This Thursday at Change, CSE faculty member Gaetano Borriello will be leading a discussion about a proposed smartphone application ODK Tables. He will provide a brief overview of the system and ask for feedback from the group on the approach and design elements of the application. SMS services are ubiquitously available around the world and are supported on even the lowest cost mobile phones. Applications are being developed that use SMS as the primary communication medium to a server back-end. However, this approach requires an ecosystem for implementing information services in the cloud, SMS gateways to get the messages to those servers, and web access to get to the servers’ data. Unfortunately, these capabilities are not readily available in all parts of the world, especially not in many developing world contexts. We propose ODK Tables, a smartphone application that organizes structured SMS communications to make it easier to manage large numbers of SMS messages. ODK Tables applies a spreadsheet metaphor to make it easy to create a variety of applications without the need to program or deploy services in the web. In this talk, we will describe some of the features of ODK Tables and how it is applied in a few use cases. We seek feedback on the approach and design elements of the application. Please join us for sandwiches, and to learn more about ODK Tables! What: Gaetano Borriello discusses ODK Tables When: Thursday, Feb 3rd at noon Where: Paul Allen Center, Room 203