RSS and SMS: Two Great Technologies that Work Great Together!

Working with grants from the Knight Foundation and the United Nations Foundation, DataDyne.org is creating MIP: a tool to let anyone broadcast SMS text messages.

• MIP lets anyone create news channels on even the most basic cellphones
• MIP lets organizations reach a variety of populations with targeted messages
• MIP lets anyone route RSS feeds to SMS

Since April 2009, MIP is being piloted in Chile as part of the DatAgro project, in conjunction with UNESCO, la Fundación para la Innovación Agraria (FIA), and the Zoltner Consulting Group. The DatAgro project will allow farmers to receive agricultural information as well as news, sports, and weather information -- all by SMS (text messaging).

Starting in 2010, DataDyne.org and the Zoltner Consulting Group have partnered with the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO/OPS), the Peruvian Ministry of Health and ADRA to implement MIP for their ongoing training iniatives. We will reach out to two groups - nurses and community health workers - to send text messages supporting and reinforcing the key points of their integrated management of childhood illness (IMCI/AEPI) trainings.

How does MIP work?

MIP allows groups that want to communicate with the public, or just within themselves, to very easily create a stream of short messages (called RSS, for "Really Simple Syndication") that can be sent from MIP as text messages to anyone who has chosen to subscribe.

As an incentive, people who subscribe can also receive messages of their choosing from news, sports, weather, or other websites, simply by texting simple commands to the MIP phone number.