will change to the desktop; release your finger to drop the application there.

It’s also useful to remove all the other junk from the desktop. For each icon and widget on the desktop, press and hold it with your finger for a few seconds, until the trashcan icon appears, then drag your finger to the trashcan and release it there.

Form management on the device

There are several ways to put blank forms (designs) onto the tablets:

• Download them from the ODK Aggregate server using ODK Collect.
• Copy them onto a microSD card, insert the card into the device, and use the My Files application to copy them from the SD card to the /sdcard/odk/forms directory.
• Attach the USB cable from the device to a computer, enable mass storage mode on the device, and on the computer, drag and drop the form into the /sdcard/odk/forms directory.
• Attach the USB cable from the device to a computer, and use ADB or DDMS to push the file onto the device, into the /sdcard/odk/forms directory.

Of these methods, ADB or DDMS is recommended for rapid development, and using the Aggregate server is recommended for production use, since the form must be installed on the Aggregate server for it to be able to accept submissions.

Similarly there are several ways to copy completed forms (data) off the device:

• Upload them to the ODK Aggregate server using ODK Collect.
• Use the My Files application to copy them from /sdcard/odk/instances to a microSD card, then remove the card and connect it to the computer, and drop the files into the ODK Briefcase data directory.
• Attach the USB cable from the device to a computer, enable mass storage mode on the device, and on the computer, drag and drop the files from the /sdcard/odk/instances directory to the ODK Briefcase data directory.
• Attach the USB cable from the device to a computer, and use ADB or DDMS to pull the file from the device’s /sdcard/odk/instances directory to the ODK Briefcase data directory.

Of these methods, using ODK Aggregate is recommended for development and production use.

Since the Aggregate server is on the Internet, this method requires that the device have Internet access. So it either needs a valid SIM card installed with credit and a data bundle, or a WiFi network connected. We had many problems with using SIM cards for data, so WiFi is preferred if possible.

The directories mentioned above will not exist until ODK Collect is installed on the device and run for the first time. Forms downloaded from the Aggregate server will also be placed in the /sdcard/odk/forms directory. Forms completed on the device will be placed in the /sdcard/odk/instances directory.

Configuring ODK Collect

Collect needs to know the details of the ODK Aggregate server to log into it, download blank forms and upload completed forms.

Open the ODK Collect application, press the Settings button and click on Change Settings. Click on URL and enter https://partimob.appspot.com. Similarly, complete the Username and Password using the details that you’ve been given by the Aggregate server operator, or the account that you’ve created on the Aggregate server. This account should only have Data Collector permissions, no more. Press the Back key to get back to the main menu of ODK Collect.

Downloading forms using ODK Collect

Open ODK Collect on the device, and click on the Get Blank Form button. Collect will try to log into the Aggregate server using the details that you’ve provided, and get a list of forms on the server that have the Downloadable box ticked. This is on by default for newly uploaded forms.

Tick the box next to all the forms that you want to download, and click on the Get Selected button.

Filling forms on the device

Open ODK Collect on the device, and click on the Fill Blank Form button. All the forms in the device’s /sdcard/odk/forms directory should be listed. Choose the form that you want to complete.

You will see an introductory screen showing how to move between questions by swiping your finger across the screen, from right to left or left to right. This screen has a text box at the bottom, which you can use to name the form that you’re completing. Naming forms is useful if your data collection is interrupted and you need to resume it later. It’s much easier to identify the form using its name, rather than opening it and flicking through to find some identifying information. You might name the form based on the household code that you’re surveying.

Depending on your answers to some questions, others may be hidden, or their text might change.

At the end of the form there is another chance to Name this form, and a tickbox to Mark form as finalized. Before you can upload the form to the Aggregate server, this box must be ticked, and you must press the Save Form and Exit button. Otherwise Collect will consider that the form is incomplete.

Sending completed forms to Aggregate

Open ODK Collect on the device, and click on the Send Finalized Form button on the main menu. Tick the box next to all the forms that you want to upload to Aggregate, and click on Send Selected. After the upload is complete, you should see the Upload Results message. Every form should have “Success” next to it, otherwise it was not sent successfully.

Downloading forms using Briefcase

We are using a customised version of ODK Briefcase with the following changes:

• Fix the export of repeated groups, which before only worked for the first row (issue 461).
• Shorten exported column names, to allow the CSV file to be imported into Access.
• Allow the server name, username and password to be provided on the command line (or via a shortcut).

You can find the source code here and the pre-compiled version here, as an executable JAR file. You can also find it in the ZIP file download. If you make changes to the source and want to build the executable JAR again, install Maven and use the mvn package command.

To download the completed forms, open Briefcase by double-clicking on the briefcase-1.0-jar-with-dependencies.jar file. On the Transfer tab, click on the Connect button. For the URL, enter https://partimob.appspot.com, and for the user name and password, give the details of an ODK Aggregate account with Data Viewer permissions.

Then you should see a list of forms appear under the heading Forms to Transfer. Tick the box next to the one that your users have been completing, and then click on the Transfer button. If you do this after all the completed forms (data) have been submitted to the ODK Aggregate server, you will not need to do it again for that form template (design).

Now switch to the Transform tab and see if the form appears in the Form list. If it doesn’t, then exit and restart the Briefcase application (issue 464).

For Output Type, choose .csv and media files. For Output Directory, choose the directory where you’d like to save the CSV files. Note that any previous files exported to that directory from the same form will be overwritten without warning, even if they have been modified (cleaned). Click on the Output button to write the CSV files.

Cleaning data in Excel

You can find the Excel spreadsheet that we use for data storage and cleaning here. Note that Excel is a long way from the best way to store and manipulate data like this. Microsoft Access would be far more appropriate. Yet again I wish there was a sufficiently powerful open source alternative.

Because the spreadsheet contains cleaned data, which is “better” than the raw data which is included in the CSV export, we don’t want to overwrite existing rows. For the main section of the questionnaire (the so-called Single Responses) you can include only the new data like this:

• Open the main spreadsheet and switch to the Single Responses tab
• Highlight all rows from 3 down to the bottom, and Sort them by the SubmissionDate column.
• Note the last submission date on this spreadsheet.
• Open the newly exported CSV file for the single responses (something like RANQ-2011-Round-4-v5.csv).
• Sort this file by the SubmissionDate column as well.
• Highlight and copy all the rows whose submission date is later (more recent) than the last one in the main spreadsheet.
• Paste them at the bottom of the Single Responses tab of the main spreadsheet, below the other data.

For the other tables, this process needs to be done completely manually at present.

You can then check and clean the data by viewing and modifying it in Excel. Note that each sheet has one or two columns at the end, which are filled by formulae that look up values from the Single Responses sheet, such as the Household Code.

Using the Android x86 Emulator

To be written.

Lessons learned

To be written.

I must admit to being skeptical about any such innovation, and I’ve been listening to both sides of the debate on the BytesForAll mailing list. Despite my skepticism, Osama’s questions have some answers, and I’d like to present them for comment.

• India has one of the lowest ratio of teachers—just 456 teachers per million people.
• Seventy-two percent of our primary schools have only three teachers or less.
• 25% of teachers were absent from school, and only about half were teaching, during unannounced visits to a nationally representative sample of government primary schools.

How is the $35 tablet going to solve any of these problems?

Of course technology on its own is not going to solve these problems. It is just a valuable weapon in the armoury of those who would launch an all-out war on poverty (and other abstract nouns).

Kentaro Toyama, an ex-Microsoft guru turned ICT4D researcher, says that “technology is [just] an amplifier of human intent and capacity.” And when faced with a task that’s possible but simply too large, an amplifier is exactly what we need. It doesn’t need to be high tech. Tanzania did just fine with radio, one of the oldest, simplest and most inclusive ICTs:

About ten years after independence, Tanzania decided to move towards universal primary education, almost doubling the number of children in school. The government estimated that it needed an extra 40,000 teachers. As the existing training colleges were producing only 5,000 new teachers a year, it was decided to recruit secondary school leavers and train them on an apprenticeship model, partly on the job and partly through distance education. Over a period of three years, they were posted in schools where they had a reduced teaching load. They then followed correspondence courses backed by radio programmes; they were supervised and tested on their classroom practices, and passed their examinations. Two evaluations found that they ended up reasonably competent in the classroom (Chale, 1993; quoted by Perranton, 2000; retrieved from UNU)

If India were to launch a massive teacher education programme, they would find it cheaper to implement that programme using technology. For example, they might distribute radios, TVs, portable audio players or even (heaven forbid!) computers to trainee teachers. It might take longer for those teachers to reach high standards, and more might drop out, without the personal connection and feedback of face-to-face training. Even so, one could train more teachers for more time and achieve a similar number of fully trained teachers at a lower cost.

In the business sector, more than 70% micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) are not connected to information society to leverage opportunities of business and efficiency. How will the $35 tablet help in the financial inclusion of MSMEs, which are largely situated in small towns and remote areas?

It’s unfortunate that the tablet doesn’t include a long-range wireless network (such as GPRS), which must surely cover most of India as it does Africa. Even without an Internet connection, it can still provide useful services such as record keeping, business accounting and stock tracking to small enterprises. The tablet is based on Android, but the marketplace has been disabled, and this is a serious limitation. I think it’s likely to be overcome soon. When that happens, India’s many skilled software developers will be free to create localised applications for a potentially huge local market.

Most of India’s 3.3 million non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are also located in remote areas—70% of them lack any sort of information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure or connectivity, and have no websites.

How can the $35 tablet help these NGOs’ global outreach efforts or aid the millions of people working with them in rural areas?

You probably know the answer to this question as well as I do: The same way as computer and phones can, only more so. Helping people to communicate and to do their work is exactly what ICTs do. All of them. With the possible exception of Angry Birds. A computer can help us to make leaflets, track visits to patients and beneficiaries, diagnose illnesses, improve farming techniques, or learn about anything we wish to know in the whole world of knowledge.

Can it bring transparency in governance at this level?

Good question. Not by itself, sure. Transparency comes from open data. The people might get together to publish what the government would rather hide, or pressure the government to release the data, but a $35 tablet won’t help them much.

When they do release that data, however, the usual problem is how to make use of it. Government data tends to be massive and unwieldy, and answering difficult questions takes much time and significant skill even with the best of data. I think that free, open, widecast media provide the biggest opportunity to make real use of transparency, and our use of the Internet as an enabler of democracy is the best example of that. Potentially, a simple but powerful Internet device could help bring people together to investigate and answer those difficult questions. But by the sound of it, this tablet is not quite there yet. Hopefully it will be soon.

Since a large population of our country communicate verbally, and cannot read and write with ease, their preferred medium of content consumption and content production is audio-visual… But to make use of good multimedia content, you need powerful machines, not cheap and underperforming ones.

I disagree with that. I grew up with “multimedia content” on BBC Micros: simple games, moving blocks around a screen, simple word processors and spreadsheets and databases and graphics. A picture is worth a thousand words, and a simple, clear diagram can be worth far more than a complex, confusing one. Advanced graphics are no substitute for a visual designer’s ingenuity and skill. Wikipedia is “multimedia content” that is perfectly suited to a $35 tablet.

If the $35 tablet can do anything good to education in India, the only way is by handing them to each and every teacher and school management staff to monitor the workings and functioning of the school and its teachers…

Monitoring is an interesting application, and a double-edged sword. Robert Chambers, the inventor of participatory rural appraisal, told us a story at the recent ICT4D Finale event in Cambridge of a hospital in India where the nurses were given mobile phones “to collect data at the source.” But the director of the hospital used it to monitor what they were doing, effectively spying on them. The nurses went on strike and eventually the director was fired. I think that for monitoring to have a positive benefit, it must be done with consent and a shared vision to use the data to improve performance, not to criticise and control.

rather than assuming that each student will buy Aakash and India will become digitally literate overnight.

I have to agree with that sentiment, although I’m not sure who raised it. Kapil Sibal, who takes the credit for inventing the $35 tablet, merely said:

This low cost device is part of our national mission on education through information and communication technology (NME-ICT) which will connect over 1,000 institutions across the country, enabling tonnes of web-based course content for free.

Now that doesn’t sound so far-fetched, does it?

When you have a classroom full of children with computers, each working at their own pace on speech or language tasks, they need private sound rather than the built-in speakers of their laptops. Otherwise the cacophony would make learning much harder for all of them.

Headphones (or headsets) are the normal solution for language labs in UK schools. But they’re not great for use with primary school kids in a dirty, dusty environment. They’re extremely fragile, hard to clean, uncomfortable to wear for long periods, and can spread ear infections.

A bluetooth headset would work, and would be nice in theory, but much more expensive, and would need charging often.

The most obvious solution seems to be something that looks like a mobile phone, but attaches to a computer with a cable. They’re very hard to find. It seems that everyone wants tiny, delicate, wireless or in-ear headsets. So manufacturers don’t bother making the kind of big, clunky, bulletproof handsets I’m thinking of.

First, after long and fruitless searching, I discovered that what I’m looking for is actually called a handset (because you hold it in your hands) and not a headset (that fits over your head).

And then I found them:

Unfortunately the cheapest I’ve found so far is £10 ($14) through Maplin, which is about ten times the cost of the cheap, fragile headsets we’d like to replace.

If you know of any others, or a cheaper bulk supplier than Maplin (such as their supplier in China) please let us know!

Jeff continues to try and solve the low bandwidth/high latency problems that aid workers face in the field every day and that we encountered in Indonesia. We all know the joy of VSAT networks that slow to a crawl because either some folks on the team are downloading stuff they shouldn’t be downloading or all the computers are infected with bandwidth sucking viruses. It appears Jeff has moved one step closer to sorting out some of the problems surrounding bandwidth optimization by utilizing the Go programming language.

Rather than try and explain to you what Jeff has done I’ll let you read ‘A rate-limiting HTTP proxy in Go‘ and ‘How to control your HTTP transactions in Go‘ and sort out what he is talking about. Hopefully, this post will bait Jeff into leaving a lengthy comment that explains exactly what the hell he is up to.

My understanding is that Jeff is developing two useful tools:

• A web proxy that simulates low bandwidth connections, similar to the Loband Simulator. Jeff’s version is probably more accurate than ours because it doesn’t need to modify the web page, but ours might be easier for non-developers to try out, because you don’t have to install any software.
• A web proxy that can be fed prepackaged content repositories to serve up, so that you can take pre-prepared content (offline websites) with you into the field, and browse them through the proxy as though you were online.

People have been trying to make offlineable websites for a long time. Some of the best examples so far are using entirely client-side (in-browser) technology, such as the Logistics Operational Guide, developed by the World Food Programme for the Logistics Cluster, which can run entirely offline using Google Gears.

Gears had a lot of potential for developers to create offlineable websites, but Google has abandoned its future development in favour of the open standard HTML5, which is not ready yet. So there’s no obvious and future-proof way to develop offlineable websites at the moment. Jeff’s proxy, combined with a spidering system, could be one way to download an entire site, even if it wasn’t designed to be downloaded by the developers.

Another important potential comes from content management systems (CMS) such as WordPress, Drupal and Joomla. More and more websites are developed using such systems, rather than coded from scratch. The systems know all of the pages on the site, and the links between them, and could easily build an offlineable version of the site for download into Gears, HTML5 or Jeff’s proxy. And one plugin could potentially enable thousands of sites to be offlineable, especially if it was included in the CMS distribution and enabled by default.

A few wikis such as MediaWiki, MoinMoin, DocuWiki and JSPWiki have a programming interface (XML-RPC or WebDAV) that allows a smart client to download pages in their original text format, which could make them more efficient to store offline and also potentially editable offline. Jeff’s proxy could be extended to support sites built in such wikis automatically. There are still some limitations to this approach:

• The pages would not look the same as the online versions, since the styling wouldn’t be downloaded and the effects of CMS plugins would not be visible;
• It would probably still be quite slow to download an entire site this way, by spidering, without server-side support for downloading multiple pages at once;
• Few websites are built out of Wikis, so the potential maximum reach is limited compared to better support for WordPress, Drupal or Joomla.

Anyway, I wish I knew Go, and had time to hack on Jeff’s proxy tools.

I’ve been wanting to write some thoughts about Digital Resilience for a while and reading Janet Gunter’s blog post about Mobile Blackouts and the Poor has prompted me into finally doing it.

I think we’re going to see the subject of Digital Resilience rising in our consciousness over the coming years… at least we should. What do I mean by it? We regularly allow ourselves to rely on information and communication technologies but these tools can be  fragile and have many modes of failure. Often this fragility is not taken into account. I see this all the time.

Here’s a typically example. I’m on the phone to a friend organising an evening out. How many times have I heard the phrase “I’ll call you when I get to town”? This relies on us both having signal, on our batteries not running out and on our phones not breaking, being lost or stolen. Modern “smart” phones eat through their batteries at a tremendous rate and sometimes crash or reboot so these failure scenarios are not that unusual. If any of the things that our phones rely upon fail what is our back-up plan? Are we going to wander around the city, aimlessly, hoping to bump in to each other? Or go home?

A failed night out is not the end of the world. The point I’m wanting to make is that most of the time people seem oblivious to the failure modes of the technology they use or the need for back-up plans. And yet when you’re in the habit of considering technological risks it becomes second nature, like finishing a sentence with a full-stop
.

So when I hear “I’ll call you when I get to town” I usually can’t help myself say “And if I don’t hear from you, I’ll meet you at the station…”

The situation gets a little more serious in a business context. Take the example of a conference call. Scheduling a call between several people can take a lot of planning trying to find a time when everyone is free. If this time-slot is missed it can represent a significant opportunity cost to the organisations involved. The duration of the call itself represents a cost when you consider the time of the people involved. There is growing use of Skype for conference calls in the professional community. Sometimes Skype works very well but in my experience it frequently doesn’t work at all. Many times I have been asked to participate in a Skype conference call with no back-up even when many of the participants are in developing countries. When the Skype call fails much time is wasted, sometimes several participants are excluded and sometimes the call is abandoned all together. My automatic response to a Skype invitation is usually to send round the number of a phone conference service just in case.

OK, failed conference calls are still not the end of the world. For someone poor or vulnerable a technology failure could be much worse. At the recent ICTD2010 conference I was very interested to hear for the first time a few people talking about vulnerabilities to the poor caused by reliance on ICTs. For years the ICT4D community has been promoting the use of ICTs in poverty reduction. There has been a fair amount of work in adapting technologies for harsh environments. However these technologies still have failure modes and it was very encouraging to hear the resulting vulnerabilities being discussed.

Digital resilience is less about building robust technologies and more about building an understanding of its failure… and the habit of back-up plans.

This is an area in which Aptivate is also very interested, and one in which I’ve done some research and been following developments. I still managed to learn quite a bit from three very interesting presentations:

Information Economy Report 2010 (UNCTAD)

The informational dimension of poverty, i.e. where information can help to alleviate or reduce poverty:

• Market price information
• Income-earning opportunities (e.g. jobs)
• Weather information and warnings
• Correct use of pesticides and fertilisers
• Health information and education
• Disaster risk reduction

Communication up and down the supply chain, and with peers and advisors, also helps.

There is an increasing trend to direct involvement of the beneficiaries in the production of ICTs:

• As ICT workers
• Manufacturing of ICTs (as an alternative occupation to subsistence farming)
• Providing IT and ICT-enabled services (answering questions, finding information, running telecentres)

Mobile phone penetration has exceeded all other ICTs in growth in developing countries. On average in the least developed countries, it has increased from 2% to 26% of the population (1000% growth) from 2000 to 2009. Possibly the fastest-spreading technology ever in the history of the world.

Growth is uneven. There are still some LDCs where less than 10% of the population have a mobile phone. In Ethiopia for example, only 5% have a phone. This was largely attributed to lack of liberalisation of telecomms markets.

Half of rural population in LDCs have no access to a mobile phone signal, which will limit the further growth of mobile usage. Many Universal Service Funds are sitting unused. In some cases this is because they are mandated only to be used on the fixed line network, which is nearly obsolete.

Mobile micro-insurance has become a big topic. For example:

• Kilimo Salama in Kenya
• Burkina Faso, Mali (index-based crop insurance)
• Alliance Afrique

Kilimo Salama recently made their first payouts to farmers because weather conditions exceeded their thresholds. The payouts are automatic and don’t have to be claimed by the farmers. The largest was about $30.

Even those who don’t have access to ICTs themselves can benefit from more transparent markets when enough participants use ICTs.

Download the full report (PDF, 171 Pages, 1240Kb).

Enabling role of ICTs to transform smallholder farmers to entrepreneurs (IFAD)

IFAD offers grants and loans to governments for argicultural development programmes. They are starting to offer grants (but not loans) to the private sector as well.

Grameen and BRAC had limited success with mobile banking (so far), because most of their customers are groups, not individuals, and mobile phones tend to be personal devices.

IFAD and WFP are running a joint project called the Weather Risk Management Facility (WRMF), a micro-insurance project. Half of the insurance premiums are paid by the farmers, and half by the sellers of inputs (seeds, fertilizer, pesticides) as they benefit from farmers being willing to buy more of their products due to reduced risk of crop failure.

ICTs enhancing plant production at the field level (FAO)

e-Locust2 uses vehicles with GPS, laptops and HF radio modems to send real-time information on locust swarms to governments, which can help to warn and prepare neighbouring villages and allow the targeted use of pesticides to control the pests. Time is critical to achieve this.

Digital Pens are being used to capture information entered on forms. The pen recognises what is being written, and where on the form, and captures the data for later upload. This makes it possible to have electronic filing with minimal training, minimal unreliable ICTs, an inherent fallback to paper-based methods, and hard copies of the forms that can be given to farmers or stored in local offices.

There are problems getting pest monitoring officials to enter high quality data when there is no incentive (reward) for accurate data, e.g. in one-way monitoring systems. If governments used this data to target their interventions, villagers would have a much more obvious incentive to ensure that the data was entered accurately and on time.

Thanks

Thanks to FAO for hosting this excellent seminar, and to the World Food Programme for allowing me time off to attend it.

Several of us expressed an interest in continuing the discussion online, we have been heard, and Michael Riggs, lead facilitator of the e-Agriculture Community, is working on enabling this to happen. There will also be a follow-on discussion at the ICTD 2010 Conference in London.

There is the smell of autumn in the air reminding me that we’re on the steep part of the sine (-ish) wave of rapidly shortening day length and presumably sun altitude. Last week the PV panel was out of shadow. I noticed half way through today that a good 25% of the panel was now in shade. With my head down frantically programming in python I didn’t have time to extend the legs of the gridbeam frame. Instead I balanced the frame precariously on top of the compost bin.

The laptop started the day with a flat battery and so was drawing 5 Amps initially. I decided to forego the external monitor today. The laptop was was fully charged by lunch time so went down to 2 Amps. With the laptop suspended the power supply still draws 0.2 Amps so I unplug it for lunch. Unfortunately after lunch I forgot to plug the supply back in and didn’t realise until a few hours later when the laptop was practically flat again. It recharged by the end of the day but just as I was finishing I noticed the solar battery was shut down again despite having a relatively sunny day today.

Starting Voltage: 12.2V
Ending Voltage: 11.8V

All images are embedded SVG in the XHMTL. No bitmaps at all. Notice how fluid it is, how it scales with the browser’s zoom in and zoom out controls (Control + and Control – in Firefox) and as you resize the browser window.

Screenshot of Sam Ruby's Blog

The page is small, just 14.5k of HTML plus 6.6k of CSS. There’s 21k of JavaScript that isn’t required for the design. Even the drop-down menu at the top works with Javascript disabled. Finally there a WOFF web font that adds 40k (another nice technique). It would be nice to have web fonts hosted for cross-site caching.

One disadvantage of designing sites this way is that the page must be valid XHTML for inline SVG to work. This makes it difficult to support older browsers properly, because the server must send the content-type as text/xhtml+xml, not text/html. This will cause older browsers to download the page instead of rendering it. You could work around that with user agent sniffing. I think that Internet Explorer might need that in any case.

Another disadvantage is that very few CMSs currently support generating valid XHTML, so it’s difficult to know what tool we could recommend to help you to build and manage a website with inline SVG. Massimiliano of the Habari Project says:

I don’t have any examples of blog software constructed this way… the only way to find out how many people would like having SVG on their blog is to provide a blogging tool which allows them to do it.

Both issues could be worked around by using external SVG (in separate files) instead of inline (embedded in XHTML). External SVG files are more cacheable but require additional HTTP requests to fetch from the server the first time.

Most older browsers do not support SVG images, so although the site degrades gracefully, it looks very plain without any graphics. You could work around this with a server-side renderer that converts the SVG to PNG for older browsers.

I think this is an excellent example of a great technique that we could be using for many more sites.

A cloudy day. This is one of the interesting things about taking responsibility for my electricity production – it’s not just that I replace the electricity I used to use. The awareness I am getting is modifying my behaviour.

I generally think of myself as someone who tries not to waste energy. I turn lights off when I leave rooms etc. But trying to run my working life off an under-dimensioned solar power system is being a real education in energy wastage.

Today I’m having the usual one hour lunch break. Normally I would probably leave my computer on. Today I don’t even suspend the laptop, I shut it down completely… and unplug its 12 volt regulator. I want to see 0.00 amps flowing out of the battery when I’m not using it.

I’m also aware that I’m starting the day with a fairly empty battery and it’s cloudy – so today I’m not using the external monitor…

(time passes)

…I got through the day but around 5pm the solar charger shut down the load to protect the battery from getting too flat. So I worked the rest of the day, up to 6:30, using the internal battery of the laptop. By the end of the day I’ve got 10 minutes battery left on my laptop, about the same on the Samsung / PixelQi netbook and a shut down deep cycle battery. Hmmm. (I’m actually writing this blog entry on Day 6 because I ran out of power on Day 5)

Day 6

The forecast was for sun this morning, potentially worsening through the day. I’m starting the day with an empty solar battery and no reserves on the laptops. I have to get up early (early for me anyway, if not early by international standards) to get the panel out. At a push, the sun starts being usable from about 8am so I’ve got 2 hours to get enough charge on the battery.

Luckily, yesterday evening, the 15m extension cables for the PV panel arrived so I don’t have to lug the battery around. I start by dragging the panel upstairs to the east facing bedroom to try and get the early sun. By the time I’ve got it all plugged in the sun’s rising high enough that it’s hitting the doorstep out the front. I take it down there instead. The panel’s bigger than any of the panes in our windows so there would always be a shadow from the window frame which would seriously reduce the power output.

As the minutes tick by I’m glued to the multi-meter watching the voltage slowly climb, repeatedly running out the front, rotating the panel to face the sun. (There is some debate about whether it is better to spend money on mechanical trackers or on more static PV panels instead. However manual tracking is free… if a complete pain in the back-side.) It gets to 10am, time to start work, and the solar charger is still disconnecting the load. I use my last few minutes of laptop battery to skype in to the office for the morning meeting and then, with a sad face, I plug the laptop into the mains. I’ve broken my mains-free diet. And what’s even more irritating is it’s a gloriously sunny day. There’s probably enough power coming off the PV panel to run the laptop directly, but I’m not set up to do that… yet. Digital-Resilience #fail.

I’m hoping the battery will get enough charge over the weekend to see me through next week. Until I’ve built my office-cum-shed with the south-facing roof in the garden, I’ve got nothing to attach the PV panel to in a permanent way. We’re away for the weekend and I’m worried the panel might go for a walk if I leave it out in the garden so it’s currently inside standing vertical against a west-facing window. Knowing the PV panel is less than optimally placed is taking some of the joy out of the fabulous sunshine we’re having today. I did try and persuade the family to bring the battery and panel away with us. They think I’m obsessed. Luckily for family relations the panel is too big to fit in the boot of the car and the battery is too heavy to carry on the train.

If I make even more gridbeam I could, in true agile fashion, just make the roof of the shed.

I am using the equipment we used for the “Small Is…” festival to see if I can go “off-grid” for my work electricity requirements. This is a pilot to investigate the possibility of the whole of Aptivate being powered by renewable energy.

Because my house faces East-West, to get the morning sun means either dragging the panel through the house and putting it outside the front door or dragging it down the far end of the garden. Trying the garden this morning – it will be interesting to see how the sector of sun moves across this part of the garden.

Right now I’ve only got about 4 metres of cable to run to the PV panel which means I have to drag the 33kg battery down the garden too – made all the more difficult today because I broke my toe yesterday running into my baby’s high-chair!

Really I need to get the panel up higher… which means drilling more gridbeam.

Today was going to be a particular challenge to stay “off-grid” as I’m supposed to be pair-working out of “The Skiff” with Nate. I’ve had a last minute reprieve as Nate’s not going to be there until the afternoon – but how do I stay off grid there? The battery is too big to carry.

For pair-working we want to use a decent sized screen. We use an one of the Iiyama 12 volt 24″ monitors, which in Eco mode takes about 20 Watts. Interestingly the Samsung N220 netbook we have can drive the big screen quite happily. It would be useful to get a bigger battery for the netbook anyway, so I could conceivably run a whole working day off the netbook’s battery. That only leaves powering the monitor.

There are small lead acid batteries that I could carry to the Skiff. For an 8 hour day I would need a battery with about 20 Ah. That’s 20 Watts / 12 Volts  x 8 hours x 1.5. The 1.5 is to make sure the battery never gets below 1/3rd capacity as this would shorten its life.

A shadow has shifted and is covering one of the cells on the PV panel, and if the voltage from one cell drops it tends to pull the others down with it apparently, so be back in a minute…

…ow! Never try and cut back brambles without gloves. I didn’t realise this solar experiment would be so dangerous.

A 20 Ah lead acid battery would weigh about 6kgs – which could just be carried but is on the heavy side. The screen takes about the same power as a netbook, so I’m wondering if a lithium-ion battery would be more appropriate – they are about a third of the weight. I imagine I would need some kind of charge controller for it – the solar charge controller is specifically for sealed lead acid batteries.

…Nate and I didn’t use the large screen for pairing today so I’ve got through day 4 without mains electricity using the battery in my laptop and netbook for the afternoon.

battery voltage at the end of day 4:  12.11V