A resource for activists using mobile technology worldwide.

Google Labs in India recenty launched SMS Channels, a new, free SMS messaging service for India only that may prove to be incredibly useful for citizen groups and NGOs.  The service allows anyone to set up a group of mobile subscribers to message to, or for a group to message each other many-to-many. A user can receive news alerts and blog updates via SMS, for example; or a group can group-text message to each other.

There are many commercial group messaging solutions in India where the primary means of mobile communiations is SMS. However, unlike GupShup, Zook, and MyToday, Google’s SMS channel is two-way allowing for SMS discussions and also enabling subscribers to publish to the channel.

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Ever wonder what the social implications are of the mobile revolution? Take a look...

We are pleased to release the newest MobileActive.org resource, A Mobile Voice: The Use of Mobile Phones in Citizen Media.

In this report we explore the dynamics of the role of mobile phones in enhancing access to and creating information and citizen-produced media.  We explore trends in the use of mobile telephony with a focus on software and platforms that make content creation and broadcasting easier.  We also present an inventory of current and potential uses of
mobile phones to promote citizen media and freedom of information, and present short case studies of examples--all from the MobileActive.org community.

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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.

From the review:  

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.

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In our ongoing and ever-expanding series of how-to resources for NGOs and grassroots organizations using mobile technology in their work, we are releasing a new primer on "Mobile Surveillance."  Our reviewer, Melissa Loudon, gives an overview of mobile surveillance risks and tips and tools on how to prevent surveillance for secure communications.

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The National Council of Resistance of Iran reported recently that SMS use in Iran is now regulated. According to the article, the Organization of Communications Regulations in Iran has imposed restrictions on sending SMS, requiring a security check by the Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) to receive clearance for using the service.

The article details the regulation: "Sending SMS deemed contrary to national security will be punishable by law. Any change of address by the subscriber of the service must be reported promptly to the relevant authorities. It is the security agents who decide which SMS are in breach of national security."  The article further states that "according to some figures every day over 20 million text messages are received in Iran, the peak hours are between ten in the evening and one in the morning. The SMS has become a tool to exchange messages by opponents of the regime."

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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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Mobile phones bridge the rural digital divide, bring economic benefits, and act as agents of social mobilization through improved communication. But what are the real challenges of reaching rural areas, and what are some of today’s most beneficial applications that can help rural communities, specifically regarding agriculture development?

The Virtual Forum on "Mobile Telephony in Rural Areas" will examine the challenges that rural communities face in enhancing the benefits of mobile telephony, and look at some examples of interesting initiatives and good outcomes from around the globe.

Subject Matter experts include:

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We are very privileged to co-host MobileTech for Social Change, a barcamp on 4 November 2008 in San Franciso from 10 am - 2 pm.  We are especially pleased to co-organize the event with Dan Appelquist from Mobile2.0, Mobile Monday UK, and Vodacom. Registration is here!

Fresh back from MobileActive08, we'll explore mobile tech to advance social development and social change goals. Expect this to be highly participatory and interactive, and cover anything you wanted to know about using mobiles for social change. MobileTech for Social Change is open to anyone with passion and interest in the topic and since it's a barcamp, bring your ideas, innovations, products, tools, projects, and organizations!

And if you want to be an angel and sponsor the event, contact us at info at mobileactive dot org!  Registration again: Go here!

 

With the advent of ubiquitous mobile phones recording video, audio, and photos and easily connecting to a worldwide audience, everyone has the potential to become a citizen reporter on the spot, as news and events are happening.  Traditional news organizations (aka mainstream media) are struggling to keep up and find relevance among the new voices from around the world.  Al Jazeera, the Arab news company (and arguably not exactly mainstream media) has been testing mobile phones with its reporters and for its media coverage. Safdar Mustafa, head of Al Jazeera's mobile media unit, explains how in this coverage from MobileActive08.

More videos are on the MobileActive YouTube channel.

I have long been a great fan of Paul Notzold, the ingenious SMS graffiti artist and inventor of Txtual Healing.  He is embarking on a 10-night tour through key states in America, projecting interactive displays where bystanders can text in why they are voting for Obama.  Paul is famous for his interactive and whimsical SMS displays.

He describes how it works: "The simple explanation is that it’s a cellphone paired to a mac using proprietary software, custom scripting and graphics, and then the results are displayed through a projector connected to the computer. The whole system is mobile and with the right projector/beamer, quite bright."

The tour will lead him through so-called battleground states that are contested for the presidential vote:  Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.  If you are in any of the states, go visit with him and text in why you are voting for Obama!

Photo courtesy Paul Notzold, Textual Healing

This article, in a slightly revised version, was published by Orascom's TALK Magazine, Fall 2008.
 
There has been much talk of late about mobile financial services as a way to lift millions of people worldwide out of poverty. A recent article in The Guardian called mobile banking in developing countries “potentially revolutionary.” The advent of mobile financial services promises to bring many more poor people into an economic mainstream where safer and less costly financial services (such as person-to-person payments and remittances) are delivered over the cell phone. But is this promise anywhere near reality?
 
Transferring money via mobile phones can save days of travel for workers in cities who send money home to families in rural villages. Mobile payments are also often cheaper and more secure than relying on informal brokers or carrying cash personally, and they have the potential to change markets by making small business-to-business transactions immediate and more reliable.
 

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Three hundred and eighty people gathered from all over the world in Johannesburg last week to discuss how mobile phones might be used for social and political purposes in developing countries. The event crackled with the kind of energy that happens when people gather on a topic for the first time. Russell Southwood, a prominent researcher and analyst in South Africa,  looks at the issues raised by the event. Excerpts follow.

At the core of all this energy was a very simple notion. The technology device of choice for the majority of people in developing continents like Africa is the mobile phone. If you want to deliver messages to people or get them to respond then SMS or voice is an obvious route to go down.

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Two great blog-posts wrap up MobileActive08. Ismail Dhorat from ignite^2 gives an overview of one of the best sessions on ReadWriteWeb:

I found this presentation by Tino Kruetzer, a researcher at the University of Cape Town, extremely interesting. It was based on the interim results of a pilot study on mobile internet usage by low income youth in Cape Town. Some of the key findings were:

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What an amazing three days MobileActive08 it was!  We gathered an extraordinary group of people in one place who usually never get to see each other and the energy and work and collaboration that happened here in Johannesburg was truly amazing.  The session and ideas are too numerous to describe here (and not that I would know about all the crazy work that went on, anyway!) but here are a few observations about who was here!

Participants: Thanks to the fantastic team at Mobile Researcher, we conducted a number of surveys of the more than 370 attendees and here are a few data points:

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For other videos from MobileActive08 in our YouTube channel.

One of the big initiatives that was just formed/announced at MobileActive '08 was what we're calling the "Open Mobile Consortium" (working name). This is a body much like the W3C, focused on bringing together groups working on initiatives in this space, formulating best practices and standards and generally working to bring this fragmented industry a little closer together.

We'll see where this goes, but there seems to be a lot of enthusiasm and willingness to make something happen. On top of that, the organizations taking part carry a lot of weight. There were representatives from UNICEF, Shuttleworth Foundation, Tactical Tech, InSTEDD, Cell-Life, Ushahidi, UN Foundation, Open Rosa, Columbia University, and many more that I can't remember.

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Yesterday I attended the session "OpenRosa mHealth in Tanzania" presented by Gayo Mhila and Neal Lesh. Gayo told us about CommCare, an OpenRosa mobile data collection application which enables community health workers (CHWs) to easily collect patient data through their mobiles. OpenRosa is a consortium for mobile data collection and decision support.

Community health workers serve poor, rural populations, promote preventative care, convey health information, and collect data. Their challenge in being able to use applications such as CommCare include limited network coverage, the fact that it's hard to charge phones in rural areas (solar charger, anyone?), airtime management of personal calls in the case of granted airtime, and understanding of technology.

I asked Gayo about how the CHW's found patients to survey, especially since privacy is such an issue for the population with HIV and TB.  He said that health workers direct patients to go to the NGO to get help, so it is their initiative to work with them. 

 Another audience member mentioned how complicated navigation on donated cellphones was an issue in her project.

Reposted from MobileActive08.org, by Brett Davidson

This afternoon I attended 'The Mobile Web': The potential and reality for developing countries, facilitated by Toni Eliasz.

There was extended discussion of the value of the mobile web to developing countries. Views hinge a lot on how one defines 'mobile web'. Some people had strong reservations about the potential of the mobile web, related to affordability, the need for high-end phones in order to browse the internet, the high cost of data access via cellphone networks, and ongoing problems with connectivity.

But many of these reservations can be removed if one defines the mobile web more broadly than accessing the Internet. One person proposed defining it as access to data and databases in whatever form. So if people are able to access data on the Internet, through tailored SMS services, for example, that qualifies as the mobile web.

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MobileActive08 delved right into the key issues that we have been talking about for some time now. During the Mobile Cafe in the opening session, key themese emerged that need to be addressed to fully "unlock the potential of mobile tech for social change."

It was rightly noted that we need to make "common ground" - there are lots of small projects that should start sharing notes, tech, and experiences. This is one of the key reasons, of course, why we co-convened MobileActive08 - to bring the best and the birghtest people in this field together to start comparing notes.  Several participants talked about the importance of voice. Much attention is focused on SMS and higher-end applications but voice is often neglected.  

The cost of mobile communication is a hug barrier for many projects that needs to be addressed in order to go beyond a small proof-of-concept phase to anything resembling sustainable use of mobiles.  

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Greenpeace Argentina, Al Jazeera, Unicef, Burmese monks, healthcare workers in ten African countries, geeks and IT entrepreneurs, 380 people from 45 countries: what's the common link?  Mobile technology with a social mission.  Whether it's sharing medical information in rural Mozambique, or helping getting the word out about post-election violence in Kenya or getting accurate demographic data in regions with no IT structure, or using phone minutes for micro-banking or social marketing, someone here (and there are close 400 participants)  is talking about it, and others are sharing their experiences, with each other of course, and with any social network you've heard of from Twitter to Flickr to Youtube to Facebook.  

In general the flash of the IT world is mixed with a fair amount of humility; most people are here as much to listen, and get the lay of the land as they are to present the killer app or networking tool.

For me, coming from New York, the notion that Katrin Verclas suggested, that the event is packed with people and information precisely because it's in Africa, rings true.

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