MobileActive.org

On January 28, 2011, Egypt’s President, Hosni Mubarak, took the drastic and unprecedented step of shutting off the Internet for five days across an entire nation. His reason for doing so was simple: to halt the flow of communication and coordinated assembly taking place over social media platforms, like Facebook and Twitter. That Mubarak took this desperate step — which cost Egypt an estimated $90 million and outraged the international community — demonstrates the incredible power of social media. Mubarak’s decision to shut off the Internet took place after three days of demonstrations by tens of thousands of Egyptians. Although the demonstrations were centered in Cairo’s Tahrir Square (or “Liberation Square”), there were also substantial demonstrations in Alexandria, Mansoura, and Suez. The protesters expressed outrage over several issues, including state corruption, police brutality, and economic oppression. Their demand was clear: President Hosni Mubarak must leave the country.

Various groups, including April 6 Youth Movement, We Are All Khaled Said, National Association for Change, and Kefaya led a coordinated effort using social media platforms, including Facebook and Twitter, to spread a revolutionary message. Prior to the first day of protest, 85,000 Egyptians pledged on Facebook to attend “Revolution Day.” Similarly, April 6 Movement had over 90,000 members during the protests, and We Are Khaled Said had over 40,000 Facebook fans. In the two weeks leading up to and including the first few days of the protest, Egyptians created 32,000 Facebook groups and 14,000 Facebook pages. It is likely that a substantial number of the five million Facebook users in Egypt were in some way encouraged to attend the protests.

New media platforms are changing how people communicate with each  other around the world. However, there is great variation in both the kind of 

communication platforms people make use of as well as in how they access these  platforms. Computer ownership and internet access are still the prerogative of  the wealthy few in wide swathes of the African continent. All the same, mobile internet access is on the rise and if current growth rates continue, African mobile phone penetration will reach 100 per cent by 2014. Mobile phone penetration rates, in particular, have resulted in a plethora of ideas for new media platforms aimed at bridging the information divide between the well-connected and the disconnected. Topic areas range from agriculture and conservation to health and human rights. In addition to mobile phone-based platforms, there is also a number of promising internet-based ones.

To counter the Zimbabwean government’s tight grip over the traditional media, activists integrated old fashioned tactics of leaflets, graffiti, and small covert meetings with electronic media: short wave radio, pocket sized video cameras, digital cameras, fax machines, the Internet and email.

An early adopter of this mix of ICTs was Kubatana.net, a locally based non-profit which became an important aggregator of civic and human rights information on Zimbabwe. Its free online archive, established in 2001, offered articles, reports, documents and interviews with much of the information sourced from local civic organisations and international watch dogs. Its electronic NGO directory made civil society organisations accessible at a time when contact details were extremely fluid. Its email newsletter mailing list kept thousands of ordinary Zimbabweans regularly informed of events, opportunities and newly added resources to the web site. And its early adoption of SMS proved crucial to keeping Zimbabweans informed during the critical 2008 elections.

The concept of mobile reporting, combined with community reporting is changing the way we perceive previously ignored local issues. While they hardly make it into mainstream media, they are now flooding into the cyberspace and the blogosphere thanks to the Web and the mobile phone technologies. The power of the mobile phone in the context of community reporting approach resides in its simplicity, both through the ordinary tools used by reporters – the phones which almost everyone knows or owns by now – and through the reporters themselves, who are members of the community being reported about.

In this presentation, I want to highlight how one issue – childabuse – is being ‘naturally’ captured and documented by mobile reporters following a training offered by Voices of Africa Media Foundation in various African countries. The capturing is ‘natural’ in the sense that, viewed locally, the abuse is tolerated, justified, or even approved by communities, who do not perceive them as abuse. The idea is to draw the attention of political leaders and decision makers, who mostly rely on mainstream media, the ones known for neglecting non-profit generating local issues.

In this paper, I want to deal with three main points. In the first place, I will conceptualise mobile reporting combined with community reporting in the light of existing theories on culture convergence and participatory media. Secondly, I will focus on one case, child abuse, which our reporters have covered spontaneously. In the end, I will discuss the potential impact of this way of approaching local news on local leadership and politics.

This paper offers an overview of the emerging domain of mobile governance as an offspring of the broader landscape of e-governance. Mobile governance initiatives have been deployed everywhere in parallel to the development of crowdsourced, open source software applications that facilitate the collection, aggregation, and dissemination of both information and data coming from different sources: citizens, organizations, public bodies, etc. Ultimately, mobile governance can be seen as a tool to promote the rule of law from a decentralized, distributed, and bottom-up perspective.

The purpose of the Sudan Vote Monitor (SVM) project was to utilize simple information and communication technology (ICT) tools in the independent monitoring and reporting of the Sudan national elections held in April 2010. This initiative built on the successful recent experience of civil society organizations (CSOs) and volunteers in several countries (e.g., Ghana, India, Sierra Leone, Montenegro) in harnessing ICT to support the conduct of fair and credible elections. The project’s primary focus is the process of observing and reporting rather than the election results or their implications as significant as these are. Accordingly, SVM, and this report, is only concerned with the reporting activity with no regard to the political climate or political orientation of reporters, CSOs,or candidates. The main objective is to cooperate with and facilitate technological knowhow for civil society organizations in the Sudan (grassroots and other NGOs, media organizations, journalists, and interested private citizens and individuals in general).

The project was led by SIRP in collaboration with Asmaa Society for Development and several other Sudanese NGOs, with technical support from eMoksha.org, Ushahidi.com, and Khotawat Consultancy. During the April national elections, the Sudan Monitor website enabled reporting of the election process by many different organizations and individuals. Through the use of open source software civilians in Sudan were able to report general observations or irregularities via e-mail, short code text message (SMS), or by logging on to the Internet and visiting the sudanvotemonitor.com website. Using the Ushahidi platform reports could be aggregated along with direct feeds from news sites, blog posts, photos, videos and tweets related to the elections from all relevant sources, in one place, on an interactive map. Users had up-to-date information including streaming video from election centers or polling stations around the Sudan, and were able to comment and rate the credibility of the submitted reports in collaborative manner. The site was accessible to all individuals and organizations regardless of their political affiliations or views. The reporting facility was available for public reporting from April 10 to April 30, 2010.

This paper examines the use of mobile phones, particularly the short messaging system or SMS, in promoting democratic governance - organizing institutional frameworks to achieve democratic ideals. The objective of this paper is to document how mobile phones is being used to promote popular participation in Philippine politics.

The paper looks into the various SMS-based services that enhance citizen participation. Specifically, SMS services that provides the following were examined: 1) Provision of Public Information; 2) Delivery of Public Service; 3) Amplifying Voice; 4) Vigilantism. 5) Elections and 6) Mass Action and 7) Developing Political Accounts.

Previous studies of SMS in government show that over half of Philippine government agencies use SMS-based services. Most of these national government agencies use SMS as a mechanism for providing information and receiving feedback. In a few instances SMS is used to enhance the delivery of public services.

The notable examples of SMS-based services that provide information are the Department of Agriculture’s Presyo and Panahon Text and the Department of Trade and Industry’s TextDTI. The PAYBIR is an SMS-based service that allows citizens to pay taxes through their cell phones. The Office of the President’s TXTGMA and the office of Marikina Mayor’s TXTMCF elicit complaints, comments and suggestions from constituents. These two are examples of SMS-based services that amplify the citizens’ voice. On the other hand, the DILG’s Patrol 117 is an example of a government service that promotes citizen participation in crime prevention.

The role of SMS in elections as well as its role in mobilizing political action is also discussed. Examples of how text messaging was used as the medium for organizing rallies, spreading information, and stating political positions were given. The discussion on how SMS help develop political account or interpretation of current events was considered through an analysis of political jokes spread through SMS.

While the focus of the paper was on how SMS is being deployed to promote citizen participation, it was noted that SMS is also used in anti or counter-democratic projects.

In sum, this paper documents the role played by SMS in the overall effort at creating an effective set of rules for managing voluntary political exchanges in the Philippines.

This study explored the use of mobile phones among young adults in India. The study used the theoretical frameworks of uses and gratifications approach from media studies, socialcognitive domain theory from human development literature and social construction of technology (SCOT) from Science and Technology studies. The main objective of the study was to examine the use of mobile phones to fulfill communication, media and age-related needs by young people in India and to investigate regional and gender differences.

The study was conducted in two phases using a mixed-methods approach. In the first phase, in-depth interviews were conducted with 30 college-going young adults (18 – 24 years) in Mumbai and Kanpur in December 2007 and January 2008. In the second phase, a survey was conducted with 400 college-going young adults (18 – 24 years) in Mumbai and Kanpur.

The qualitative analysis of the data showed that young people in both the cities used cell phones for a variety of communication, news and entertainment needs. Additionally, they considered cell phones as personal items and used them to store private content, maintain privacy and have private conversations. Further, the analysis showed that they used cell phones to negotiate independence from parents and to maintain friendships and create friendships with members of opposite sex.

The quantitative analysis of the data revealed that young people in the two cities used cell phones differently due to the differences in their lifestyles and socio-cultural factors. Additionally, the study found there were only a few gender differences in the use of cell phones by young people, mainly in the use of cell phones for entertainment purposes, negotiation of independence from parents and in forming friendships with members of opposite sex. Finally, the study concluded that young people in India mainly use cell phones for private communication and needs.

In this article, we look at tools and systems for Interactive Voice Response (IVR). IVR allows callers to navigate an automated menu by pressing keys on their phone keypad, reaching either an extension ('press 1 for sales, press 2 for support'), a further menu, or audio content. Such content might be pre-recorded - for example, a weather report - or retrieved from a database and read out by an automated voice, which most mobile users will have encountered when calling in to request an airtime balance or bill amount. IVR systems can also be configured to allow people to record their own content.

This working paper is part of a series examining how the Internet influences democracy. This report is a narrative case study that examines the role of the Internet and mobile phones during Ukraine's 2004 Orange Revolution. The first section describes the online citizen journalists who reported many stories left untouched by "self-censored" mainstream journalists. The second section investigates the use of digital networked technologies by pro-democracy organizers. This case study concludes with the statement that the Internet and mobile phones made a wide range of activities easier, however the Orange Revolution was largely made possible by savvy activists and journalists wililng to take risks to improve their country.

Writing for a new media review is like writing history as events unfold. In a short time, this article will be out of date and perhaps no more than a few personal 2.0 snapshots taken of a slice of our lives circa 2009. Nevertheless, it is useful to draw a clear picture of how this medium is being used today, to define some of its emerging social properties, and to document and pay closer attention to its influence on our daily experiences and self-mediations. By self-mediations I refer to how each one of us decides his or her digital imprint: what we post online, whether they are videos, photographs, CVs, and the like. Due to the enormous quantity of content produced by users – now usually called prosumers – we should pay close attention to these
doings.

My focus will be on how camera phones affect how news is created and shared, reminding us of how closely the concept of ‘newsworthiness’ is linked to immediacy. Then I will briefly compare the camera phone video experience to the cinematic experience and discuss how film narrative and conventions have affected camera use for better or for worse. Finally, I will pose some open questions that touch on the academic and social value of the camera phone images, and on how contextualising them remains a crucial ingredient in all analysis. I will conclude by considering the visual impact that this handheld object is having on our lives and relationships.

This study explores how news journalists' working conditions are changing in an African developing country due to the growth in information communication technologies (ICTs). The special focus is set on news journalists' use of mobile technology because the rate of mobile penetration in to Africa is so significant these years that the region is actually driving the mobile market’s growth worldwide with a teledensity of over 50%. Although mobile technology has been in the Africa continent for almost two decades it is only within the last two to five years that people have made regular use of these technologies due to recent improvements in accessibility and cost-efficiency.

Interviews with several Kenyan news journalists and other media actors conducted in January and February 2010 were used as the prime empirical data in the study. Thus, to the extent that mobile technology has an effect on the journalistic working process, the following problem statement and research questions served as a guide for this study and were answered in the analysis that drew upon the theoretical framework of journalistic working processes, gatekeeping theory, disruptive technologies, and ICT for development (ICT4D):

•    PS: How do Kenyan news journalists use mobile phones in their work?
•    RQ1: In which ways does mobile technology affect the journalistic working process?
•    RQ2: How does mobile technology affect public interaction with the news media?

The findings suggest that Kenyan news journalists use mobile technology in several ways in their work: they set up interview appointments by calling their sources; they conduct telephone interviews; they record interviews using the mobile phone’s microphone which is particularly useful in conflict-sensitive reporting; they send Internet links to their sources whom can read the online news from their mobile phone’s browser. The consequences of journalists’ use of mobile phones are, for instance, that in the past two to five years mobile technology has linked journalists with sources from Kenya's remote areas and enabled the news media to publish reliable stories which would have been difficult to verify a few years ago. Also, the Kenyan public has gained easy access to the news media, for example by participating in radio call-in shows and the information they provide is sometimes researched by journalists and turned into news stories. The traditional gatekeeper role of the press has changed to fact controller, and it is likely that the public's knowledge contribution can help to promote democracy in the country.

This How-To article provides tips for recording and sharing clear-sounding audio from a mobile phone. Often, recording on a handset is done in less-than-ideal environments. This article offers recording tips to help you capture quality audio to ensure a clear sound, even when you report on the ground and outside of a professional recording studio. We'll describe the best way to create, share and edit audio content depending on what resources you have (or do not have). You will also find a brief outline of some of the most popular and easy-to-use tools for creating, editing, and sharing audio content.