Rapidsms

Developer Erin Mullaney was just in Amsterdam for RapidCon, a UNICEF-hosted event for developers using RapidPro, an SMS tool built on Django. The teams that have worked on RapidPro and its predecessor RapidSMS have gotten to know each other virtually over the years. This marks the second time they’ve all come from across the globe to share learnings on RapidPro and to discuss its future.

Last Friday, the Cakti set aside regular client projects for our quarterly ShipIt Day, a chance for personal development and independent projects. People work individually or in groups to flex their creativity, tackle interesting problems, or expand their personal knowledge. This quarter’s ShipIt Day was all about open source contributions, frontend fixes, and learning new (or revisiting old) programming languages. Read about the various ShipIt Day projects for Q2 of 2016 below.

We are proud to say that, with the Libyan High National Elections Commission (HNEC) and consultative support from the United Nations Support Mission to Libya, we have open sourced their elections management platform today under a permissive Apache 2.0 license. Open sourcing means other governments and organizations can freely adopt and adapt the elections tools which cover nine functional areas. The tools range from SMS voter registration, the first of its kind, to bulk alerts to voters and call center support software. You can learn more at our brand new SmartElect homepage. This is the cumulation of two years of work, so we’re incredibly excited to share SmartElect with the rest of the world.

As proud sponsors of PyCon, we hosted a one and a half hour free workshop. We see the workshops as a wonderful opportunity to share some practical, hands-on experience in our area of expertise: building applications in Django. In addition, it’s a way to give back to the open source community.

Last Friday marked another ShipIt Day at Caktus, a chance for our employees to set aside client work for experimentation and personal development. It’s always a wonderful chance for our developers to test new boundaries, learn new skills and sometimes even build something entirely new in a single day.

The Stanford Social Innovation Review recently featured Caktus in “Text the Vote” in Suzie Boss’ “What’s Next: New Approaches to Social Change” column. It describes how our team of developers built the world’s first SMS voter registration system in Libya using RapidSMS.

This is Caktus’ first year taking part in the Catholic Relief Service’s (CRS) Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) conference. The theme of this year’s conference is increasing the impact of aid and development tools through innovation. We’re especially looking forward to all of the speakers from organizations like the International Rescue Committee, USAID, World Vision, and the American Red Cross. In fact, the offerings are so vast, we thought we would provide a little cheat sheet to help you find Cakti throughout this year’s conference.

Caktus co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Colin Copeland, is among an outstanding group of top business leaders to receive the Triangle Business Journal’s 2015 40 Under 40 Leadership Award. The award recognizes individuals for their remarkable contributions to their organizations and to the community.

The best part of PyCon? Definitely the people. This is my fifth PyCon, so I’ve had a chance to see the event evolve, especially with the fantastic leadership of Ewa Jodlowska and Diana Clarke. We were also lucky enough to work with them on the PyCon 2015 website. This year we were once again located in the Centre-Ville section of Montreal, close to lots of great restaurants and entertainment.

Caktus has been involved in quite a few projects (Libyan voter registration, UNICEF Project Mwana, and several others) that include text messaging (a.k.a. Short Message Service, or SMS), and we always use RapidSMS as one of our tools. We’ve also invested our own resources in supporting and extending RapidSMS.