[wp-hackers] Heartwarming side effect of the iPhone admin challenge.

[Stephane Daury]

Regardless of the material outcome, this whole WP/iPhone admin  
challenge might very well have a very good side effect faster than  
one would have thought.

Plank Design, the company I'm about to start working for (Oct. 29th)  
has a *pet project* where they've setup a group of 3 hospitals in  
Tanzania with a WordPress install to communicate with their audience.

<http://www.highlandshope.com/>
"Highlands Hope of Tanzania is an association of nurses who work as  
HIV-AIDS counsellors and caregivers in the Southern Highlands of  
Tanzania. Currently, their members are part of the healthcare staff  
at Consolata Hospital in Ikonda, the TANWAT Company Hospital in  
Njombe, and the PIUMA HIV Testing Centre in Bulongwa."

If you think about it, their current audience is of course mostly  
"limited" to computer/internet users, which in this part of the world  
is far from the majority of the population.

Knowing how it is far easier to find a decent mobile phone/network in  
Africa (never fully developed the copper infrastructure) than a  
decent computer/connection (xo laptop isn't quite there yet), I'm  
going to try to actually increase the scope of what WordPress allows  
the staff/volunteers to do by enabling them to actually reach a much  
broader audience through the mobile admin plugin and another project  
of mine, a php-based mobile feed reader (<http://tekartist.org/labs/ 
parseme/>).

In their context, and with this simple setup, WP could go from a  
blogging tool to bring awareness to their cause, to a full fledged  
communication platform by enabling the medical staff to blog from the  
field (remote villages), and the patients and/or authorities in these  
same remote locations could access up-to-date news through the WP feeds.

Now, it's safe to assume they're not going to use the iPhone  
interface much, but both of the released contender projects so far  
have committed to try and support a wide array of devices, with the  
latter actually being the focus at the core of our own efforts.

So here we are: from one simple question sent by Doug to the list on  
September 12th (what would it take to make a mobile WP admin?) to  
potentially making life a little better in the third World, all in  
less than a month. :)

Aaaaaaw.

Cheers,

Stephane Daury