This work consists of two main components: (a) a longitudinal ethnographic study in Kyrgyzstan that demonstrates the importance of transportation resources in the developing world and how to plan for an appropriate ICT solution, and (b) the results of a proof-of-concept system engineered to create a bottom-up, transportation information infrastructure using only GPS and SMS. Transportation is a very important shared resource; enabling efficient and effective use of such resources aids overall development goals.
Short message service (SMS) is cell phone technology that is a simple and flexible transport mechanism for programmatic information exchange in developing regions for database-based applications. MySMS takes advantage of this medium by providing a framework using SMS as a transport layer to allow SQL queries, notifications, remote code execution and rapid application development.