Our prototype in testing

We are currently working with about 20 homeless people to test our prototype service. We are hugely indebted to Sheila Scott @ Shelter From the Storm and Ben Richardson @ Connection at St Martins for their support of the service and for letting us meet and work with their guests and clients.

Core curated accounts
We created a master service account that a homeless user follows after signing up to Twitter online or over their mobile. (This is the 'Welcome' account). Through this account and supporting documentation, we then introduce our users to a number of other curated accounts that we operate based on specific content streams. These content streams currently include:

WELCOME: Information on new curated accounts and service updates
TIPS: ​​ Useful info and advice to make a difference day-to-day
FIND:​​ User can tweet a question to get information on a specific service
ENJOY: ​ Updates on fun and free things to do (films, music, art)
DO: ​​ Updates on sports, and outdoor and social activities
LEARN: ​Find classes, courses, lectures and workshops
NEWS: ​ Daily weather updates & news

Additional accounts:
In addition, we are investigating the possibility of creating other specific accounts with relevant information for particular user segments such as women, those with no recourse to public funds, and those suffering with drug and alcohol problems.

We are also looking at how we can enable service providers, whose Twitter efforts are predominantly focused at non-homeless people, to take advantage of mobile as a communication channel with clients. This could be ideal to provide updates on the organisation, spread useful and timely information, issue appointment reminders or gather feedback.

Selecting the right content:
Users will be informed of the content of each account and can decide how to interact with it by either ‘following’ or ‘getting’. ‘Following’ will mean that they receive each tweet from the account by SMS. 'Get' means that the user can request only the latest tweet from an account and is not overburdening themselves with unnecessary content. We envisage each user having a different 'fingerprint' of accounts they follow, tailoring the information over time to suit their needs.

Amplifying a users voice:
Once provided with access to the basic accounts, and on reaching a certain level of confidence using the service, users can then begin to make use of its outbound potential. We provide an account we will refer to as a 'help' account that follows all the users of the service. When a user tweets a question or comment, it is seen by the help account and if suitable it can then be retweeted to the other homeless users or a network of service followers (non-homeless), who may be able to answer the question or feedback.

Whilst this is not something we can easily automate, it means that homeless users do not have to rely on people following them directly to be heard. To make this even easier, we have built a Twitter list so that non-homeless users can directly access any tweets made by our users without having to follow them all individually.

What we've been up to

Well, it is clearly time for a well-overdue update on all things Homeless SMS. It’s going to be a big one as I will try and explain what we are currently prototyping, so apologies in advance.

A role for Twitter?
Ohyoon and I have been extremely busy over the last couple of months experimenting with Twitter as a platform. It's easy to forget the humble SMS origins of the now-mighty Twitter; in fact, it was a great surprise to find that they still support SMS and, in addition, even fund it. (Well, at least I think they do!)

For those who don't know Twitter, it enables pretty much full operation and interaction by SMS via their short code. This means that you can register, tweet and follow (or stop following) accounts with various straightforward(ish) text commands. Crucially, you also receive any tweet from the accounts you follow as an SMS.

Twitter too scary?
We were immediately interested in the potential for Twitter or a similar platform as a basis of a communications tool for the homeless, but we were concerned that throwing the homeless headfirst into the Twittersphere was absurd, particularly if SMS was their only means of interacting with it. Despite its simplicity, Twitter can take some time to get your head round, and knowing where to start, or understanding how to get what you want out of it, can be daunting for anyone. Coupled with this, the sheer volume of tweets a regular user can find themselves having to process, if delivered in individual SMSs, would rapidly send a mobile phone and the person using it into meltdown.

Reduce and simplify
To reduce the 'fear' and impracticality of Twitter for homeless users, Ohyoon and I have been working to create a portal of sorts which can deliver a simplified, useful and SMS-friendly Twitter tool for our homeless users. The idea is to minimise the stress of interacting with a social network like Twitter and make it as easy as possible, rather than leaving people to work out how to get something out of it.

What we want it to do
We need the tool to enable users to easily:
• select and manage which information they receive and when
• be updated with useful regular information and updates
• ask questions and get answers.
• share information and answer questions from other users.
• interact with other users independently as part of an informal support network.

We have already begun to test this and I will explain exactly what we have built in the next post.