SMS Interface

[anandology]

Lot of people are not on web. Many of those who can access web, can't access it always. Lot of times people want to interact with the system, but the barrier-of-entry to open a website, login and do something is so high that it never happens. I would be great if we have a way to interact with the website via SMS.

Imaging things like sending an SMS to all volunteers in a ward or entering number of houses visited today in door to door campaign. What if we allow them to send SMS like below and record that interaction in website to a pre configured phone number?

SENDSMS W012 We've a meeting today evening at park xyz. All booth agents are requested to attend.

or

ENTRY D2D PB0123 2015-08-15 20

or

ADDVOL AC012/PB0034 Lakhman Ram 1234567890 ABC1234567

The first one is to send an SMS to all volunteers of ward W012, the second one is to record an entry for door to door campaign and the last one is to add a volunteer with name, phone number and voterid.

For doing this, we can setup an android phone with some app like sms2web installed and configure it to forward all the incoming SMS to cleansweep instance. The cleansweep can look at the phone number from which the SMS came and use that to decide if the sender has permission do the action he is trying to do.

If we provide a nice API to specify new SMS patterns like @route of flask, all the components of cleansweep can try to expose the important features via SMS.