Sms on Caktus Group

RapidCon 2016: RapidPro Developer's Recap

Wed, 16 Nov 2016 15:41:07 +0000

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.

ShipIt Day Recap: Q2 2016

Thu, 21 Apr 2016 12:00:00 +0000

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.

Open Sourcing SmartElect: Libya's SMS Voter Registration System

Wed, 28 Oct 2015 17:01:54 +0000

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.

PyCon 2015 Workshop Video: Building SMS Applications with Django

Fri, 24 Jul 2015 12:00:00 +0000

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.

Stanford Social Innovation Review Highlights Caktus' Work in Libya

Fri, 12 Jun 2015 18:43:50 +0000

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.

Cakti at CRS ICT4D 2015

Wed, 27 May 2015 12:39:51 +0000

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.

PyCon 2015 ReCap

Tue, 21 Apr 2015 19:55:57 +0000

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.

Why RapidSMS for SMS Application Development

Mon, 16 Mar 2015 12:00:00 +0000

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.

PyCon Blog Features Caktus Group

Tue, 27 Jan 2015 21:07:10 +0000

Brian Curtis, the director of the Python Software Foundation, recently interviewed and featured Caktus on the PyCon website. PyCon is the premiere event for those of us within the Python and Django open source communities. Brian writes about our work designing the PyCon 2015 website, our efforts in Libya, and what’s on the horizon in 2015. We’re excited about this recognition!

Caktus Libya Project Makes Top 10 Stories of 2014 for Technology Tank

Tue, 06 Jan 2015 18:07:44 +0000

Technology Tank, a communications and tech think tank, recently ranked their top 10 stories of 2014 and Caktus made the cut. Earlier this year, we shared a story about Libya’s SMS voter registration system. We’re happy to learn that other people were just as excited about our work enfranchising Libyan voters as we are! The list is based on number of visits to the story.

Improving Infant and Maternal Health in Rwanda and Zambia with RapidSMS

Fri, 19 Sep 2014 21:19:06 +0000

Image courtesy of UNICEF, the funders of this project.

I have had the good fortune of working internationally on mobile health applications due to Caktus’ focus on public health. Our public health work often uses RapidSMS, a free and open-source Django powered framework for dynamic data collection, logistics coordination and communication, leveraging basic short message service (SMS) mobile phone technology. I was able to work on two separate projects tracking data related to the 1000 days between a woman’s pregnancy and the child’s second birthday. Monitoring mothers and children during this time frame is critical as there are many factors that, when monitored properly, can decrease the mortality rates for both mother and child. Both of these projects presented interesting challenges and resulted in a number of takeaways worth further discussion.

Chapelboro.com: Carrboro Firm Develops Web App to Register Voters in Libya

Tue, 01 Jul 2014 15:56:31 +0000

Chapelboro.com recently featured Caktus’ work in implementing the first ever voter registration system via text message.

TechPresident: Libya Uses World's First Mobile Voter Registration System

Thu, 26 Jun 2014 10:00:00 +0000

Caktus team members from our Libya mobile voter registration team recently spoke with TechPresident about the context and challenges of implementation.

Triangle Business Journal: The Triangle technology fueling Libya's election

Thu, 26 Jun 2014 02:30:21 +0000

The Triangle Business Journal recently featured our work in Libya on the first ever SMS voter registration system.

Caktus Supports Libya Elections with World’s First SMS Voter Registration System

Wed, 25 Jun 2014 17:16:19 +0000

Today’s election in Libya, the second general election for a governing body since Gaddafi’s ouster, is being supported in-country by our Caktus team. Caktus developers created Libya's SMS voter registration system, the first of its kind in the world.

Caktus Implementing New Policy Modeled on Foreign Corrupt Practices Act

Fri, 04 Apr 2014 21:23:59 +0000

Caktus’ successful growth in mobile messaging applications overseas has been a wonderful point of pride for us. The work we’re doing internationally has real impact on burgeoning democracies, HIV/AIDs patients, and others where technology makes all the difference.

Caktus Teaches mHealth to Fulbright Enrichment Students

Thu, 30 May 2013 15:03:53 +0000

[As part of the Fulbright Enrichment [From Lab to Market]{style=“font-style: italic;”} seminar, Caktus hosted 16 Fulbright students from around the world on Wednesday, May 29th. The participants were engineering and science students with an interest in Public Health and Mobile Health innovation.]{#docs-internal-guid–15dfdd3-f622-293e-da9c-340d4c5b5818}

Thoughts after attending the UNICEF Rwanda mHealth Conference

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 17:00:00 +0000

This past July, I had the pleasure of attending the UNICEF Rwanda Conference in Kigali, Rwanda. The conferences focus was on developing a comprehensive eHealth suite for numerous nations to implement.

An alternative RapidSMS router implementation (with Celery!)

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 18:00:00 +0000

We've been using RapidSMS, a Django-powered SMS framework, more and more frequently here at Caktus. It's evolved a lot over the past year-- from being reworked to feel more like a Django app, to merging the rapidsms-core-dev and rapidsms-contrib-apps-dev repositories into a single codebase (no more submodules!), to finally becoming installable via pypi. The "new core" is in a great state now and is much easier to work with. However, one particular aspect of RapidSMS, the route process, has always been complicated and confusing to deal with. Tobias began the conversation on this issue after returning from a 6-week long UNICEF project in Zambia. He summarized the route process like so:

Expanded services, portfolio, and more in the new Caktus web site

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 20:46:20 +0000

We're pleased to announce the release of the latest and greatest Caktus web presence yet. This edition features an enhanced services section and portfolio. Among other things, the new site demonstrates how our Django-based content management system can be used to connect related pages in customized, innovative ways.