In early 2008 violence errupted in Kenya after the most recent elections there the previous December. Post-election tribal warfare resulted in the death of 1,200 people, internally displaced 400,000 to 600,000 people, and destroyed more than 41,000 properties. The economic cost of the crisis has been estimated at more than KSh 100 billion (approx US $ 1.5 billion), with more than half a milion jobs lost. The World Bank noted that over 2 million Kenyans may have been driven into poverty as a result of the violence. Food security also declined with farmers unable to cultivate and harvest their farms in early 2008.
Today is International Women's Day and we are celebrating by featuring innovative women in the MobileActive.org community who are making a difference by using mobiles for social impact. Many of these social innovators are indeed focusing their work on improving the lives of women - their health, incomes, and social and political well-being. We salute you all!
I am currently working on developing a client application for Sahana, which can also act as a standalone data collecting tool for field reporters and people working in the process of disaster relief & management.
"...Free and Open Source Disaster Management system. It is a web based collaboration tool that addresses the common coordination problems during a disaster from finding missing people, managing aid, managing volunteers, tracking camps effectively between Government groups, the civil society (NGOs) and the victims themselves." - Source - http://www.sahana.lk
1. Openmoko is a Linux distribution designed for open mobile computing platforms, such as, but not limited to, cellphones. 2. Openmoko is the company behind the Openmoko Linux distribution. Openmoko also manufactures mobile computing platforms, such as the Neo FreeRunner.”
Allyson Kapin from Women Who Tech asked me to respond to some excellent questions about mobile campaigns for advocating for specific social issues. As I just received two text messages from NARAL and the Planned Parenthood Federation of America promoting two campaigns they are running, I thought I take the opportunity to answer Allyson's questions publicly, drawing on my experience and observations of the last few years of mobiles in advocacy, illustrating what works and what is better avoided in using mobiles in advocacy campaigns. This is, by nature of the question, somewhat US-centric. A follow-up article will focus on mobile campaigning in the Global South to differentiate some of the key issues.
How can integrating mobile technology benefit online advocacy campaigns?
UPDATE: Henrietta Fore, the administrator of USAID, announced today the winner of the USAID Development 2.0 Innovation Challenge focused on mobile technology. MobileActive was a judge for the Challenge. The Challenge, a co-production between USAID's Development Commons and Netsquared, focused on mobiles in development. The winner of the $10,000 award is Child Malnutrition Surveillance and Famine Response.
Some people are claiming that the conflict in Gaza is a "social war." But so far, social media is used mainly for propaganda and there is a marked absence of voices from people affected by the conflict, and of useful applications of mobile and other social media. As the Israeli bombing of Gaza is continuing and is now in its third day, mobile communication is beginning to make the news but is not playing the dominant role in citizen reporting and aid communications as it has in other conflicts.
A few examples that have not been reported anywhere else: Souktel, an organization in Ramallah that is known for its SMS-job matching service connecting Palestine youth with work, is running a Palestinian "SMS Blood Bank" program for the Red Crescent.
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!
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.
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:
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.
The Knight News Challenge 2008, a worldwide contest, reopened again for a new round. There is $5 million in funding available for digital media experiments to innovate news and communication - including mobile! The deadline is November 1, 2008.
The contest is open to community-minded innovators worldwide, from software designers to journalists to citizens and students of any age. Winning entries must have three elements:
What does it take for smaller organizations to adde a mobile strategy to advance the work? What are some ways in which small organizations can get started in mobile, and get what they need for free or at very low cost to try the mobile medium for their work?
We were recently at the Institute for Nonprofits organized by the Bay Area Video Coalition to help a select group of organizations develop their social media strategy.
Lots of the groups at BAVC were interested in exploring how mobile phones fit into their work. Many work with constituents of color and lower-income communities in America that are more likely to be on a mobile than on the web. And of course, this is true around the world already.
In that same vain, a reader asked recently: "How can I get started in mobile?" He wrote:
We have written a lot about providing consumers with just-in-tine information about products on their mobile. Shoppers can receive an SMS about sustainable fish or climate impact of products already. This is the idea of the new GoodGuide, a new start-up spun out of the University of Berkeley. Good Guide provides 'green' consumer information for shoppers who want to buy products in line with their values.
The brainchild of Dara O'Rourke, an enterprising UC Berkely professor, Good Guide came online yesterday. The 61,000 products already in the database contain hundreds of datapoints. They are organized into three categories: health, social and environmental impact. Currently, there are two product types only: personal care and household chemicals. Food, electronics, toys, and apparel are to be added over the next several months.
ICTD2009 will be be held in Doha, capital of the small, oil-rich country of Qatar along the Arabian Gulf. This conference is a focal point for new scholarship in the field of ICT and international development. Confirmed speakers include a keynote by Bill Gates, Chairman of Microsoft Corporation.
Conference Co-chair Richard Heeks notes: "As noted previously, we will particularly welcome papers about mobiles and development."
In our exploration this week of the social impact of mobiles phones on livelihoods, the GSMA Development Fund has aggregated key research studies from the last few years on the social and economic impact of mobile telephony in developing countries.
There is a growing body of impact studies that indicate the substantial effect that mobile telephony has on the lives and livelihoods of poor people. The GSMA Development Fund compendium (attached for easy download) lists 20 studies conducted between 2005 and early 2008, and cites other, related reseaech in a well-done overview.
"However, in order to reap the full benefits from connectivity in a long-lasting manner, underlying issues of policy, affordability and technology need to be addressed," LIRNAsia's Executive Director Rohan Samarajiva and co-editor of the book with Ayesha Zainudeen, told Mobileactive.org in an email interview.
Currently Asia is the fastest growing region in the world in terms of connectivity. Between 1984 and 1993, the Asia Pacific as a region overtook the other regions of the world (mainly due to mobiles), and it continues to grow, he noted.
"The book looks at the recent experiences of some countries in emerging Asia that are improving connectivity.
Curious how your state ranks on reproductive choice? NARAL Pro-Choice America makes it easy to find out. By texting the word "grade" and the abbreviation of your state to a short code, you get an almost-instantaneous text response with your state's grade and opportunities for more information. "One of the reasons we decided to invest in mobile technology is we want to diversify how we're communicating with people," said Kristin Koch, Deputy Director of Communications at NARAL. NARAL recently began a mobile program -- they're calling it Txt4Choice -- and has been exploring how to use mobile in ways that compliment and integrate into their already developed communications strategy.
In the United States, a used mobile phone is likely to end up in the trash can, or more likely, in the back of a desk drawer for several years, collecting dust. But in the rest of the world, this just isn't the case. Mobile phones -- or even parts of mobile phones -- are reused, recycled, and refurbished.
Jan Chipchase, a phone anthropologist for Nokia, has seen the way that old mobile phones transform into new ones while traveling for Nokia around the world. According to this CNET News article, Chipchase and his team (MobileActive wrote about Younghee Jung, an anthropologist who works with Chipchase, here) have found that refurbishing phones is a booming market in developing countries, with small businesses springing up that sell phone parts, repair manuals, and pirated versions of the newest software.
An early-morning group text message from SFTorch on txtmarks.com by protest organizers in San Francisco read: "Good morning, what a beautiful day! Default meeting place is Ferry Park, 8 am." Throughout the day, text messages to more than 1,300 people were disseminated by protesters, using Txtmark, a free group messaging system. Thousands of Tibetan exiles and supporters protested the Olympic torch relay throughout the day, forcing the torch route to be changed a number of times.
The Twitter group SFTorch was much smaller with some 200 followers by mid-day and used to report up-to date messages to audiences both in San Francisco and elsewhere. The security prompted messages on Twitter such as this one: "I have never ever seen this much security for an inanimate object" and ""It ain't coming here." --Guy behind me "It's going up and down Van Ness, and nobody is there to see it." --Girl beside me."
I recently had a chat with Patrick Meier, a doctoral student at Tufts University, and am thrilled to have started a conversation. Patrick is doing his dissertation on what he calls the "iRevolution," activism, repressive regimes and who is winning in the cat and mouse tech game. (And yes, I am paraphrasing!) He generously allowed us to repost one of his pieces on secure SMS and a mobile equivalent to TOR. We'll be in close touch with Patrick as he delves into the research - it's much needed and great work.
WirelessWeek: Analysts predicted SMS revenues of up to $80 billion worldwide in 2007, with the number of text messages expected to reach a whopping 1.8 trillion by 2010.
Erik Hersman, our excellent colleague and friend over at White African writes about a new mobile data collection tool for Africa focused right now on survey and field data capture. His review is reposted here with permission. Great stuff, thanks, Erik!
I was contacted about a month ago by Mark Fowles who works at Clyral, a web and mobile development company based in Hillcrest, outside Durban, in South Africa. He was emailing me to let me know about a new mobile data collection platform called Populi.net.
Over at Netsquared we're running a Mashup Challenge. In a nutshell, we're asking folks to contribute their ideas and then working, heads down crazy, to get them resources -- brains and $ -- to help move those ideas forward. And we want more mobile mashups represented.
There are three parts to the Challenge:
1. Applications: Individuals working to create change will share with the NetSquared Community what change they are trying to make, as well as the information/data sources they believe can be married to help create that change. Applications will be available online February 1 and accepted until March 14, 2008.
2. Recruiting and specification-building: The Net2Team will reach out to web-savvy collaborators to help translate your idea into a Mashup Project.
3. Mashup Development Teams will start building the mashups.
This Valentine's Day, forget the chocolate, roses, and poetry-filled greeting cards. Instead, consider surprising your love with ringtones of animal mating calls available for download to North Americans at eNature.com.
The site features 20 different ringtones with more to come in the future. Current animals include a lovelorn howler monkey, a horny tree frog, a lonely African lion, various birds, and many other species. The ringtones can be downloaded at no cost. And if you are curious and want to learn more, each mating ringtone page contains a description of the animal's mating habits and calls. We are sure you'll be able to delight your love there.
Post-election violence has exploded in Kenya in the wake of the December 27 presidential elections. Ethnic killings -- which today's New York Times suggests may have been carefully planned -- have increased, and estimates of the death toll range from 650 to over 1000. In the midst of this, people both in and outside the country are using mobile phones in innovative ways to communicate political knowledge and circumvent the media blackout.
