MobileActive's Blog

The Open Mobile Consortium, a working group of developers and organizations engaged in open source mobile applications for social change, is meeting in New York at UNICEF today and tomorrow. The Open Mobile Consortium was founded at MobileActive08 to build an open source community for collaboration and shared development between relevant organisations engaged in mobile development for social good.

The goal of the meeting is to assess the landscape of tools, and begin to develop a technical roadmap.  

The Open Mobile Consortium believes that it is critical to overcome frthe current agmentation in this field, and to align existing projects that are developing and implementing mobile tools.  A longer-term vision is to work as an open source consortium, with funding for coordination and project management, as well as code integration, refactoring and producing documentation for training and support. 

MobileActive.org will participate in tomorrow's portion of the event, and report back on key discussions.

I am thinking a lot about how nonprofits and NGOs can use mobile phones for fundraising (this being the holiday season and all) and have been collecting examples of campaigns that I like to extract some lessons and data on how it's working. Here are my picks of some that I have come across. I'll tell you what I like and why (and what's not so great here).  Note that I have no data yet on how WELL they have worked but believe me, we are on it for a whiteb paper on the topic later in the season...So, here is November's pick!

UNICEF's Halloween Trick-or-treat for UNICEF campaign:

• How it works: Donors can text the word “TOT” to 864233 (UNICEF) to make a $5 donation via premium SMS that gets billed to the user's phone bill or prepaid card. 
• What's nice about this: This campaign uses the just-in-time feature of mobile perfectly and had great potential to be used during the Halloween season where kids walk around with little donation boxes when the go door to door  -- kids collecting for kids.  Most people at the door give a few coins as opposed to $5, so with the right promotion, this campaign could generate extra money in addition to the collection. 

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Kutoma Wakunumadid a great presentation at MobileActive08 on her research that investigates whether women are benefitting from mobile technology. In this interview, shot by ICT4D.at at MobileActive08 in Johannesburg this year, she discusses how women are using mobile tech, what some of the barriers are, and social implications of mobile communications for women. A blog post about the discussion we had at MobileActive08 about women and mobile phones is here.

Take a look also at the notes from a session on participatory design for mobile tech with and for women here and an earlier article we wrote about women and mobile technology -- Who Will Join This Standing Up.

Thank you again to all who came out for Mobile Tech for Social Change barcamp in San Francisco!  We had a great day at Google.org which graciously hosted us.  Two highlights for me:  A live video conversation with Tim Berners Lee who talked about the need for making the mobile web accessible to all people around the world, and his new Web Foundation.  (Some video from the conversation is here.) It was wonderful to see that Tim understands the importance of mobiles in the next generation of the 'web' when the majority of the world is already accessing the web throught their mobile screens.

The second thing that thrilled me was the enthusiasm, interest, and knowledge displayed at the barcamp where the 80 participants enthusiastically delved into key topics.  We hadmore than 24 session, all user-generated, and many more conversations.  

A few key themes that have been emerging again and again:

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The 2008 election in America has seen a much greater use of mobile technology than in any election before in this country.  The Obama campaign in particular has been touted as very innovative innovative in its use of using text messages as part of their voter and volunteer engagement, culminating in the unprecendent text message announcement of the vice-presidential pick that went to an estimated million new text subscribers. 

But these are not the only innovations. In the waning days before the election, a number of other efforts stand out that take advantage of mobile phones.  Here are a few:

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On day three of MobileActive ’08, I attended a session led by Pragnya Alekal of the XPrize Foundation. Pragnya is a water sanitation and energy engineer who has spent a lot of time in the field. She stressed that technology has its limitations – it’s not the whole solution. Her entire goal has been to make up for the fact that technology is important while encompassing other factors.

Alekal told us that XPrize’s goal is to revolutionize sectors – they have a commons-based philosophy. Pragnya was at MobileActive ‘08 to get ideas. How do you solve poverty? How do you get more people to think of solutions?

Alekal told us the history of XPrize, which started with a big dream and got scaled out. It was founded by Peter Diamandes – from the age of nine on, he wanted to go to space. He became a rocket scientist and got six degrees. He felt that the astronaut program was too restrictive. If you are non-American like he is, your chances of becoming an astronaut are low. The number of people who make it into space is very small.

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On day two of MobileActive ’08, Benjamin Brandzel of Avaaz.org led a session on cross-border mobile engagement. Avaaz.org is an international network of activists who work through the Internet to directly influence policy issues such as global warming, poverty, peace, democracy, and human rights. They have made use of internet and email to reach out to people. There is still plenty of room to grow with that, but now a growing segment of the world’s population uses mobiles and not the Internet.

Avaaz.org wants to transfer its model of issue advocacy across global boundaries. Brandzel asked if it is possible to engage folks through mobiles simultaneously across many different nations. To do so, we must deal with political issues, legal issues, and technical issues –- for example, there is no global shortcode. There are also language issues. In Zulu, it’s hard to say “Call me” in 160 characters.

Brandzel said, “Trying to set up a shortcode across a number of African countries is a nightmare. It would be nice to get a platform to make it easier.”

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On day two of the MobileActive ’08 conference, I attended The Humanitarian Technology Challenge: In Search of Innovative Solutions presented by Claire Thwaites, who heads the technology partnership between Vodaphone and the UN Foundation.

Thwaites said that their goal is to find technology solutions to humanitarian challenges. The IEEE lists five key challenges which Thwaites presented:

Reliable Electricity

Needs: Power availability for electronic devices, including low power stationary facilities, rugged mobile power supplies for emergency settings, mechanical transducers, passive generation devices that charge as you walk. Renewable energy hubs are preferred, as well as the use of intermediate field offices as data relay points.

Data Connectivity of Rural Health District Offices

Needs: Exchange data between central health facilities and remote field offices. Two-way transmission – upload/download, data could be batched for daily transfer, also useful for emergency alerts and outbreak alerts, less expensive service and higher bandwidth needed, maps of existing connectivity

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