MobileActive.org wants to hire you! If you are a cracker-jack researcher and writer, we want you for research and stories from around the world about mobiles for social impact. Some data entry on organizations and projects around the world using mobile phones to make the world a better place are also part of the job. Online and telephone research, interviews, writing reports and blog posts.
Must be a thorough researcher, and persuasive and clear writer. Living and working experience in developing country/ies a must. This is an ideal position for journalism graduate student with a great interest in mobile tech, or for a technologist interested in the social implications of the mobile revolution. Location in New York preferred but could be done from anywhere IF it's the right person. Fluency in Spanish or Arabic a great plus. Some travel will be supported.
Send a resume, cover letter explaining why we should hire you, and at least TWO published pieces pertaining to this or a related subject matter of at least 300-500 words. Send your materials to katrin [at] mobileactive [dot] org. Search is open until we find the perfect candidate(s), so hurry.
Greenpeace Argentina, as part of Greenpeace's global Whales Campaign, in a protest action yesterday delivered cans of fake 'whale' to the Danish Embassy in Buenos Aires. The action was recorded clandestinely by the activists on mobile video. According to Greenpeace, the Danish government is part of the pro-whaling meetings held in Japan. The cans were inscibed with "Whales Canned thanks to Danish support."
Great idea: The nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity offers free ringtones of rare and endangered animals. Download their haunting hoots, sensational songs and crazy croaks to your cell phone. Available are calls of the blue-throated Macaw, Beluga Whale, Boreal Owl, Mountain Yellow-legged Frog, Yosemite Toad, or any one of over forty other endangered critters. Ringtones are free and available here. Nice way to build a list as well.
SMS in Action is an interactive crowdmap that allows users to submit and search for SMS-based systems that aim (or claim) to have a social impact. The map can be filtered by categories including Agriculture, Health, Emergency/Disaster Services, Banking, Economic Development, Information and Media, Education, and Governance with many of these categories dividing into further subcategories. Reports may also be filtered by report date.
Corresponding markers on the map can be clicked giving the user the option to zoom in/out or get more information. While clearly still in its early stages, the map has a lot to offer. A quick search for disease programs under medical/health returned over a dozen hits across the map. Additionally, users may subscribe to receive location-specific email alerts whenever a report is posted within 20 miles of a designated area.
"The World Bank is a vital source of financial and technical assistance to developing countries around the world. Our mission is to fight poverty with passion and professionalism for lasting results and to help people help themselves and their environment by providing resources, sharing knowledge, building capacity and forging partnerships in the public and private sectors. We are not a bank in the common sense; we are made up of two unique development institutions owned by 187 member countries: the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) and the International Development Association (IDA).
Each institution plays a different but collaborative role in advancing the vision of inclusive and sustainable globalization. The IBRD aims to reduce poverty in middle-income and creditworthy poorer countries, while IDA focuses on the world's poorest countries.
A discussion on mobile application security must address the current issues facing mobile devices and the best way to mitigate them. This chapter aims to provide content on the following subjects:
Top issues facing mobile devices
Tips for secure mobile application development
The issues covered in this chapter are not exhaustive and appear in no particular order; however, they can be used to begin the conversation on mobile application security in your organization.
When it comes to water, every drop counts. When a local waterpoint malfunctions or dries up, it’s important to get the problem resolved as quickly as possible. That’s where Maji Matone, a water monitoring and civic participation project in Tanzania, comes in.
Run by Daraja, a Tanzania-based NGO, Maji Matone asks villagers to report outages in their water systems via SMS. Daraja employees read through the SMSs, then pass along the information to the local district engineer. The project is currently being piloted in three different districts. Each district has a local engineer responsible for the water infrastructure. If reports continue to come in and no action has been taken, Maji Matone turns to its media partners in order to publicize the lack of action.
According to the Wall Street Journal, “[Data produced by the use of mobile phones] generates immense commercial databases that reveal the ways we arrange ourselves into networks of power, money, love and trust.” As mobile phone use increases and applications become increasingly sophisticated, the volume of mobile data we create continues to grow at an incredible rate, creating new possibilities and posing new challenges to notions of privacy.
Businesses want this data for marketing. Congress wants to regulate it. Activists and privacy advocates want to ensure that it is not used to compromise their safety or freedoms. Meanwhile, projects such as UN Global Pulse want to use information gleaned from mobile phone use to detect and prevent slow-onset humanitarian crises. We invite you to join us on the evening of June 30th for our next New York City-based Mobile Tech Salon as we explore these tough questions:
How do we determine socially beneficial uses for mobile data?
How can the safety, security, and privacy of individuals be respected while using mobile data to benefit them?
How can our mobile data be effectively aggregated and anonymized? Or can’t it?
SharedSolar: Mobiles and Micro-Grids For More Efficient Energy data sheet 3737 Views
It is an unfortunate irony that often the poorest people pay the most for the lowest quality energy. In many areas, the rural poor pay as much as 5 USD per month for kerosene or battery power. SharedSolar is a project that attempts to develop the technology, and business case to connect these populations to better, more traditional energy sources. It does so by leveraging existing mobile networks.
With SharedSolar, rural poor consumers make payments based on their usage by using a scratch card and adding credit via SMS. The system uses a micro-grid network to connect consumers to power, and each household uses a unique prepaid metering system. A group of up to 20 consumers (individuals, households, small businesses, or schools) are all located within a 50 meter radius of a single, central power source -- such as solar panels -- connected via an underground wire.
At the same time, the SharedSolar team is testing and developing its business model to show that a case exists for micro-grids and mobile energy payment. The team launched an initial pilot in 2010 in Pelengana, Mali and currently has systems set up in Uganda and Tanzania.
MobileActive.org spoke with Matt Basinger, project lead for SharedSolar, to learn more about the overlap of mobile technology and rural power.
One of the main goals of the SaferMobile project is to release software tools that allow activists and rights defenders to use their mobile phones as network monitors and sensors. The goal is to help them, and the mobile developers, human rights organizations and people on the street they work with, to monitor network performance and proactively detect blocking, filtering and censorship. SMSTester is the first tool we are publicly releasing within this category, and it is free, freely licensed and open-source. Our first trial run with Short Message Service Tester (SMSTester) was completed in April 2011. The results are written up here.
The World Bank announced today the winners of its first-ever Apps for Development competition. The contest launched last October as part of the Open Data Initiative and invited developers and development professionals to create mobile applications to help solve world problems apply their skills toward the Millenium Development Goals. A total of 107 applications were submitted form 36 countries across every continent.
Honorable mention, for example, went to Treepet from Mexico, that teaches people about the realities of worldwide deforestation via a game in which you plant a seed, nourish and water it, and try to restore an ecosystem. One of the winning apps helps the Bank directly: StatPlanet World Bank from Australia uses the 3000-plus indicators available from the World Bank database in interactive maps and graphs.
Water is becoming one of the most contested resources in the world as populations increase and the availability of fresh water decreases. MobileActive spoke to the team behind NextDrop, an organization that uses mobile technology to monitor water flow in urban India.
Designed by a team of Berkeley and Stanford graduate students, the idea for NextDrop came out of a class at Berkeley's School of Information on how to use information technology for sustainable development. A group of students wanted to track intermittent water supplies in India. NextDrop was born. Ari Olmos, one of the team members running NextDrop, explains, “There was an opportunity to use information technology to improve the situation and create a schedule and feedback loop.”
Roughly 13 percent of the world’s population still lacks access to a regular supply of clean drinking water, and monitoring current water pumps and sanitation points is an important part of making sure that areas that have gained access to clean water don’t lose it. Water for People is a non-profit organization that monitors water and sanitation points in the developing world; last February, the organization began to investigate how mobile technology could help their work and from this, FLOW was born.
FLOW (Field Level Operations Watch) is an open-source, Android application that allows field workers to use mobile phones to document how well water pumps and sanitation points in the developing world are functioning, then transmit that data to create an online tagged map of target regions.
Nearly 1.6 billion people in the world live without access to electricity. This is a quarter of all humanity. At the same time, off-grid power stations from mobile towers often produce excess energy.
A new initiative from the GSMA Development Fund in partnership with Lighting Africa, International Finance Corporation and World Bank, seeks to combine this lack of electricity with excess power from mobile stations. The resulting project is called the Community Power from Mobile (CPM) initiative.
The initiative will support and encourage mobile network operators and tower-sharing companies in developing countries to provide excess power generated by their base stations to local, off-grid communities. This power can then be used for anything from charging handsets and lanterns to powering local schools and clinics. Case studies already exist and the CPM initiative is setting out to test a business model for future deployments, said David Taverner, director for the Green Power for Mobile (GPM) program at the development fund.
MobileActive.org spoke with Taverner to learn more about the goals of the initiative.
Mobile phone users want to display other maps instead of just Google maps on their devices. Mobile GMaps enables users to view Yahoo! Maps, Windows Live Local, Ask. com, Open Street Map, and other sources on Java J2ME-enabled mobile phones, PDAs, and other devices.
Mobile GMaps is a free application that displays maps from Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps, Windows Live Local (MSN Virtual Earth), Ask.com, Open Street Map and other sources, but only on Java J2ME-enabled mobile phones, PDAs and other devices. MGMaps can connect to a GPS receiver over bluetooth or use internal GPS features on some phones in order to automatically display the map for your current position. You can pre-download maps and store them on your memory card in order to use them on the go without accessing the network.
Mobile GMaps is distributed under the Attribution - NonCommercial - NoDerivs Creative Commons license. You may download, use and distribute the application free of charge only for personal, non-commercial purposes.
Tool Category:
App resides and runs on a mobile phone
Key Features :
Mobile GMaps enables users of Java J2ME-based feature phones to view maps from a variety of sources. The creator is constantly improving this application and you can view past versions for download. There is also a G-Map Track BETA feature that allows you to view public Google maps and see a map of you and your friends. API for this application is coming soon.
Mobile Telephony as an Enabler of Environmental Action in the Philippines data sheet 1987 Views
Author:
Dolma T. Dongtotsang, Robert A. Sagun
Publication Date:
May 2006
Publication Type:
Report/White paper
Abstract:
Population growth, economic development and ineffective development policies place the Philippine environment and its natural resources and biodiversity under serious risk. Increased levels of air and water pollution in urban areas, deforestation, soil erosion, coral reef degradation as well as increasing pollution of coastal mangrove swamps important for breeding fish, are some of the threats mentioned by the Philippines Environment Monitor 2004. The situation is made worse by ineffective environmental laws and policies, rapid urbanization, expansion of resource-based markets and the growing apathy of its populace to environmental safeguarding. Environmental degradation is a common global problem, but strategies to halt it must be contextually specific if they are to be effective.
This paper explores how the telecommunications sector, and in particular mobile telephony, offers tools that may be used successfully for environmental action in the Philippines. Our research has indicated the ubiquity of mobile phones in the Philippines; they are convenient, relatively inexpensive, easy to acquire, and can send and receive text messages. For these reasons, using the SMS technology is an ideal and accessible way for the public to take action as well as increase their awareness of environmental issues.
Want to use mobiles for data collection? Don't know where to start your research or where to read evaluations of existing and past mobile data collection efforts? You're in luck! We've produced the resource guide you've been waiting for.
Recently, MobileActive.org collaborated with UN Global Pulse to crowdsource an inventory of mobile data collection projects around the world. While this growing inventory shows there is enormous interest to leverage mobile technology for data collection, technical reports and evaluations of deployments and pilots are scattered.
So, we took the lead and compiled the existing literature (as best as we could) in an easy-to-use spreadsheet here.
Acquee.com is a SaaS offering of survey/form designer + mobile portal where data can be collected online. No software installation is required on the desktop or mobile side. It is a web based mobile data collection service designed for use with modern mobile devices.
Today's Mobile Minute brings you coverage on the Hearst magazine empire's new focus on mobile apps, what can go wrong on your mobile website and how to spot it, a camera phone-to-email project in India, checking African drugs with SMS, and a new speed texting record.
Today's Mobile Minute features links on fundraising with QR codes, a survey report on how audiences get information, a breakdown of how journalism is changing due to mobile phones, the announcement of a clearer definition of mobile broadband, an open-source, solar-powered mobile network, and five cross-platform mobile development tools.
This month, many of the events are more corporate, with a focus on informational conferences for larger organizations. But, as always, we keep you up to date with what's happening in the mobile world! If you have an event that you'd like to share, leave a message in the comments or send us an email at info at mobileactive dot org
MobileActive.org's July Events:
8 July, New York City, USA: Tech Salon, Participatory Mobile Sensing: MobileActive.org is hosting a tech salon focused on using phones for urban sensing. Join us for a fun, laid-back event that brings together practitioners, developers, and other curious people to learn how mobiles are used to gather and share information about the world around us. Register here.
Today is the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, a global celebration that raises awareness about the enivronment. To do our part to celebrate this day, we’ve put together a look at some of the mobile tools and organizations we’ve covered recently that are doing their part to help the Earth. If you have any suggestions about tools or organizations that are doing great environmental work with mobiles, please leave a comment and let us know – and have a good Earth Day!
Water Quality
We recently covered the Water Quality Reporter, a program in South Africa that uses mobiles to test the health of water supplies. The program allows field workers to use mobile forms or SMSs to cheaply and effectively transfer data about water quality to a centralized database, while receiving feedback about how to handle local water problems.
As we here at MobileActive.org have been covering ICT and mobiles for development now for more than five years, we have seen our fair share of failures. For every great project that changes how a community benefits from technology to improve the lives of its people, there seem to be twice as many projects that fail, and end up wasting time, money, and maybe worst, goodwill.
Too often in our field, we talk up our successes, overhype and overestimate the value of our projects, and sweep the failures under the rug. But, if we don’t talk about what didn’t work (and, perhaps more importantly, why it didn’t work), others will keep repeating the same mistakes.
That is why we invented FailFaire, a gathering that is happening tonight in New York City and that we hope will take place in other cities around the world. FailFaire is a place where it's ok to talk about what didn't work to learn from for the next project using mobiles for social change and development.
