MobileActive covered a project called Wikimapa by Rede Jovem, where teenagers use Nokia N95 phones to map unmapped areas of Rio de Janiero.
The project cost $87,310. The evaluation section of the article was interesting:
The most challenging part of the project was developing the mobile application. The organization is still working to develop versions for other operating systems. Having a long-term, sustainable budget is also challenging. The project was unsuccessful in getting grants from Nokia — they bought the phones themselves — and currently doesn’t have any money to sustain the project beyond December. Because the project doesn’t actually make money, they are dependent on grants and its unlikely to be scalable or sustainable. — MobileActive.org
I’m going to contact the organizers and see if they’d like to use some of the techniques we’re prototyping now.
Rede Jovem (via MobileActive.org)
November 25th, 2009 at 6:09 am
No wonder the project is unsustainable .. what a budget to blow on developing applications. Totally, they should use pre-existing stuff .. use Cartagen, or buy a few iphones and install mapzen. Why even have a phone .. we just use GPS units and a lot of sweat to map Kibera.