Freedom Fone celebrates 1000 days of development

Freedom Fone wins the Innovation Award of the Index on Censorship 2012

We are very happy to announce that the Freedom Fone is the winner of the Innovation Award of the Index on Censorship 2012 for its contribution to the area of Freedom of Expression.

The Index of Censorship's prize recognises innovation and original use of new technology to circumvent censorship and foster debate, argument or dissent.

Our congratulations to the Kubatana Trust of Zimbabwe to conceptualize Freedom Fone and to all those developers that spent sleepless nights with us writing and debugging code. Special thanks to Giovanni and Areski for your patience with us and the Freeswitch, Cake PHP and Ubuntu communities for being always there. Thanks for the freedoms of open source software to allow us to make an idea a reality.

A presentation of Freedom Fone in slide share  http://www.slideshare.net/nahingax/freedom-fone-africa-gathering-nairobi2010-it46-v2|here

Freedom Fone

The first free and open source voice content management system (vCMS). The low cost audio information bridge.

Freedom Fone is a voice content management system that makes possible the convergence of telephony services with the Web. Thanks to Freedom Fone, Callers can leave audio messages or listen to content navigating IVRs. Using the graphical interface, Administrators can send and receive audio content from the most common telephony channels, including GSM, VoIP and Skype.

After working several years with telephony systems for civil society and media organizations, we discovered that there was not an open source integrated system able to do what Freedom Fone can do now. Rather than presenting millions of options to set up a telephony system, we have invested our energy to build a few but very powerful telephony applications that can be used with a great degree of flexibility. We have put special emphasis in the user interface and lowering the cost of interfacing with the GSM network.

The system has been localized to English, French, Spanish and Swahili and extensive documentation is available for the end users and developers.

Dashboard with incoming voice and SMS messages

Monitoring of incoming calls and simple configuration of voice services

The core development team of Freedom Fone is  IT46, a Swedish consultancy company delivering free and open solutions in developing regions since 2004.

Freedom Fone code development has been possible thanks to the support of  Kubatana, a civil society NGO in Zimbabwe. More information about Freedom Fone including deployments and case studies can be found on the project website Freedom Fone.

Freedom Fone has been built and deployed in a low power appliance as a stand-alone system and connected to the Internet.

Freedom Fone Appliance

Videos

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More videos in the  Freedom Fone Youtube Channel

Contact

Core Developers

Alberto Escudero-Pascual aka aep (backend and system integration)

Louise Berthilson (frontend)

Contributors

Giovanni Maruzzelli (gsmopen)

Areski Belaid (newfies dialer)

Localization

Brent Barber (French)

Emanuel Feruzi, Martin Benjamin (Swahili)

Charo Atauri, Nico Gnecchi (Spanish)

You can reach the developer team at: lab @ freedomfone . o r g

News

  • 2012-2-3 We have upgraded our public development platform and we run now four servers: archive (binary repository), lab (subversion and trac), demo (demo website) and wim (ip configuration service)

Features

Freedom Fone is built combining the power of several open source projects that include:  FreeSWITCH,  Spidermonkey,  PHP5,  Cake PHP and  JQuery. Freedom Fone uses  Cepstral, a text-to-speech voice engine to synthesize voice messages.

Telephony interfaces

  • GSM
  • VoIP (SIP)
  • Skype (appliance version only)

Applications

  • Leave-a-message (LAM)
  • IVR (single and nested)
  • Polls via SMS
  • Audio and Text-to-speech
  • Multi-lingual support
  • Localized (Swahili, English, Spanish, French)

Hardware support

  • Mobigater (single GSM channel, AT GSM modem)
  • 2N Office Route - Voice Blue (multiple GSM channels)
  • SIP-based external gateway

Graphical User Interface

  • MVC Framework
  • Graphical User Interface with RBAC
  • API

Security and Privacy

  • Role Based Access Control
  • Encrypted Audio Storage
  • Automatic Sweeping of personal identifiable information

Monitoring and Reporting

  • Call data records
  • Monitoring of user preferences in IVRs and audio content
  • Automatic generation of reports

Releases

Freedom Fone is distributed both as an installable ISO and a build system based on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. Freedom Fone can be obtained as an appliance. Our public releases are named after the  African Wilddog known as 'Lycaon Pictus'. Every major release takes the name from a Subspecies.

The name of our five major releases are:

End of Life

  • Lycaon Pictus 1.0 (end-of-life 2010)
  • Lycaon Lupinus 1.6.5 (end-of-life 2010)

Current

  • Lycaon Sekowei 2.0.3 (long-term-support LTS)
  • Lycaon Manguensis 2.S.3 (security edition + API) (latest version under Ubuntu 10.04 and Freeswitch 1.0)
  • Lycaon Manguensis 2.S.4 (security edition + API) (LTS release under Ubuntu 12.04 and Freeswitch 1.2-stable)

Development

  • Lycaon Suyo 2.D (dialer edition) (RC1: 2012-04-04 / tag 2.D.2)

Documentation

Filing tickets and requesting new features

Log into our trac system with the user: freedomfone and the password: now

Repositories

Archive and software repository 

 http://archive.freedomfone.org/
 http://archive.freedomfone.org/installer/

Full checkout of the code: 

 svn co http://lab.freedomfone.org/svn/freedomfone freedomfone

Branches and Tags 

 Security Edition (tag: 2.S.3 branch: 3.0) svn co http://lab.freedomfone.org/svn/freedomfone/branches/3.0/
 Dialer Edition (tag: 2.D.1 trunk) svn co http://lab.freedomfone.org/svn/freedomfone/trunk/

Latest ISO 

 http://www.freedomfone.org

Attachments