Learnings from Frontline SMS

[bensheldon]

Good stuff in this FrontlineSMS reflection

The 5 bullet points at the top:

We were more of a thesis and vehicle for social change than we ever really were a business.

Running an organization that builds and maintains a customer-facing, open source software platform is different than running organizations that do other things.

It is hard to overstate how much people disregard SMS as a platform.

There’s a chicken-and-egg problem in public interest software pricing.

Most people think of designing a digital service like building a car: it may take a lot of initial work, but - at some point - you decide it’s “done” and then it just “works forever.” [it does not]

We made technical choices based on what would reach the most people, at first because it was the only way to reach last-mile markets and, eventually, because it led to the most resilient, replicable tooling.

[bensheldon]

Via this Twitter thread, https://twitter.com/oso/status/1437385903236796421?s=21