Legal Justice Goes Mobile

FrontlineSMS is an application that turns any laptop into a mobile communication gateway without any internet required. Using only locally available technology, the tool has been used for everything from helping rural healthcare workers access far away patient records to monitoring elections. Yesterday's launch of FrontlineSMS:Legal not only expands the family of custom products built on top of the platform, it reinforces the power of technology platforms in general in shaping the next century of development and emergency response.

For those unfamiliar with the technology, FrontlineSMS is a free downloadable software program that makes it easy to turn any laptop into a communication hub for a large number of people. It allows for easy one-to-many messages (for example, a nurse messaging an alert about cholera to all field health workers in a specific region with just one text), as well as the ability to customize responses for different types of queries or different groups of users who text back.

The tool first debuted a few years ago, and since then has been used in hundreds of deployments - many of which had nothing to do with the original use cases imagined by the founder of the organization, Ken Banks. One of the earliest uses that pushed the tools to new areas was the experiment of a Stanford student, Josh Nesbit, who used the platform to dramatically shift how a rural health clinic in Malawi interacted with its rural outlying patients. The project enabled community health workers to travel farther and return less frequently, saving the clinic time and money.

The project was successful enough that it created momentum for the first FrontlineSMS spinoff, FrontlineSMS:Medic. The idea of the group is to build off of the core architecture of the FrontlineSMS software to customize the platform for use by local clinics around the world. Not long after that, a group started thinking about how they could use the one-to-many, no-internet-needed platform to help power credit exchanges and get regular people access to quick cash, and FrontlineSMS:Credit was formed. Soon, an education version called FrontlineSMS:Learn will begin testing.

The announcement of FrontlineSMS:Legal extends and expands how the core platform is being used. It follows the pattern of the others: a hack of the original software customizes the information delivery gateway in order to deliver a customized type of information - in this case, legal info. At the same time, the attempt to deliver legal information involves immensely complex social norms. The new platform wants to make sure that people everywhere know their rights and the legal resource available to them.

Justice is an essential (some would argue the essential) pillar of a free society. Like everything else, the way justice is dispensed is changing in accordance with new needs and new technologies. Local legal systems are being employed in situations like the Rwandan genocide to dispense culturally contextual justice at scale, and at the same time, transnational justice systems like the International Criminal Court are trying to change patterns of impunity for corruption and autocracy at the global scale.

It seems like FrontlineSMS:Legal's role will be more about letting people at the individual and community level know about their rights and local resources. If they can make it work, it will be extraordinarily valuable.

The family of FrontlineSMS applications demonstrate the power of creating technology platforms for good that are easily customized for different situations. It's not just Frontline that is demonstrating this, however. The deployments of crisis info crowdsourcing platform Ushahidi continue to grow more diverse, and the organization has spawned related offshoot projects like Swiftriver, a powerful tool build by Appfrica Labs that makes it easy to sift through a rush of data and extract the most important points.

This all suggests that going forward, much of the most important technology will not be the version created by the founders, but the versions created by the users who hack it for their discreet purposes.

Photo credit: timsnell