BUILDING WITH, NOT FOR:
GRASSROOT
Luke Jordan, Executive Director, Grassroot
About Grassroot
• Our vision is a nation self-organizing from the ground up
• We have created simple, purpose-built tools that:
– Reduce the cost and time of the routine tasks of organizing and
mobilizing in low-income communities
– Work on any kind of phone, with any quality connection
– Enable people to call meetings, take votes, record decisions,
recruit and find others, and summon help in an emergency
• This year we have grown 10x, to over 10,000 users, and
2,000 meetings, votes and todos called through the tools
We build in connectivity-scarce
environments
Low airtime
Spend per week, % of users
“Rising smartphone” penetration is
less than it seems
45
•
40
35
•
30
25
•
20
15
•
10
5
0
•
“Dinkies” (old, R100 Nokias) are still
prevalent and often preferred
Even “smartphones” are often 2ndhand Blackberry, old Nokias
Android phone are often grey
market, virus/bug ridden and old
versions (e.g., from 2009-10)
Challenge is only partly connection
“speed”, as much availability—it
comes in and out, minute-to-minute
Electricity is as much of a
constraint—charging phone battery
once a day not feasible
WhatsApp helps, but …
“The ‘dead cat’ problem … Refers to when
you create a WhatsApp group to organize,
and it works fine for a while. Then
someone’s cat dies, and they post about.
Then everyone sends them pictures. Then
someone talks about their dog. Pretty soon
you mute the group, and it’s done.”
-- National campaign coordinator
“Well the problem is 70% of our members
have WhatsApp, but 30% don’t … So we sent
out a meeting notification, but those guys
didn’t get it. Then they became angry,
because they said we’re excluding them.
Now every meeting I have to remember who
has what phone. It’s terrible.”
-- Local political activist and organizer, Gauteng
Our tools: three interfaces
*134*1994#
No data, any
type of phone
Android app,
built with
“offline mode”
Web app for
desktops, no
images, little data
How we build
User-centric
Lean
Agile
• 3-4 months of research before touching code
• Then continuous feedback—almost 90 individual
contact sessions, over 30 workshops w/ ~5 users
• Has shaped everything from an automated “thank you”
message to rebuilding the data model
• Core team of 3 full-time: myself, a junior developer, a
community builder
• Flexible contracting arrangements, from senior devs to
ground-level “Grassroot Ambassadors”
• Aggressive use of cloud & open source technology, from
AWS to Stanford’s NLP libraries
• We do a deployment on average once a week
• Willing to wholly abandon features and ideas if they do
not have traction, and/or add new ones when needed
(e.g., ‘join codes’)
Growth in users
Growth in tasks (meetings, votes and
actions) called
In Jan-Feb, Grassroot processed 1-2,000 notifications per month—we are now
averaging that per day
Conclusion:
Lessons learned in building for access
Realism
• Technology doesn’t solve problems, it just helps
reduce costs and time for people who do
• “If you build it, they probably won’t come”—
almost no new apps get downloaded anymore
Humility
• Meet users where they are, on the tools/platforms
they themselves use already
• Be prepared to get it wrong the first time, and to
iterate repeatedly to improve anything that’s built
Focus
• Avoid building something new just because
“apps” seem like a fashionable idea
• A health clinic can’t be built in a week by a team
that has no doctors—a non-tech project team can’t
build an app in a week (except at low quality)
THANK YOU
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