The fourth FAILfaire, this time in New York City on December 14th, will be an evening dedicated to those tech and mobile projects that were designed to have a social impact but instead crashed, burned, and FAILED. FAILfaire NYC is presented by MobileActive.org and hosted by the U.S. Fund for UNICEF, with participation from UNICEF's Innovation Unit.
If you do not know about Failfaire, here is some background: Launched in early 2010, there have now been three FAILfaires, events designed to provide a platform for those working in online and mobile technology for social change to openly, honestly (and humorously) discuss our own failures.
As noted in the New York Times’ piece on FAILfaire, “Technology’s potential to bring about social good is widely extolled, but its failures, until now, have rarely been discussed by nonprofits who deploy it.” Well, FAILfaire is changing that, and is doing so in style. The format is informal, the discussions are rich, and the refreshments are adult and, well, refreshing.
Slate.com wrote that FailFaire “...[isn’t] about celebrating failure just for the sake of failure, but about taking lessons from each mistake and using them to create more efficient, economical, and accessible projects that could have a greater effect on a community.” We couldn’t agree more!
To join us, please RSVP here, as the event will fill up quickly.
If you like to be considered as a presenter for the next FAILfaire, go to failfaire.org and submit a note about your failed project and what we can learn from it.
Konbit: Using Mobile Tech (and Your Voice) for Local Jobs in Haiti data sheet 2188 Views
Konbit is a service that aims to help communities rebuild themselves after a crisis by indexing the skill sets of local residents, allowing NGOs to find and employ them. Konbit development started after the earthquake in Haiti, and in response to complaints that NGOs were typically bringing in their own labor, rather than hiring locally. The service allows Haitians to describe their everyday skills and talents, in their own voice and language, over a mobile phone.
This audio content is then transcribed and translated into job skill categories that can be searched by NGOs and employers in the area. In this way, Konbit combines mobile and Internet technology with something more accessible to the Haitian community: their own voice.
Budgets, Batteries, and Barriers: PDA Implementation Issues for NGOs data sheet 2640 Views
Author:
Kanchan Banga, Tanti Liesman, Alicia Meulensteen, Jennifer Wiemer
Publication Date:
Apr 2009
Publication Type:
Report/White paper
Abstract:
What prevents humanitarian non-government organizations (NGOs) from adopting technology that can potentially improve their operations and response time? Global Relief Technologies, a producer of handheld data collection devices, asked a New York University Capstone Team to research the barriers to NGO PDA adoption. The Capstone Team conducted 17 interviews with nine organizations, from animal welfare to humanitarian relief, to discover the financial, technical, and institutional barriers preventing groups from implementing technology into their field programs. The Team also conducted two case studies of groups currently using PDA technology, one domestic and one international, to explore in depth the factors that went into the decision making processes these groups followed in their technology acquisition decisions.
Ken Banks has a theory: The long tail theory of mobile applications for social development. It goes something like this, paraphrasing him from his incendiary blog post:
Mobiles are the most rapidly adopted technology in history. But if mobiles truly are as revolutionary and empowering, then don't we have a moral duty in the ICT for Development (ICT4D) community to see that they fulfill that potential?
Banks says that indeed, we do have that moral duty, and I agree with him wholeheartedly there.
On day three of MobileActive ’08, I attended a session led by engineer Blaine Cook, formerly Twitter’s Chief Architect.
Cook summarized what the group was looking for:
“We would like an ongoing, up-to-date tool. A migration tool that keeps us moving from one social network to the next so NGO’s can move and migrate from platform to platform. We need the ability for any one organization to connect with any other organization.”
Mixit was mentioned as a useful tool, but Cook noted cross-border interoperability issues: Mixit requires GPRS which isn’t that credible across borders. Using a SIM card costs a lot to text across borders. Cook suggested that there could be a network where you send to SIM chip in Uganda from Uganda, but set up a network with nodes to dramatically cut costs of cross-border activism.
Cook said that it costs around $20,000-30,000 for a short code in the US and you can send as many SMS’s as you like. He mentioned that Twitter got a bill for $37,000 in Egypt for only 6000 Twitter users.
In our ongoing reviews of mobile tools focused on the NGO sector, here is our latest edition: A review of FrontlineSMS, the much-written-about desktop SMs bulk messaging tool. We take a look at some use cases, outline technical considerations in using Frontline, and describe the tests that we ran.
Firstly, and most importantly for many users, FrontlineSMS provides a simple way to send and receive SMS on a laptop or desktp, with contact management and grouping ability for bulk messaging. Provided installation comes off without a hitch and you are using a supported phone, this should allow new users to get started quickly, after which they can explore some of the more advanced functionality.
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
Mobile technology is transforming the way advocacy, development and relief organizations accomplish their institutional missions. This is nothing new to readers of MobileActive. Our recent report Wireless Technology for Social Change: Trends in NGO Mobile Use, released today by the United Nations Foundation and The Vodafone Group Foundation, brings this point home.
Wireless Technology for Social Change: Trends in NGO Mobile Use was written by Sheila Kinkade (ShareIdeas.org) and Katrin Verclas (MobileActive.org), and commissioned by the United Nations Foundation-Vodafone Group Foundation Technology Partnership. The report examines emerging trends in “mobile activism” by looking at 11 case studies of groups active in the areas of public health, humanitarian assistance and environmental conservation.
Claire Joyce Tempongko, a Filipina immigrant, was murdered by her ex-boyfriend in front of her two young children five years ago. Tempongko had repeatedly tried to get help from state services -- she had called the police before, and her ex-boyfriend had been in jail for domestic violence -- but she was murdered despite the involvement of various services.
Immigrants like Tempongko repeatedly face language and cultural barriers to getting help from domestic abuse. Tempongko's murder was one of the factors that eventually led to a new translation program which was recently implemented by the city of San Francisco in California in the western United States. The new program brings translation services to non-English speaking victims of domestic violence in over 170 languages, all via mobile phone.
Jill Tregor, a Senior Policy Analyst with the San Francisco Department on the Status of Women, sat down with MobileActive for an interview.
QR codes have been in the news recently, bringing news stories, animated zoo animals, and nurtrition facts from tiny barcodes to the screens of mobile phones worldwide. By linking print media with mobile phones, the codes are helping to bridge the connection between old and new media and have impliations for social mobile campaigns.
A QR -- or Quick Response -- code is a two dimensional bar code that can be used for tracking or link to information such as a website or text message. When a user scans the code with a camera phone the code then links to the destination URL or other information. The codes were first created by a Japanese corporation in 1994 for tracking parts used in car manufacturing, but today are found in everything from newspapers to business cards to advertisements. QR codes can hold several hundred times more information than conventional bar codes.
