"Innovations in Mobile Data Collection for Social Action," a workshop co-hosted by MobileActive.org and UNICEF Innovation in Amman, Jordan, featured Ignite Talks -- five minute presentations by inspiring people who are using mobiles for social action -- and interviews with key participants.
Igniting the attendees, Brian Herbert presented Ushahidi, a crowdsourcing platform that allows users to map crisis information from their mobiles. In an interview, JD Godchaux discussed NiJeL: Community Impact Through Mapping, which helps organizations share information and tell stories through maps.
Alex (Sandy) Pentland, asynchronous connectivity, ad hoc network, Richard Fletcher, Amir Hasson
Publication Type:
Report/White paper
Publication Date:
Abstract:
In short, the goal of “broadband connectivity for everyone” has been shelved in favor of cutting back to the minimum possible standard telephone ser- vice in the mistaken belief that this is the cheapest way to provide connectivity. This compromise is particularly tragic given recent advances in wireless technology, which make running a copper line to an analog telephone far more expensive than broad- band wireless Internet connectivity. Rather than backpedal on the goal of connecting everyone, society should be thinking, How can we establish the kernel of a user network that will grow seamlessly as the village’s economics develop? In other words, what is the basis for a progressive, market-driven migration from government seed services—e-governance—to universal broadband connectivity that local users will pay for?
DakNet, an ad hoc network that uses wireless technology to provide asynchronous digital connectivity, is evidence that the marriage of wireless and asynchronous service may indeed be that kernel—the beginning of a road to universal broad-band connectivity. Developed by MIT Media Lab researchers, DakNet has been successfully deployed in remote parts of both India and Cambodia at a cost two orders of magnitude less than that of traditional landline solutions. Villagers now get affordable Internet services—and they’re using them. As one man in a small village outside of New Delhi remarked, “This is better than a telephone!”
SMS or text messaging is a feature available on all mobile phones which allows a small amount of text to be sent between one user and another. Text messaging has become increasingly popular in recent years, particularly among youth, and it is being adopted by non-profit organizations as a communications channel.
This “quick start” guide is intended to demystify SMS and help get you set up to using text messaging in your work in the shortest possible time. The guide is not intended to serve as a comprehensive look at the use of SMS, but rather provides a short overview of SMS considerations and an introduction into how it works.
Natural disasters and violent conflicts have always been part of human existence. But the number of humanitarian crises has been rising in recent years. Moreover, disasters strike most frequently, and with the most devastating impact, in the least developed countries. These countries also have the weakest communications infrastructures, which poses a particular challenge to governments, aid agencies, and the affected population at every stage of a crisis, from the run- up to a disaster through to long-term reconstruction.
There have been dramatic advances in communications technology: in the number of new technologies, the mobility and range of functions available, and the spread of these technologies. Growth has been particularly strong in the penetration of mobile phones and more recently the uptake of social networking websites including Facebook and Twitter. One important change is a shift from one-to-many forms of communication, such as television and radio, to many-to-many forms of communication, such as social networking and crowdsourcing websites, that is changing the way in which information is delivered and exchanged.
Communications advances present an opportunity for humanitarian organizations to harness modern technology to communicate more effectively with communities affected by disasters and to allow members of those communities to communicate with each other and with the outside world. People in affected communities can recover faster if they can access and use information.
A look at the use of communications technology during disasters in recent years shows that while it has played a positive role, its full potential has not yet been realized. Moreover, governments, humanitarian agencies, and local communities face challenges and risks associated with modern technological innovation.
These include 1. Information flows must be two-way to be effective—from the external world to the affected community, but also from those affected to the agencies seeking to help them in useful ways. 2. Information will not be used unless it is trusted. The utility of any technologies will depend on the social context. People are a vital part of the communication system. 3. Information will be helpful only if it is accurate. There are risks in unregulated information flows, especially when these are spread rapidly online, and these risks need to be managed. Authentication is a key challenge. This tension between the potential benefit to humanitarian efforts from harnessing these technologies and the risks that they pose is a key theme of this report.
The report examines how authorities and humanitarian and aid organizations can best balance the opportunities and challenges of exploiting different technologies at the key stages on the timeline of crisis—early warning and preparedness, immediate humanitarian relief, and reconstruction and long-term development.
"Innovations in Mobile Data Collection for Social Action," a workshop co-hosted by MobileActive.org and UNICEF in Amman, Jordan, featured Ignite Talks -- five minute presentations by inspiring people who are using mobiles for social action in the Middle East -- and interviews with key participants. Jacob Korenblum describes the work of Souktel in Palestine, and Erica Kochi from UNICEF Innovation, the co-host of the event, illustrates why data collected by mobiles is so important for their work in Iraq.
As the business and editorial structures that have historically sustained media melt away, new innovations in reporting and monetization are rapidly reforming the business. But a key question remains: Can media producers adapt and lead, or will they disappear with Journalism’s Ice Age? The Media Consortium (TMC), a network of the country's leading progressive, independent media outlets, commissioned this research and strategy project to ask: Who produces it, what the audience wants, and how they want to consume it. Media organizations must match their production and delivery strategies to new consumer demand, technology and business models. The research covers three areas:
Vol. 1: Dissonance & Opportunity: Summarizes and outlines a strategic framework that enables independent media to build a shared vision for the future.
Vol. 2: New & Emerging Realities: Four main questions are explored. How is the landscape changing? What new capabilities are needed to succeed? What needs can be met, problems solved or desires fulfilled to create value? How are media organizations structured to capture this value?
Vol. 3: The Future?: Surfaces key uncertainties to consider and future possibilities that may further change the game in coming years.
We will be blogging and twittering this week from a workshop we are co-hosting on Innovations in Mobile Data Collection for Social Action in Amman, Jordan.
Co-hosted by UNICEF’s country office in Iraq, UNICEF Innovation, and MobileActive.org, this three-day gathering is bringing invited experts from around the world together to explore some of the key issues related to using mobiles for data collection and analysis of some of the toughest social issues.
Why are we hosting this event?
With the ubiquity of mobile technology, data collection and monitoring of key indicators from the ground up by affected populations is now possible. Mobile technology in the hands of people can now be more than a person-to-person communication medium but can be used for capturing, classifying and transmitting image, audio, location and other data, interactively or autonomously.
Two of the fastest-growing and popular mobile data collection tools have recently seen some exciting upgrades in newly released versions.
Open Data Kit recently released v1.1 of ODK Collect. Open Data Kit (ODK) is a suite of tools to help organizations collect, aggregate and visualize their data. ODK Collect is powerful phone-based replacement for paper forms. Collect is built on the Android platform and can collect a variety of form data types: text, location, photos, video, audio, and barcodes. ODK Collect can be downloaded in the Android marketplace or here. The developers also have a demo video that describes the new features of the release. Open Data Kit is a member of the Open Mobile Consortium of which MobileAtive.org is a founding member.
Some of the new features of ODK Collect include barcode scanning, image/audio/video capture and playback, editing of saved forms, and device metadata (phone number, IMEI, IMSI) support. GPS acquisition and form processing is a faster, and the developers added review data entry. The user interface has been field tested and reworked to make training and use much easier. ODK Collect also supports question grouping, repeats, constraints, complex logic, and multiple languages.
ODK is currently deployed for HIV counseling with AMPATH in Kenya, user feedback gathering for Grameen's AppLab in Uganda, war crime documentation with the Berkeley Human Rights Center in the Central African Republic, and forest monitoring with the Brazilian Forest Service.
Meanwhile, our friends over at Datadyne have released version 2.0 of their popular mobile data collection platform EpiSurveyor. For some of the very cool GPS features of that, see the video below. EpiSurveyor is a free, user-friendly mobile-phone-and-web-based data collection system. Version 2.0 has many new features such as GPS (users with GPS-enabled phones (like the Nokia E71) can automatically create a "GPS stamp" for every record collected AND automatically see the results on a Google map, all within EpiSurveyor.org), advanced logic, including skip logic; numeric range limits for data entry; and a much better user interface for the web-backend.
EpiSurveyor is used by organizations around the world. One organization, TulaSalud in Guatemala, uses EpiSurveyor for maternal health. The video below (en Espanol) explains how the organization is using the tool.
Video informativo de TulaSalud, sobre la aplicación del sistema de monitoreo epidemiológico aplicado con la tecnología de EpiSurveyor, el cual pretende tener a tiempo real el reporte epidemiológico de las comlunidades.
This guest post was written by Joshua Haynes who is studying for his Masters of International Business, at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. Reposted with Hayes' permission.
Adult literacy in rural areas faces an inherent problem. In Niger, for example, there are no novels, newspapers, or journals in native languages like Hausa or Zarma. The 20% of Nigériens who are literate are literate in French. The vast majority of rural villagers have struggled to maintain their livelihoods since time immemorial without ever knowing how to read a single word. What’s the point of literacy if there is no need for written materials?
Due to the increasing penetration of mobile phones even in poor communities, mobile-phone-enabled banking (m-banking) services are being increasingly targeted at the “unbanked” to bring formal financial services to the poor. Research in understanding actual usage and adoption by this target population, though, is sparse. There appear to be a number of issues which prevent low-income, low-literate populations from meaningfully adopting and using existing m-banking services.
This paper examines variations across countries in adoption and usage of existing m-banking services by low-literate, low-income individuals and possible factors responsible for the same. It is observed that variations are along several parameters: household type, services adopted, pace of uptake, frequency of usage, and ease of use. Each of these observations is followed by a set of explanatory factors that mediate adoption and usage.
Indrani Medhi, S. N. Nagasena Gautama, Kentaro Toyama
Publication Type:
Report/White paper
Publication Date:
1 Apr 2009
Abstract:
Due to the increasing penetration of mobile phones even into poor communities, mobile payment schemes could bring formal financial services to the “unbanked”. However, because poverty for the most part also correlates with low levels of formal education, there are questions as to whether electronic access to complex financial services is enough to bridge the gap, and if so, what sort of UI is best.
In this paper, we present two studies that provide preliminary answers to these questions. We first investigated the usability of existing mobile payment services, through an ethnographic study involving 90 subjects in India, Kenya, the Philippines and South Africa. This was followed by a usability study with another 58 subjects in India, in which we compared non-literate and semi-literate subjects on three systems: text-based, spoken dialog (without text), and rich multimedia (also without text). Results confirm that non-text designs are strongly preferred over text-based designs and that while task- completion rates are better for the rich multimedia UI, speed is faster and less assistance is required on the spoken-dialog system.
From traffic to construction to everyday chatter, noise pollution is a part of city life. But with the ubiquity of mobiles, documenting noise pollution is getting a little bit easier. NoiseTube and LHR NoiseMap are two projects that use mobile phones to record and map instances of noise pollution.
NoiseTube uses crowd-sourcing to monitor noise pollution. Users with GPS-enabled phones can install a free application that measures the noise level wherever they are. Users tag the recordings with a description of the noise, its source, the time of day, and other criteria, and the data is then mapped onto GoogleEarth; in this way participants can use their phones as noise sensors to automatically share information about their city with other members of the community.
Mobile phones are becoming prolific in society, both in industrialized and non-industrialized countries. Of all of the developments in new media, mobile is the only one that seems to be narrowing the digital divide rather than widening it, making it a crucial tool in improving the health of poor and hard-to-reach populations. Organizations around the world are beginning to implement mobile technology into their health behavior interventions and are seeing rising success. In diabetes and other chronic disease management, mobile phones are being used for medication alerts and health reporting. The technology is being used to send sexual health and HIV/AIDS information in places like downtown San Francisco and rural Africa, as part of ongoing testing, counseling and prevention services. In the US, applications involving GPS technology, video games, and persuasive technology are all being tested for their effectiveness in influencing health behavior and applicability on mobile phones.
Through published research and interviews with key leaders in the mobile health field, this paper outlines the benefits of mobile technology and the barriers to integrating mobile fully into public health campaigns. Despite the enormous work already being done and a host of new technologies on the rise, most experts will agree that mobile phones on their own will not serve as primary tools for influencing health behavior. A comprehensive and integrated campaign that incorporates mobile will be most effective, but mobile alone faces too many barriers to fostering social norms on the wide-scale. In fact, many argue that the ways in which public health advocates are able to place health messages in broadcast media cannot be applied on cell phones because of society’s growing resistance to mobile marketing.
The paper asks: What are some examples of how organizations around the world have harnessed mobile technology to improve the health behavior of disease-specific and target populations? What lies in the future for mobile technology and health? Is mobile the answer we have been looking for?
Christelle Scharff is an associate professor of computer science at Pace University in New York. In our occasional series of mobile innovators, she is discussing her work with the Mobile Development and Web Design for Senegal project that teaches students to develop mobile applications.
To date, the project has also trained 22 teachers in Senegal in a training organized with Manobi. Most of the teachers did not previously identify mobile application programming as a field of study. The do now! Take a look at Christelle's work.
Instead of cracking open a book, try sitting back with a short story on your phone. CellStories, which launched in September, offers a new short (1500-2500 words) story every weekday to readers on mobile phones. The website only shows its daily short stories to visitors coming to the site on mobile phones – those on a desktop see a welcome page and are encouraged to come back on a web-enabled mobile.
This document aims to help readers understand the current challenges of deploying development-oriented services on mobile phones, evaluate existing technologies, and identify the most promising directions to lower the barriers of developing, deploying and accessing services on mobile phones and thereby creating an enabling environment for more social-oriented services to appear.
This document is divided into two major parts. The first part presents the major challenges today for both developing and accessing mobile services, potential ways to bridge them with existing tools, technologies and infrastructure, and potential research directions to follow to provide a more comprehensive resolution or solution. The second part focuses on presenting the major technologies and the major options existing today to deploy content and applications on mobile phones. For each of these technologies, the document presents a short analysis of the technology's potential and the requirements in terms of infrastructure, devices, targeted end-users, and costs associated with implementation and delivery.
After more than a year's work, the World Wide Web Consortium's Mobile Web for Social Development is releasing its final product: a roadmap that outlines where mobile for social development is today, and will be going in the next few years.
The document is long and dense at times, but highlights a few noteworthy trends and developments. As with any product developed by committee (and a small committee, in this case - no more than four or five people during the bi-monthly phone calls and drafting process, none of them actual NGO practitioners) this document is lacking specificity and actual relevant use cases, tending to be too esoteric to be useful.
Here are a few highlights of what we liked followed by a discussion of the documents shortcomings.
Would you give 15 minutes of your time for a really good cause (and a chance to win a prize)?
Vodafone has recently launched a new version of Betavine, the open mobile application community. This new version encompasses a pilot project called "Social Exchange", which aims to foster the creation of mobile solutions for problems in the developing world.
The project’s aim is to create a website that brings developers, NGOs and community organisations together in order to develop mobile solutions to some of the difficulties faced by people in the developing world. Your input will help Vodafone to make this worthwhile project into a real success.
By participating in a quick and easy online process, you'll also have the chance to enter a prize draw to win a £50 Amazon voucher or one of two £25 ones. If you are willing to help, please go to the following webpage, which will explain everything you need to know: http://www.webnographer.com/do/betavine/socialexchange
Mobile phones are the tool of choice for a new group of young reporters in Africa. Voices of Africa Media Foundation, a Netherlands-based non-profit, trains young journalists in Africa to create news videos for the web using mobiles.
The foundation currently has programs in Kenya, Ghana, Cameroon, Tanzania, Mozambique, and South Africa, with plans to expand to more countries in 2010. The training program for the young journalists lasts nine months and teaches the trainees how to create video news reports with cell phones. At the beginning of the program, the small group (there are usually six or fewer participants per program) comes together and is trained for three to four days in the basics of mobile reporting (both how to use the technology and in basic journalism). Then they return to their communities, and for a period of six months, use the phones to make video reports on local stories.
To create opportunities for young African journalists using mobiles
To provide news coverage of under-served areas
Brief description of the project:
The Voices of Africa Media Foundation teaches young journalists in Africa how to use mobiles to create news videos. The nine month training program allows the students to gain online exposure for their work, while also providing free online feedback from instructors.
Target audience:
The target audience for students is young Africans with an interest in journalism; the program is especially trying to reach young women to join their program in order to have equal male/female participation. The viewing audience is primarily located overseas and in major African cities where the Internet is more easily accessible.
Length of Project (in months) :
36
Status:
Ongoing
Anticipated launch date:
What worked well? :
By choosing students from local communities, reporters are able to interact with their subjects in local languages, giving them much better access than outside organizations.
Mobile phones lower barriers between the reporter and the subject, are lightweight and portable, and are relatively cost-effective.
What did not work? What were the challenges?:
Difficulty of maintaining funding so that the program remains free for students
The program has had difficulty attracting and keeping female students; they are trying to reach an equal male-to-female enrollment
Finding ways to show the videos to the areas the cover
Voices of Africa: Citizen Journalists Reporting with Mobile Phones Locations
Mobile phones are the tool of choice for a new group of young reporters in Africa. Voices of Africa Media Foundation, a Netherlands-based non-profit, trains young journalists in Africa to create news videos for the web using mobiles.
The foundation currently has programs in Kenya, Ghana, Cameroon, Tanzania, Mozambique, and South Africa, with plans to expand to more countries in 2010. The training program for the young journalists lasts nine months and teaches the trainees how to create video news reports with cell phones. At the beginning of the program, the small group (there are usually six or fewer participants per program) comes together and is trained for three to four days in the basics of mobile reporting (both how to use the technology and in basic journalism). Then they return to their communities, and for a period of six months, use the phones to make video reports on local stories.
For eight years, the Indian government dragged its feet until, in 2003, it finally permitted mobile phones in conflict-torn Kashmir. Intelligence officials had feared that Kashmiri and Pakistani militants would use the phones to plan attacks on Indian army outposts throughout the region, but in '03 they relaxed the ban, and the past six years have been the most peaceful since the conflict began in 1989. Causation? Probably not. But correlation, anyway.
There was a time when the adoption of mobile phones was expected to be limited to the wealthy and early mobile phone designs included a number of features that supported shared use on the assumption that few people would be able to afford one of their own. 4 billion plus cellular subscribers later and it’s the mobile phone owning residents of Accra or Cairo that are more likely to use multiple devices than the residents of London or Tokyo.
The first billion mobile phones were sold in about twenty years, the second billion took four years, and the third billion were sold in just two. That the mobile phone has had a positive qualitative and quantitative impact on many of the world’s poor is no longer an issue for debate, and the simple fact that many invest in a few months salary to purchasing one suggests that it continues to meet a broad spectrum of base user needs from directly creating revenue generating opportunities to indirectly supporting survival. As a personally carried, connected device the mobile phone is in a prime position to bring mobile money services to the world’s unbanked, and today there is much activity, debate and not a little hype on its potential (Ramussen, 2009).
This paper discusses the factors that will affect whether recently established mobile money services such as M-PESA can also achieve success in other markets, and whether new services and business models will fly or fail? What can we learn from previous research into mobile phone behaviours and practices?