The Internet has enabled people from all over the globe to communicate and share information. Yet over two-thirds of the world’s population remains disconnected from the Internet, and many of these people live in poor, remote areas in the developing world. Organizations struggle to cross the last mile to these communities that are difficult to reach geographically, are often only fluent in local languages, lack reading and writing proficiency, and have limited experience with information technology. Unidirectional broadcast media such as the radio, television, and written periodicals can be localized to a region or community, but they are not micro-local, demand-driven, and do not offer transparent space for feedback and community discussion. Local people may seek information from experts or others in their personal social networks, but misinformation abounds and advice is fragmented across multiple sources. There are few comprehensive, on-demand sources for relevant, high-quality knowledge. This is precisely what the Internet provides for those who have access.
Awaaz.De (“Give your voice”) is a software platform enabling organizations to engage with poor, remote, and marginal communities by providing on-demand, many-to-many information access through mobile phones. People access Awaaz.De applications by dialing regular phone numbers to create, browse, and share voice content through automated voice interfaces. Voice makes it easy to provide services in local languages, overcomes literacy constraints, and offers a low barrier to content creation: one only needs to know how to speak into a phone. Organizations use Awaaz.De to host voice-based information portals, discussion forums, Q&A services, classifieds, and more. For example, rural development organizations can offer demand-driven agricultural extension through a farmer Q&A service, broadcast market prices and weather reports targeted by crop and location, or perform real-time data collection on availability of farm inputs and outputs. In this way, Awaaz.De helps organizations reach previously disconnected people with on-demand, locally relevant information, in their language. Most importantly, Awaaz.De is a social platform that supports people to give their own voice and participate not just as passive consumers, but active producers of knowledge.
Currently Awaaz.De serves eight social development organizations and enterprises across six states in India working in agriculture, education, women’s empowerment, labor rights, and rural products. These organizations serve as content providers, and use Awaaz.De to disseminate their informational content in real time, as well as collect input from the community through interactive features. These organizations have proven the value of Awaaz.De through willingness to pay; partners pay a recurring monthly fee to host their customized voice information service with Awaaz.De
The other demonstration of Awaaz.De’s value comes through the response from the communities of users. To date, Awaaz.De has served over 100,000 calls from over 10,000 unique callers. People rate content highly whenever ratings are solicited; in one deployment, the average rating was 2.8/3 from 325 individual ratings. A bit more anecdotally, unsolicited messages of praise and gratitude come in regularly from people. In a study where an Awaaz.De partner sent agricultural information broadcasts to farmers and then prompted for a question or comment, 37% of the recordings posted were simply comments of praise for the service, compared to 41% posts asking technical agricultural questions. To us, these are small indicators of Awaaz.De's potential for not only building knowledge capital, but social capital. Here’s another good anecdotal example.
Tool Category:
App resides and runs on a mobile phone
Key Features :
Awaaz.De’s technology platform consists of two components. First, the voice application lets end-users access content through regular phone numbers. After calling in, they navigate automated message boards with touchtone to create, browse, and respond to voice messages posted by others. A “personal inbox” option plays the caller’s own messages, identified by their phone number. Message boards are configured with a number of policy settings. A message board can be listen or post-only, moderated, and allow community response. It can also define sub-message boards based on hierarchical categories. Awaaz.De’s second component is a web interface that lets community managers moderate the voice forums, annotate and categorize content, route messages to specific experts for responding, conduct voice-based surveys, collect ratings, and broadcast the best content to wide (e.g. last 1,000 callers) or targeted (e.g. all callers who have posted messages related to wheat) audiences. Taken together, the two components of Awaaz.De provide an “Internet for the few, voice for the many” model, where the mostly Internet-less community members access content and communicate through mobile voice interfaces, and community managers with access to the Internet administer the system through the web interface.
Main Services:
Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
Voting, Data Collection, Surveys, and Polling
Mobile Social Network/Peer-to-peer
Information Resources/Information Databases
Display tool in profile:
Yes
Tool Maturity:
Currently deployed
Release Date:
2010-09
Platforms:
All phones -- Voice
Program/Code Language:
Java
Python
Other
Organizations Using the Tool:
Awaaz.De is currently being used by eight organizations across six states in India. For their project descriptions, visit this page.
The Mobile Media Toolkit is a new resource site with lots of content about how mobile tech can be used for reporting, news broadcasting, and citizen media.
The Toolkit content is available in English, Spanish, Arabic, and we are translating into Russian as well. We've been adding lots of helpful new content since our launch a few months ago. Here is a sampling:
NEW How-To Guides: The latest is on how to use Bambuzer to live stream content and engage with audiences. Michelle Li of WECT tells us how her newsroom uses Bambuser to share live video and engage with viewers. (And lets us in on what news anchors talk about, off-camera.) Check out the complete guide here.
NEW Case studies, for instance on how to use SMS and radio to engage with listeners in Uganda. No Internet? No problem. Using a new tool called TRAC FM, stations are able to poll listeners via SMS and share the results over the radio. Read the full case study here.
TIPS for the Mobile Journalist, (aka MoJo) such as this video on how to shoot and transfer content from a mobile phone to a tablet using basic hardware and software. For more, check out the Toolkit section on Creating Content (and getting it off) your mobile phone.
SMS in Action is an interactive crowdmap that allows users to submit and search for SMS-based systems that aim (or claim) to have a social impact. The map can be filtered by categories including Agriculture, Health, Emergency/Disaster Services, Banking, Economic Development, Information and Media, Education, and Governance with many of these categories dividing into further subcategories. Reports may also be filtered by report date.
Corresponding markers on the map can be clicked giving the user the option to zoom in/out or get more information. While clearly still in its early stages, the map has a lot to offer. A quick search for disease programs under medical/health returned over a dozen hits across the map. Additionally, users may subscribe to receive location-specific email alerts whenever a report is posted within 20 miles of a designated area.
Mobile Media Services at Sub-Saharan African Newspapers data sheet 1447 Views
Author:
Kristina Bürén
Publication Date:
Aug 2011
Publication Type:
Report/White paper
Abstract:
Published by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) and the African Media Initiative (AMI), this guidebook aims to help African newspapers implement mobile platforms.
Billed as a guidebook, and not a one-size-fits-all rulebook, the guide aims to help Sub-Saharan African news publishers develop and implement mobile services. The report is based on a series of on-site interviews with newspapers in Uganda, Kenya, and South Africa, including The Observer and the Daily Monitor in Uganda, The Standard and the Daily Nation in Kenya, and Grocott's Mail, Mail & Guardian, Avusa Group, and News24.comin South Africa.
See also this blog post with more information on the guidebook.
We are in need of a fabulous web developer for maintenance of two existing complex Drupal sites, and one WordPress site that is currently being built by another firm. We are also starting to use Tilemill and other platforms so proficieny and interest beyond Drupal desired.
Must have extensive and proven Drupal 6 and 7 as well as WordPress development experience, be creative and entrepreneurial and able to work in fast-moving start-up environment. Curiosity and interest in our work related to mobile tech for social change highly desirable, as is making websites super accessible on mobile devices and low bandwidths. Possibility to advance rapidly for the right person. Part-time to start (24 h/week) with potential for more. Full benefits are provided.
Position is based in NYC, no exceptions. We do have a cool office in Chelsea. Competitive salary and signing bonus.
A just-published guide from the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) is all about making media mobile, specifically at newspapers in Sub-Saharan Africa. The full report is available for download here.
Billed as a guidebook, and not a one-size-fits-all rulebook, the guide aims to help Sub-Saharan African news publishers develop and implement mobile services. The report is based on a series of on-site interviews with newspapers in Uganda, Kenya, and South Africa, including The Observer and the Daily Monitor in Uganda, The Standard and the Daily Nation in Kenya, and Grocott's Mail, Mail & Guardian, Avusa Group, and News24.com in South Africa.
Though the primary audience of the guidebook is media managers, there are lessons and tips for anyone interested in the current state of and potential future for mobile print media in Sub-Saharan Africa.
We would have wished that there was a greater focus on online media as the guide is almost entirely focused on print. Given the fast growth of online media outlets in a number of African media markets, this is an unfortunate limitation.
At the same time, the guide provides a detailed landscape of mobile telephony in Africa, including usage and infrastructure and access points (including SMS, mobile Internet and data, Sim Tool Kit, USSD, voice and interactive voice response). See explanations and examples of these access points in the Mobile Media Toolkit Glossary, here.
With the growing use of mobile phones for citizen media comes new risks, challenges and opportunities. This online dialogue is a space to discuss stories, tactics, and resources for using mobile phones for citizen media, as well as a space to discuss mobile risk assessment and security. Jin the discussion on July 27 to share your stories, ideas and resources!
You can find more information on how to participate here.
Mobile coverage reaches over 90% of the world's population, but mobile services in traditionally rural, lower-income areas have lagged compared to opportunities in more urban areas. One company in India, Ekgaon, is tapping into the rural market by bringing financial, agricultural, and citizen-oriented mobile services to under-served regions. Vijay Pratap Singh Aditya, CEO of Ekgaon, explained to MobileActive.org how his company developed and evolved over the years.
With a focus on under-served markets, Ekgaon partners with financial institutions, agricultural organizations, NGOs, and corporations to bring mobile services to those who need them. Users of the agricultural system receive personalized and customized soil nutrient management information and crop advice along with weather updates, market information, and alerts; users of the financial services use mobiles to manage savings, remittances, insurance, investments and mortgages; and citizen services allow users to monitor and report on the delivery of government programs.
SharedSolar: Mobiles and Micro-Grids For More Efficient Energy data sheet 3666 Views
It is an unfortunate irony that often the poorest people pay the most for the lowest quality energy. In many areas, the rural poor pay as much as 5 USD per month for kerosene or battery power. SharedSolar is a project that attempts to develop the technology, and business case to connect these populations to better, more traditional energy sources. It does so by leveraging existing mobile networks.
With SharedSolar, rural poor consumers make payments based on their usage by using a scratch card and adding credit via SMS. The system uses a micro-grid network to connect consumers to power, and each household uses a unique prepaid metering system. A group of up to 20 consumers (individuals, households, small businesses, or schools) are all located within a 50 meter radius of a single, central power source -- such as solar panels -- connected via an underground wire.
At the same time, the SharedSolar team is testing and developing its business model to show that a case exists for micro-grids and mobile energy payment. The team launched an initial pilot in 2010 in Pelengana, Mali and currently has systems set up in Uganda and Tanzania.
MobileActive.org spoke with Matt Basinger, project lead for SharedSolar, to learn more about the overlap of mobile technology and rural power.
In Tanzania Media, Speak Up and Be Heard data sheet 2233 Views
For the largest civil society media platform in Tanzania, back talk is good.
In fact, talking back is the objective of a new service at Femina HIP called Speak Up! The service aims to increase access of marginalized youth and rural communities and promote a participatory, user-driven media scene in Tanzania.
Femina HIP is the largest civil society media platform in the country, outside of commercial mainstream media. Products include print magazines, television shows, a radio program, and an interactive web site. Fema magazine, for example, has a print run of over 170,000 copies and is distributed to every rural region in the country.
Apps For Development: Lessons From mPowering data sheet 3210 Views
Non-profit organization mPowering is developing customized mobile apps to help reach the ultra poor -- people living on less than $2 a day -- and connect them with funding opportunities and programs in the developed world.
Reaching individuals and supplying resources in remote regions has huge challenges. The goal of mPowering is to leverage existing mobile infrastructure to open up channels of access. The organization has ongoing programs in Nepal and India which provide incentives to poor individuals for reporting to school or work, via mobile application. The organization is also working to create a mobile donor app to further connect the poor with funding opportunities.
Before a mobile app can be developed and deployed, the mPowering team conducts field research and partners with local institutions. We spoke with Kamael Ann Sugrim, Co-founder and CEO of mPowering, to find out how an app is developed.
Programs in Nepal and India
The mPowering organization is a year old and currently has two programs underway which utilize mobile apps. In Bhaktapur, Nepal, women earn points for reporting to work, and the points can be redeemed for food, clothing, and medicine.
In Orissa, India, 175 children in the village of Juanga earn points for attending school and can redeem the points for food, clothing, and medicine. Teachers have been supplied with donated Android phones with the mPowering application. Through the app, they can “scan” children in for attendance.
Fu Chi: A Mobile Civic Platform for Philadelphia’s Chinatown data sheet 1871 Views
Philly's Chinatown has struggled in recent years to maintain its geographic integrity with development encroaching its boundaries. There are internal challenges as well with frequent brak-ins and trash littering the streets. There is an imperative to coordinate residents, businesses and organizations to unite to address problems and prevent further encroachment. Yet, coordination and cooperation have been difficult to attain. For these reasons we wanted to design a communication system accessible via mobile phone specifically for Philadelphia’s Chinatown, to help its citizens and organizations address themselves, each other, and the greater Philadelphia community.
The range of dialects and cultural backgrounds in Chinatown make face-to-face communication rare for many residents. We wanted to create a social media system for our project that could potentially help forge social ties and build the essential element of trust in a new way. The system we envisioned would have features that address what we have identified as needs in the neighborhood:
Targeting women with mobile phones and mobile-based projects can bring great benefits and opportunities, as we outlined in Part 1 of our series on women and mobiles. But, there is a “darker side” to this world, which includes changes in gender relations and power dynamic, a potential increase in violence, substitution of money or a change in expenditures, invasion of privacy, and increased control by a male partner.
Changes in Gender Relations and Power Dynamics
When the traditional social dynamic of a household is patriarchal, introducing a mobile phone into the hands of the woman can challenge the existing gender structure. Trina DasGupta, mWomen Programme Director for the GSMA Development Fund, writes in an e-mail to MobileActive.org, “threats to the status quo have sometimes been viewed negatively by community leaders and we have seen examples of this gender discrimination manifesting itself when women gain greater access to empowering tools, such as the Internet or mobile phones.”
Women themselves may not agree. The GRACE project study in Kenya, for example, finds that women do not perceive mobiles at tools for males. “Unlike our literature review that suggested that the mobile phone is culturally construed as a male tool, the women entrepreneurs did not perceive the phone as such. However, the study does indicate that usage of the phone is culturally construed, with an increase in responsibilities and empowerment for one or other profession socially construed as women’s work.”
A paper by Aramanzan Madanda looks at gender relations and ICT adoption in Uganda (the work will soon be published in book format) and finds that “existing gender structures have been dented and that patriarchy is stressed by adoption of the technologies especially mobile phones leading to transformation of gender relations to an extent.”
A village in India last year banned unmarried women from using mobile phones for fear they would arrange forbidden marriages. The village council suspected young men and women were secretly calling one another to arrange to elope. Meanwhile, unmarried men could use mobile phones under parental supervision.
As mobile penetration increases across the developing world, the entry of mobile phones in the hands of women causes reactions. In many cases, mobile phone ownership empowers women in myriad ways: economic gains, increased access to information, greater autonomy and social empowerment, and a greater sense of security and safety.
But, there is a darker side. Targeting women with mobile phones can cause changes in gender dynamics and family expenditures and may relate to increases in domestic violence, invasion of privacy, or control by a male partner.
The World Bank announced today the winners of its first-ever Apps for Development competition. The contest launched last October as part of the Open Data Initiative and invited developers and development professionals to create mobile applications to help solve world problems apply their skills toward the Millenium Development Goals. A total of 107 applications were submitted form 36 countries across every continent.
Honorable mention, for example, went to Treepet from Mexico, that teaches people about the realities of worldwide deforestation via a game in which you plant a seed, nourish and water it, and try to restore an ecosystem. One of the winning apps helps the Bank directly: StatPlanet World Bank from Australia uses the 3000-plus indicators available from the World Bank database in interactive maps and graphs.
Whether in the developing world or the business sector, the majority of mobile data collection efforts parallel the processes set down by their largely paper-based predecessors. In traditional data collection systems information is collected from a variety of sources, funnelled to a single point and eventually compiled, sorted and (hopefully) acted upon. In many cases this workflow meets the basic needs of data consumers and in some cases is preferable.
Let's consider some of the challenges posed by traditional one-way data collection systems.
The people performing data collection (usually referred to as "mobile workers") don't have access to the wealth of raw information available to data consumers. This makes mobile workers outsiders to the big picture and lessens their potential contributions to the overall data collection effort.
Solutions pull collected data into a black hole: once it's submitted there's very little the mobile worker can do to access it for review or to make corrections.
Implementations often force knowledgeable team members to work in a void. If data cannot be easily and seamlessly shared between team members collaborative efforts will be impeded and their overall effectiveness reduced.
When team members cannot "see" what others in the group are doing, the chances of double-entry and redundant information are all the more likely.
When aggregated data finally returns to mobile workers it is often severely outdated.
Solutions are not really mobile if they require workers to access desktops or laptops to complete tasks essential to the data collection process. This is also true if the tools make it impossible to take pertinent portions of the data set with them for online & offline use.
Group Complete has coupled the power and open architecture of Open Data Kit and XForms standards with CouchDB to provide a mobile and real-time collaborative data collection platform.
Tool Category:
App resides and runs on a mobile phone
App resides and runs on a server
Is a web-based application/web service
Key Features :
Share collected data between mobile team members and data consumers in real-time
Allow team members to collaborate on data entry and review collected data, regardless of their locations
Reduce double entry, increase team cooperation and still employ more traditional workflows when needed
Perform all of the major functions of data collection on a smartphone (form building, data entry & export)
Use Group Complete Mobile to work offline
Integrate with Open Data Kit and XForms workflows
Main Services:
Voting, Data Collection, Surveys, and Polling
Location-Specific Services and GIS
Mobile Social Network/Peer-to-peer
Information Resources/Information Databases
Display tool in profile:
Yes
Tool Maturity:
Currently deployed
Release Date:
2011-03
Platforms:
Android
Linux/UNIX
Current Version:
0
Program/Code Language:
Java/Android
Javascript
Other
Organizations Using the Tool:
n/a
Number of Current End Users:
100-1,000
Number of current beneficiaries:
100-1,000
Support Forums:
http://www.groupcomplete.com/help
support@groupcomplete.com
Languages supported:
English (multi-lingual capable)
Handsets/devices supported:
All versions of Android 2.2, 2.3 and 3.x supported. Support for Android 2.1 coming soon.
Mobile del Mar: How Mobile App Fisher Friend Helps Fishers in India data sheet 3319 Views
An ongoing project in coastal India is working to improve the livelihoods of “fisher folk.” A mobile app called Fisher Friend provides timely information on local fish markets, the weather, and the sea.
A video about Fisher Friend suggests that, “for fishing communities, the key to livelihood is knowledge... knowledge of the market, the weather, and most importantly, the sea.” The Fisher Friend app, which launched in 2007, provides timely and critical information for fishers, and “also increases their knowledge base by providing information on government schemes and entitlements, health services, directory services, and a marine toll-free helpline.”
The Fisher Friend app provides information on potential fishing zones and market rates per species, helping fishers in all phases of their work. MobileActive.org spoke with S. Senthilkumaran, director of MSSRF in Chennai, to learn more about Fisher Friend.
SMSall is a service in Pakistan that enables mailing-list style interaction over SMS. It serves over 2.1 million people, and an average of 300 million SMS messages are sent every month (follow the total SMS count on the website). It is Pakistan’s largest SMS social network.
The founder of the service, Umar Saif, refers to it as “Twitter for SMS,” or as “Twitter for the 4 billion,” referring to the 4 billion people in the world who have access to mobile phones but not the Internet.
SMSall formed in response to the 2005 Kashmir earthquake in Pakistan. Like most Pakistani’s, Saif said, he tried to help during the aftermath but realized that although there were many rescue workers, there was no way to coordinate activities. “You would travel to a remote region with medicine, only to realize that there is plenty of medicine and all they needed were tents and warm clothing,' he said.
So Saif took action. On his laptop, he hacked together a basic response service, connected a mobile phone, and set up a broadcast group for all the rescue workers in the area. Those who subscribed to the “rescue group” would then receive SMS messages and information from the entire group.
From this grew the current-day SMSall service, the largest SMS social network in Pakistan. MobileActive.org spoke with Saif to hear more about the growth and next steps for the SMS service.
How does it work?
With the Kashmir earthquake, people could send an SMS to the service and ask to subscribe to the rescue group. Subsequently, they would receive SMS messages from everyone who posted to the rescue channel. This way, rescuers could keep in contact, in real-time, with only a basic mobile phone.
Now, SMSall users can create a group, join a group, follow a group, and broadcast to a group. The service has been used to spur blood donations, to communicate emergency responses, and to mobilize citizens in political protests. The service is used both by NGOs and more informally by people to keep in touch with friends and build communities around common interests.
SMSall became a popular platform for communication during media bans at the end of Musharraf’s rule. Political activists and members of civil society used SMSall to coordinate protests and activities. “One of the biggest groups on SMSall was run by an NGO setup by families of “missing persons” -- people who disappeared without trace during the political upheaval that gripped Pakistan in 2007 and 2008,” Saif said.
When a disaster or breaking news event occurs, specific groups form almost organically. An SMSall user will first notify an established group of friends and family, and from these many simultaneous chats, specific disaster or emergency groups are often formed, Saif said. The service resembles Twitter in that messages are being “pushed” out and viewed by any number of followers. Currently, there are over over 150,000 established groups on SMSall in Pakistan.
During the early days of SMSall, it was used to coordinate class quizzes and exams and communicate course schedules at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). Saif worked with several students to tweak the system and used it in a course he taught. Other professors followed his lead, students started using it, and “before we knew it, the system went viral, very quickly,” Saif said. SMSall is currently used by over 180 colleges and universities in Pakistan. And from this grew the “SMS mailing list” in Pakistan.
A comprehensive new study, commissioned by UNICEF, sheds light on trends and challenges in global mobile telephony. The report, Mobiles for Development, focuses on mobile tech as an area of significant future opportunity for advancing social development around the word. The report finds that there is an increasing number of mobile-based projects, with the most common sectors being health, socio-economic development and agriculture. Findings also show that "mobile tools can identify the most deprived...communities, provide cost effective interventions, overcome bottlenecks to services, and enable communities to maximise the impact of available resources."
Additionally, the report takes a look at the mobile operators in this field. It finds that there are significant business opportunities for regional operatators in the field of social development, including:
Recent events in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya have been on the minds -- and on the screens -- of people around the world.
News organizations are covering the events in innovative ways, and people have noticed. More generally, the role of social media itself in protests and revolutions is also being debated. But, as Charlie Beckett writes on his blog, let’s “put aside the silly debate about whether Twitter 'caused' revolution and look instead at how it helped tell the story.” Twitter is just one platform being used to help tell the story, as we see from our conversation with Al Jazeera, one of the most innovative newsrooms in the mix.
Texting to 9-1-1: Examining the Design and Limitations of SMS data sheet 1628 Views
Author:
4G Americas
Publication Date:
Oct 2010
Publication Type:
Report/White paper
Abstract:
This analysis focuses on SMS as a means to contact 9-1-1 emergency services, with a goal to provide a view of the capabilities, limitations, threats and vulnerabilities of this means of communications. There are millions of SMS messages sent each day and there is a perception that SMS is reliable; however, SMS was never designed as a reliable means for life-saving critical communications. SMS was designed to be secondary to voice calls and was never designed to provide the full and robust communications citizens have come to expect with voice calls. SMS has significant limitations and shortcomings that do not make SMS suitable for emergency communications, especially under life threatening conditions. In conclusion, there are significant limitations inherent in the design of the current Short Message Services which make it impractical to be used for emergency service. However, the industry is fully aware that it is important to address the requirements for people with disabilities as soon as possible. To that end, it is recommended that techniques which are readily available today, such as silent 9-1-1 calls, along with accelerating research and development into emerging technologies such as TTY Emulation, be undertaken while the next generation systems are being designed.
A new report from the Knight Foundation analyzes how new technologies were used to aid in the recovery of the earthquake in Haiti. The report -- Media, Information Systems and Communities: Lessons from Haiti -- suggests that the events mark "the beginning of a new culture in disaster relief" in which new and hybrid technologies, including mobile phones, are used to support rescue and relief efforts.
The report mentions a numnber of uses of mobile technology, including:
Interactive maps and SMS helped search-and-rescue teams find people in need of supplies
SMS messages broadcast critical information to Haitians
Hybrid approaches in which mobile technology was used in conjunction with radio
What can we expect to see on the technical front in m-health and m-for-development in 2011? Unleashing the inner geek in all of us, guest contributor Matt Berg has some predictions. This post originally appeared on his blog BuildAfrica.org. It is reposted here with permission.
As we welcome 2011, we wish the growing MobileActive.org community a happy, just, free, and mobile New Year! We thank you deeply for all of your support and enthusiasm in 2010 and look forward to working with you in the coming year. You are amazing, and together we will do great things - mobile, and all. Happy New Year to you and yours!
end-users access content through regular phone numbers. After calling in, they navigate automated message boards with touchtone to create, browse, and respond to voice messages posted by others. A “personal inbox” option plays the caller’s own messages, identified by their phone number. Message boards are configured with a number of policy settings. A message board can be listen or post-only, moderated, and allow community response. It can also define sub-message boards based on hierarchical categories. Awaaz.De’s second component is a web interface that lets community managers moderate the voice forums, annotate and categorize content, route messages to specific experts for responding, conduct voice-based surveys, collect ratings, and broadcast the best content to wide (e.g. last 1,000 callers) or targeted (e.g. all callers who have posted messages related to wheat) audiences. Taken together, the two components of Awaaz.De provide an “Internet for the few, voice for the many” model, where the mostly Internet-less community members access content and communicate through mobile voice interfaces, and community managers with access to the Internet administer the system through the web interface.
For the largest civil society media platform in Tanzania, back talk is good.
Now, SMSall users can create a group, join a group, follow a group, and broadcast to a group. The service has been used to spur blood donations, to communicate emergency responses, and to mobilize citizens in political protests. The service is used both by NGOs and more informally by people to keep in touch with friends and build communities around common interests. 
