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beyarkay / eskom-calendar

Get your loadshedding schedule in your calendar and never be left in the dark! Open-source, up-to-date, and developer friendly.
https://eskomcalendar.co.za
GNU General Public License v3.0
190 stars 35 forks source link

Product for non-smartphone users #85

Open beyarkay opened 1 year ago

beyarkay commented 1 year ago

Most of south africa doesn't have a smartphone. If loadshedding data could be provided to 'dumbphones' then a lot more people could be helped out. I don't have much experience in this field, but I think it could be really big.

thehta commented 1 year ago

As a dumbphone user, what I use to check the schedule when I'm not near my PC is the PDF printed out...

beyarkay commented 1 year ago

Okay cool, do you mind if I ask a few questions? I don't really know exactly what would be useful but also don't want to limit the idea to just those people who have a smartphone.

  1. Would an SMS-like service be useful? Maybe you can sign up to get an SMS either a) an hour before loadshedding, b) when loadshedding changes or c) once a day with your loadshedding schedule for the next 24h
  2. Are there any other services out there which provide internet-like facilities but without explicitly requiring the internet? I'm thinking it would be better to see how this problem has already been solved than to try solve it myself from scratch.
  3. What concerns would you have about this idea? or put another way, are there any features that would be a deal breaker for you?
thehta commented 1 year ago

Good questions. Yeah, an SMS is the closest you're going to get to push-notifications if you don't have access to data. I would imagine that a day-forecast (with updates to the forecast, should there be any) to be the most useful. But SMS is a different game... I have no clue what the rates are on bulk SMSs or how accessible SMS providers make their APIs.

Another plausible option would be to somehow "zero-rate" the calendar website/.ics files, so that people with smartphones can access the calendar without using data. I think the demographic you have in mind do have access to smartphones, but the limiting factor is access to mobile data. Not sure how feasible this would be, perhaps if the project had enough steam you could convince someone at MTN or Vodacom of this need...

beyarkay commented 1 year ago

Okay, thanks for the input. This actually ties in with some other tangential ideas I had. As you would have noticed, there's no historical loadshedding on the calendars, only forecast. So far I've just been doing this because it's simpler and I figured having ever-increasing calendar file sizes couldn't help anyone, but now I've got a more concrete reason for why to keep the file sizes small.

I think I'll keep thinking on this and drop ideas back here if I think of any, but won't make active progress on this until a more clear way forward comes through. I know some friends in real life with experience in making traditionally smartphone-only things available more broadly, so will chat with them.

beyarkay commented 1 year ago

@everyone if you're reading this and have any ideas, leave a comment!

beyarkay commented 1 year ago

Reviving this to say that twillio provides both a WhatsApp API and an SMS API (Thanks @ponelat on ZATech!), although there is a cost associated so it would likely have to be a paid tier thing (even though a paid tier doesn't exist yet...)

Possibly the end user could provide their own API key that eskom-calendar uses to post messages on their behalf, but that could provide issues with securely storing API keys somewhere.