Adventures in field testing, in which we almost melt a mobile phone.

I have good news on funding, and the Indaba fieldwork platform gets its first real-world testing.

Indaba has three main functions: Designer, which defines a project; Builder, which executes the fieldwork; and Publisher, which gets stuff out to the world. Of these, the Designer component is the first one up and running. We have Designer in beta testing with real data; the Global Integrity Report 2010 is our test bunny.

It’s performing well. This is an important milestone for us: we have a product. Much work remains, especially on the systems used by field staff, but this is good progress.

Another important milestone passed: we have preliminary indications from a new funding partner that there will be significant support to deploy Indaba with NGOs in the transparency and accountability space. Indaba will be staffed (by me, initially) to providing substantive support and guidance to get these organizations started with the new system, share best practices and incorporate user feedback into future development. The exact form of these partnerships is to be determined. We’ll share more details on the funder when it becomes official.

If you want to use Indaba at your organization, or know of a project that you think would benefit from Indaba, I’d be very interested to talk to you: email info@getindaba.org or comment below this post.

For now I’m very, very excited that we will have both the technology and the institutional backing to make Indaba impactful. For me, it was never about building cool tech. It’s about giving citizens worldwide a voice, to challenge top down information flows and replace them with something more democratic.

So, about melting that mobile phone…

Right. When our team of developers took the training wheels off Designer and let me start testing it with real data, I wanted to do it from something approximating real working conditions. This means giving up my reasonably brisk DSL Internet and going somewhere with less bandwidth. Much less bandwidth. Then, in the fine tradition of vigorous user testing, I was going to push it until something broke.

When I had a chance to spend a week working from a cabin in northern Wisconsin, I was in. The cabin had electricity but no Internet or phone, so I brought along a borrowed Palm Pixi, which can run a wifi hotspot off of a 3G network. In theory.

All the phone needed to work was access to the 3G network, which worked as long as the weather was good and no one stood near it. To maximize reception, I put the phone out on the back porch. The sky was threatening rain, so I wrapped the phone in a plastic bag, plugged in the AC adapter, and went inside to start up the laptops. Pretty soon, I was clicking away at the Indaba test site.

The good news here is that Indaba was a joy to use over the low bandwidth connection. Mainstream sites like Facebook or newspapers were unusably slow to load, but Indaba did just fine. We work hard at this — all the complexity of Indaba lives on the server side. The web interface has very few images, limited javascript, and simple HTML. As a result, the site loads pages quickly and completely on a connection that was punishing webmail and other online platforms. By now, the sun came out and I was feeling pretty good.

Do not do this.

And that’s when the trouble starts. Apparently charging the phone, running wifi, and talking to distant towers all do one thing: create heat. This is typically radiated harmlessly, unless you thoughtfully wrapped the entire phone is several layers of clear plastic. And when you add in some direct midday sunlight, clear plastic and an all black phone, you have now created a very tiny, very hot mobile phone powered solar oven.

I realized there was a problem when the phone kept rebooting, but I couldn’t shut it off because it the metal buttons were too hot to touch. Testing success!

– Jonathan Eyler-Werve