As I’m again late for the quarterly report and it’s already May, I switched to a division of the year into thirds - this being the resumé of our activities from February to now. Here are the links to the reports from last year:
For the future we are planning to open up our blog for guest authors - but more on that soon. Also we are currently working on some videos and a short series on ICT4D.
It’s been more than two years that we started blogging for ICT4D.at here on this platform with a definition of ICT4D. A lot has happened since, but we are still here, active in ICT4D and still convinced about the concept.
We are from time to time getting requests from groups or individuals who want to contribute to this blog or want to share their own projects with us. So we decided to give some of them the possibility to publish here and reach out to our community. More on this in a coming blog post.
One of the projects - Sendinel, a piece of open-source software which helps to improve
communication between clinics and patients in areas such as rural South Africa is introduced here in the following. The author of this intro text to Sendinel is Johan Uhle, bachelor student of computer studies at the Hasso-Plattner-Institute at the University of Potsdam, Germany.
Regularly going to a clinic or hospital is the basis of good health-care. But traveling to a clinic is, especially in rural areas, connected with a lot of effort, time and cost for the patient. Therefore patients only want to go to the clinic when they feel that it is really necessary.
This is one reason why patients sometimes do not attend follow-up consultations or vaccination appointments. On the other hand some people come to the clinic more often than necessary, because they have to check if something they are waiting for, like a medicine or a lab result has already arrived.
Thus it would be good if clinics could remind and notify their patients when they have to come to the clinic again.
Sendinel is a software that does this by sending SMS and automated phone calls to patients. When a
patient is at a clinic, the doctor, a nurse or admin clerk can subscribe the patient’s cellphone number to one of the following reminder or notification services:
• Patients can be reminded of follow-up consultations and vaccination appointments
• Patients can be reminded when their lab results have arrived
• Patients can be notified when a medicine is in stock again
• Patients can be informed about specific topics by the clinic. An example is to inform all pregnant women about the next gymnastics training.
To send the messages no internet connection is required because the messages are sent via an USB 3G Stick with a regular local SIM card. The Sendinel team has successfully deployed the server application to a clinic in rural South Africa on a Plug Computer which costs less than 100 $.
If you want to know more about Sendinel please visit the Homepage at http://www.sendinel.org. The software is published under an Open Source License.
Sendinel has been developed by a team of seven Bachelor students of IT Systems Engineering at the Hasso-Plattner-Institut in Potsdam/Germany. The project is part of the graduation process and lasts for about nine months until July 2010. The team is currently looking for people who want to use and further develop Sendinel.
Partners of the project are SAP Research Pretoria, the University of Cape Town and SES Astra. These partners also made it possible for the team to go on a research trip to South Africa in March 2010. During that trip, Sendinel was deployed in a clinic. You can read more about the trip and the resulting findings in this blog post on the Sendinel Blog.
Here you can see and download my presentation. It’s in German and CC-licensed (attribution, share-alike) so you can reuse it - you just have to mention our organization and the following Flickr-users whose pictures I used:
It’s time again for our monthly Stammtisch meeting. It’s not the second Thursday in May though, but the third one - due to various reasons. So not this week, but next one.
The meeting is for curious people in Vienna to find out about ICT4D in general, what we do, how to help and generally just to have a nice evening. We’d be happy to get to know a lot of new people.
Here’s a shout out for an upcoming event called DIY Kenya commission, which is a new residency opportunity for technologists, creatives and collectives to travel to rural Kenya. The aim of the residency is “to develop innovative ideas, products, events, interventions or artworks in response to everyday African concerns“.
Background Technology is being used in highly innovative ways both in the west and in the developing world. These innovations are not always for artistic or cultural purposes, but that may alter or call into question traditional ways of doing things. The effect of these changes on the day- to-day lives of individuals is significant and often inspiring.
When: 18 July- 10 August, 2010. Deadline for submissions: 14 May. More info here.
Our project Zanzicode is a course on web application programming for the urban youth of Stone Town, Zanzibar. Our aim is to strengthen the local IT capacities and provide young people who might not be able to afford it otherwise with additional education.
It is the successor of our Zanzibits Support project, which four motivated young finished successfully at the end of last year.
One of these alumni - Salum - already had some additional experience and showed so much talent in teaching himself that we decided that we would hand over the teaching to him and concentrate on organizational issues and applications for funding. Furthermore we searched for organizations in the area to improve the project and better adapt it to local conditions, and have found a promising partner with Aidnet Zanzibar.
Now we have started the course with twelve new students and are happy to announce the first funding we received - the Austria Development Agency (ADA) is taking over more than half of the project costs for the first year.
We are very happy and we’ll do our best to make this project a success.
For Zanzicode itself, we are always looking for partnerships and collaborations with NGOs and the private and public sector - so if you happen to reside in the area, our project description sounds interesting for you and you think you can contribute something, just contact us!
Also, if you too want to support the project financially, please donate here. Thank you!
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As I’m again late for the quarterly report and it’s already May, I switched to a division of the year into thirds - this being the resumé of our activities from February to now. Here are the links to the reports from last year:
Our project Zanzicode got sponsored by the Austria Development Cooperation also in May - we’re very happy about that. Furthermore Anders announced DIY Kenya commission at Maker Faire Africa 2010 and Johan Uhle from Hasso-Plattner-Institute at the University of Potsdam, Germany had a guest post about the innovative open source software project to help in rural health care - Sendinel.
To send the messages no internet connection is required because the messages are sent via an USB 3G Stick with a regular local SIM card. The Sendinel team has successfully deployed the server application to a clinic in rural South Africa on a 
Partners of the project are 
