SMS Geo-Chat
This proof-of-concept level tool allows you to connect a cell phone to your computer and use it as a central ‘station’ for receiving and responding to SMS with a map as the main interaction tool.
It was used in Golden Shadow to enable community responders to report incidents from different neighborhoods. A community volunteer would send messages to the command center with a location specified as latitude/longitude or an address in the message. The message would pop on a map at the command center where a designated operator would triage and reply to those messages. As the day progressed we tracked specific users, kept track of the conversation threads and pinpointed visually which areas didn't have enough coverage.
Key requirements:
- Receive messages from any phone and place them on a map on the operator’s desktop,
- Accept position data entered as latitude/longitude or addresses,
- Allow the operator to reply, showing the threads as a conversation,
- Allow the operator to maintain a simple address book associating numbers with titles,
- If the operator is online, upload the information to a website for others to see,
- Expose the information using standards such as GeoRSS,
- Allow people to visualize the information in common consumer mapping solutions.
This project takes advantage of the following technologies:
- RSS and GeoRSS as the standard data representation on the wire,
- Google Earth as the local interactive mapping application,
- A simple local web application that gets opened to ‘reply’ to the messages built with ASP.NET,
- Microsoft Virtual Earth and Google Maps as free online mapping applications,
- Google Maps geocoding web services to translate addresses into positions,
- Microsoft Research SMS Toolkit to receive messages and send responses hooked up to an HTC phone,
- An ASP.NET web application to host the information online and display it using multiple mapping solutions.
For Developers
- Source code, wiki and technical discussions at: http://code.google.com/p/geosms/
- Source is available under The MIT License.
Current Status:
Geo-Chat can be used for proof-of-concepts, but QA needs to be done to use it in a mission critical environment.
There are no current active efforts around this project, but the experience of building it and using it in Golden Shadow taught us things we are applying in Twitter Bots and other efforts that interact via SMS such as Contacts Nearby.