…there's plenty of room at the bottom
Last year we defined a Voice (Audio) Portal for LFY Magazine (now Open Source For You)
This year we’ve worked out how to set up a public facing voice portal, with a callable number and publishing ability to the web for under USD 200.
Yes! This does mean that you can have your own automated outbound dialler for less than the price of a smartphone
Continue reading “How to set up a public voice portal for under USD200”
Crowdsourced Information Platform is how I refer in my head to the collective of services that have started in recent times to collect news reports, incident reports, personal stories et al in the form of a web post (as in Social Media) or an audio report recorded via an IVR system, a video uploaded via smartphone or even a simple SMS…and all the others that are sure to follow.
Essentially any form of two way communication, with a large user base. Note that one way information dissemination systems (such as TV, print media and IVR systems that dont let you record) don’t fall under my definition of a Crowdsourced Information Platform.
Some examples of Crowdsourced Information Platforms:
CGNet Swara
Video Volunteers
RuaiSMS (and other sites based on FrontlineSMS)
All kinds of Ushahidi websites
Facebook, Twitter et al
Google…all of it
Email (yep, and I’ll explain…in painful detail)
We all know that most of the Web is user generated…simply because everyone on the Web IS a user. However, as we open more channels of content, the definition of user must undergo some evolution. Different users will have different access mechanisms and therefore potentially radically different views of the same information. In order to be able to provide some order to the chaos, mechanisms will be required to group and link content.
Attempts are already underway to set up repositories of crowdsourced data. However, the variance in media being the way it is, it is unlikely that any single centralized system will be able to cover everything and everyone.
A distributed system is needed where each node is able to communicate using a minimum acceptable standard. Where a medium cannot meet the peer communication standard, a translator can be introduced as an intervention.
By keeping the peer standard constant, the only requirement to add a new medium to the network remains to write a translator from that medium’s existing communication mode to the network standard.
Our (Mojolab’s) recommendation for that standard is EMail.
Email has been around for a looong time. It is one of the earliest applications of networking between computers and has been hammered into shape by, in IT timescales, the weight of millennia.
Continue reading “Mojomail – Using Email to Integrate Crowdsourced Information Platforms”
Our technology roadmap is focussed on developing a set of fungible tools that can be used to crowdsource the collection, curation, publication and visualization of content, primarily in the form of incident reports
Our tasks in crowdsourcing are classifiable into broadly 5 phases
Collection of crowdsourced data can be done via any public medium, such as SMS, Email or Phone
For almost all our projects we currently export all incoming reports to email, to provide a single, familiar content management interface
This phase involves verifying the content, editing it for quality and summarizing it in text
The curation phase is best performed by a large group of people and is therefore crowdsourcable
We again use email for this.
All curators are members of a mailing list. The mailing list acts as the data repository, and each members inbox presents a view of that repository. As long as replies are sent to the mailing list address, the views across curator mailboxes should say consistent
Members of the curator mailing list send back their updates to each message on the same conversation, so each conversation represents the body of work done on that piece of content
This phase involves taking the curated messages and publishing them on different public interfaces, such as blogs and websites
Dear Students
This is our first Summer of Code and we are very excited at the prospect of working with enthusiastic young people.
Our goal for this GSoC is to develop a set of fungible tools that can be used to crowdsource the collection, curation, publication and visualization of content, primarily in the form of incident reports
Please read this link before reading the ideas:
Long before socially inclined technology projects start creating tangible impact for their shareholders, begins the torrent of data generated by technology interventions. This data is typically valuable, since it contains new information about communities who have often never been connected to any digital media. Moreover, the data usually also contains performance related information related to the intervention itself. However, the data is collected in so many different forms and formats that it is usually very difficult to analyze data from all sources comprehensively.
Ever since Mojolab began, we’ve experienced a consistent challenge in being able to manage data that has been coming at us like an avalanche from our many sources in the field.In our case, data is collected both passively by automated systems as well as actively by human particpants. The automatically collected data is stored in several databases, each on a different remotely placed notebook server, connected only by a VPN.
The manual data is collected as a set of excel sheets, often made by participants from the field. These sheets often vary in format, even for similar data. For example, two volunteers in two different locations may collect participant data for workshops in completely dissimilar looking Excel sheets, when compared based on column names, but which represent the same type of data, in that both are lists of people.
To solve this problem we came up with the idea of a tool that would be able to combine tables in different formats to make more comprehensive data sets.
In the simplest case, the tool would be able to take two tables (as CSV files), for example (see figure below)
Continue reading “LivingData – Building collaborative datasets”
Voice enabled technology is one of the most promising bridging tools available to society. Given that large portions of the worlds population remain isolated from the Internet community and as a result are often marginalized and disenfranchised can now actually use their voice as a means to communicate with the world.
Several teams are now working to build solutions in this area, with Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems that are accessible by phone and internet and provide a means to build bridges across the digital divide.
This presentation was delivered at the conference “Turn Up the Volume: Bringing Voice to Mobile Citizen Journalism” organized by the International Center for Journalists at the Rockefeller Foundation’s facility in Bellagio, Italy between Oct 8-12 this year to bring some of the key thinkers of this space together.
In it, we provide a broad overview of how most IVR systems work, with Swara IVR as a case study and also talk about how mobile phones, the internet and other communication media can be linked together to form independent, community owned communication networks.
Continue reading “Post-Bellagio Catharsis #2 – Voices Across the Digital Divide a.k.a. “There’s plenty of room at the bottom” (v 2.0)”
Jitendra Singh(Hyderabad, India)
Any quick pointers on setting up IVR on an Indian phone line ?
Anoop Saha
You can use our open source software of Swara. http://swara.mojolab.org/
To phone callers, Swara presents a 2 way Interactive Voice Response that the user navigates using the number keys on their phone.
Jitendra Singh
Is there someone who can help us set this up quickly? Simple menu, just need to record the caller-id
Continue reading “Conversations about Swara IVR: Jitendra from Hyderabad India”
Waheedullah Zadran Babrakzai
hello my dear indian friend
i hope yo be fine and ok
Arjun Venkatraman
tell me boss…how are you!
Waheedullah Zadran Babrakzai
i am fine
actually u r my boss and teacher
i have learned many things from you
how r ur works going on there
Arjun Venkatraman
dude…come on…i am barely even able to respond to your messages…work is going well
i was in kabul recently
and may be back for a week in the coming months
Waheedullah Zadran Babrakzai
really
i hope u enjoyed here
would that i could see u from near
Arjun Venkatraman
yes, it was great…much better weather than the first time i was there…well let us hope for the best
how is yourproject?
Waheedullah Zadran Babrakzai
i am still stuck in ivr section
actually i couldn’t find any IVR software through which i could receive user input(DTMF) to enter it to my SQL Server database
Continue reading “Conversations about Swara IVR: Waheedullah from Afghanistan”
Reposted from http://arjunstechblog.blogspot.in/2012/10/gps-morse-code.html
A week at the Villa Serebelloni in Bellagio, Italy does lead to excellent ideas. One that I wanted to put out on the internet as soon as possible is to use GPS as a signalling system.
Most smartphones now come equipped with GPS, to support applications like Google Maps and Open Street Map.
It would be interesting to see if GPS can be used as a signalling system, with GPS on=1 and GPS off=0.
This would be particularly useful for disaster situations or for personal emergencies. Since GPS is usually always available irrespective of WiFi or GSM or other provider network, it seems like the most reliable place to look.
Maybe Google Latitude can include an “Emergency Ping” over GPS, where if they receive a particular pattern of bits from the GPS on/off method, they send an email alert to all the persons friends on Latitude. Now THAT is a Google service I would probably be willing to see ads in order to have.
This needs to be technically validated though, so will add detail to this post and if anyone else wants to validate or implement and talk about it…here’s a good place to start!
Swara IVR, which won the mBillionth Award for m-News and Journalism in 2010 in it’s avatar as CGNet Swara has won the award again in 2013.
On July 21st, at an awards event organized by the Digital Empowerment Foundation, the Mojolab team spent the day interacting with the best and the brightest in the mobile/social technology space in New Delhi. We also presented the latest updates in the Swara network and showcased some of our future plans. It was a delight sharing space with visionary projects like eduVarta and Kisan Sanchar, last year’s winners.
Graamvani‘s Jharkhand Mobile Radio project, inspired by CGNet Swara, also received a special mention at the awards in the same category.
Continue reading “Swara IVR wins mBillionth Award for the 2nd time!”