Thought from 2013 mBillionth Award Jury
I had the pleasure to be part of the grand jury team of the 2013 mBillionth Award. I was also there in last year’s jury. Again, it was inspiring to observe the creative solutions put forward to address different developmental challenges using mobile as a means and making a difference to people and their livelihood. The richness, depth and variety of applications speak themselves of the power and potential of mobile applications. i can see the quality of applications also getting better comparatively, perhaps now there are more and more people getting involved in this ecosystem, which has added value to raise the quality bar and also pushed competitive feeling.
The two days that i experienced was an utter qualitative time spent with the jury members and the DEF team. What appears in the award book as winners in different categories is the outcome of hours of intense discussion, scrutiny and introspection by the jury over the nominations. The nominations submitted had a wide range of ideas and solutions, and it was also a personal learning experience to witness great innovations that they have put in. Besides the normal usage of applications in common verticals like governance, health, education, entertainment i must also concede that the innovators through their nominations have been responding to the emerging needs of the society as well and not only remain supply driven.
As one concrete area that i want to highlight to support my above assertion is the provision of mobile applications to protect women. I do remember there were so many mobile applications developed and nominated on safeguarding women and help prevent violent against them, namely – Fightback, trishulam, HelPls, Safety shield, etc. it must have been prompted also from horrible bus rape case in Delhi, besides the need to empower women. Such simple and extremely useful tool for women to feel safer and more secure, are only a couple of clicks away, in fact in one app it was even driven by a mere motion of a mobile –perhaps many apps in future would use this relatively newer user Interface. Most of them sent the user’s location via GPS to pre-set contacts along with an SMS message with one push of a button, and it can also be linked to Facebook and twitter. As mobile phones become more prevalent even in rural and mountainous areas, these solutions can offer care, information, help and protection to women and girls across countries and cultures. While currently, many of these apps are available only for smartphones, which limits their availability and usability, i would be glad to see these services supporting and protecting women through very simple and basic SMS services, using local languages, which do not require a smart phone, or even an internet connection.
As a final point, hats off to DEF and the mBillionth award team for they deserve all glory for getting the work done efficiently and the trust they put into collective wisdom through the jury members. mBillionth award is truly an event showcasing mobile for masses and offers platform to nominees to present their innovations and to awardees to provide additional impetus to continue their objective of ensuring continuous inclusive growth and services to
Masses.
Sushil Pandey
ICT Practitioner at ICIMOD in Nepal