Andy Nicholson is a free software hacker and new media activist. He has been a member of the CAT collective (http://www.cat.org.au) since 1999. CAT have run linux workshops and skill exchanges, and initiated such online projects including active.org.au, and the initial indymedia.org network software ‘active’. Andy was facilitator at the recent Asia Source FLOSS conference held in Bangalore, India, (www.tacticaltech.org/asiasource/) and is currently in residency at MultiMedia? Institute - mi2, Croatia, working on free software projects (www.mi2.hr)

mo:life
What kind of technical innovations are happening within the non-commercial sector with regards to mobile phones? Can you point us to any of particular interest?

Andy Nicholson
The scene for free software (for example, GNU GPL licensed software ) on embedded devices, like mobile phones, is, I think, naturally smaller than that targeted to personal computers, network servers, etc. Devices like mobile phones only recently gained programmable capabilities, like being able to run Java or C++ applications, and have limited capabilities compared to home user’s desktop machines. This is changing, and I think the free software scene will pick up in response.

A lot of the focus at the moment is to develop the tool chain required for developing applications on mobile devices using free software environments. For instance, porting the Symbian OS environment to run under GNU/Linux [1], and to develop applications for Nokia Series 60 using Python [2].

[1] symbianos.org
[2] www.forum.nokia.com/main/0,,034-821,00.html

mo:life
Can you give a brief run-down on the software you’ve created?

Andy Nicholson
NGO Phone Ops [NOP] (somatix.net/node/8) is a mobile phone application designed as a utility inspired by the convergence of the social movements of free software, free culture, and globalisation of social justice. The NGO Phone Ops is designed for NGOs and civil society groups and collectives to communicate with their supporters. It features an RSS feed reader, SMS broadcast tool plus a photo-blogger, designed for citizen journalists to report back via their multi-media capable phone to the NGO’s blog site.

This first release is really just an aggregation of other GPL software modules wrapped into an application designed to be easily customisable and deployable for collectives and NGOs. The second stage of development I hope to do (collaboratively) includes making a web front-end to populate the application with all the
customisable details. This front end would then provide links to share with the group’s supporters so they can download the custom application. I also want to refine the SMS broadcasting, to enable a centralised repeater service, to avoid each user SMS’ing everybody on the phone list, which obviously doesn’t scale well, and to enable it to update the phonelist via the network.

There are also more long term goals to incorporate functions such as video blogging and to develop location-based social networking, that is, to use geo-coded data, but at the moment handsets that support the Java APIs for these functions are rare and/or expensive.

[1] www.somatix.net/node/8

mo:life
Is it financially feasible for NGOs to utilise mobile technologies to engage with their supporter base?

Andy Nicholson
If the application is designed to diffuse the costs, then a small collective can offer up-to-date information via network services and make them available on mobile phones at a reasonable cost. In most cases the framework to publish to mobile devices will simply be part of their current web publishing system. For instance, they can publish news via syndication formats (eg RSS) which work equally well for syndication to other web sites as to mobile devices. In this case, each mobile phone user pays themselves to access the content, that is, to download the latest RSS news feed from the collective’s site.

As I mentioned, the SMS broadcasting tool is setup to use the individual’s phone to send the SMS iteratively to everybody else on the phonelist. This is expensive for the supporter, not the collective/NGO.

I have an idea, unexplored at the moment, to design the application in such a way that most content is already pre-loaded at the time the user downloads the application. The content, like the latest RSS feeds, and any audio/video content, will be already included. This shouldn’t be too hard, but its not done this way yet. Only when the user feels like downloading new RSS feeds, or using the broadcast tool, will they need to access the network. But lets face it, accessing the Internet on your mobile phone is expensive at the moment, especially when using pre-paid credit.

mo:life
It seems the mobile phone platforms and the applications coming out are very much proprietary and profit oriented in their nature. From your perspective, is this true? Can you describe some applications that go beyond this focus?

Andy Nicholson
There seem to be two main platforms of choice for mobile phone development - the Symbian operating system, which mainly uses C++ for application development, and the Java runtime environment, which requires implementation as a virtual machine for each embedded environment. Symbian isn’t open source, and while most of the Java development stack is, the standard Java runtime environment isn’t open source software - the implementations of the virtual machine from Sun are proprietary (RMS calls this the java trap. [1]). So, from the start the embedded software development scene has proprietary roots.

However the development IDE of choice for Java development, namely Eclipse [2], is free software, as are a lot of libraries and third party applications in Java. I use an Eclipse plugin for specific J2ME development called EclipseME - this is also a free software licensed product [3].

There are some well known and useful free software applications for mobiles, like Bemused [4], turning your phone into a remote control for your PC via bluetooth. There are lots of small applications out of there, but the scene is still small, compared to GNU/Linux and the desktop scene.

[1] www.gnu.org/philosophy/java-trap.html
[2] www.eclipse.org
[3] www.eclipseme.org
[4] bemused.sourceforge.net

mo:life
What about censorship issues? Have you (or anyone you know of) hit any barriers to using mobile technologies?

Andy Nicholson
I haven’t come across any censorship issues using mobile technologies specifically. However, as this application is designed to plug into the independent media and blogging scenes you could say it is part of that disruptive mediascape that has suffered numerous attacks from corporate and government interests [1,2,3].

[1] www.eff.org/Censorship/Indymedia
[2] www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/10/08/1097089554894.html?oneclick=true
[3] www.stallman.org/italy-indymedia.html

mo:life
Can you tell us how mobile phones are being discussed at the Plone CMS Conference in Vienna?

Andy Nicholson
I only went to the Plone multimedia sprint, not the conference directly. This sprint was only about building a specific Plone CMS product for audio/video uploads - not mobiles.

mo:life
How do you envisage the future (10 years) of mobile media usage by NGO’s and community groups?

Andy Nicholson
I would hope that community communications networks will expand in scope - like the community wireless networks are doing. As such, freely accessible local networks should be full of locally relevant media, freely accessible and sharable. Its probable that some of this media could be made with mobile devices, equipped with videos and wireless functions. At least it could be possible for mobile devices to hook in to these networks, and as you pass through, download the community produced information (conveniently bypassing corporate agendas).