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:
On day two of MobileActive ’08, Benjamin Brandzel of Avaaz.org led a session on cross-border mobile engagement. Avaaz.org is an international network of activists who work through the Internet to directly influence policy issues such as global warming, poverty, peace, democracy, and human rights. They have made use of internet and email to reach out to people. There is still plenty of room to grow with that, but now a growing segment of the world’s population uses mobiles and not the Internet.
Avaaz.org wants to transfer its model of issue advocacy across global boundaries. Brandzel asked if it is possible to engage folks through mobiles simultaneously across many different nations. To do so, we must deal with political issues, legal issues, and technical issues –- for example, there is no global shortcode. There are also language issues. In Zulu, it’s hard to say “Call me” in 160 characters.
Brandzel said, “Trying to set up a shortcode across a number of African countries is a nightmare. It would be nice to get a platform to make it easier.”
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
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!
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.
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:
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.
Hosted on the NetSquared community site, you are invited to submitt your project idea to a community process:
You will have an opportunity to submit your idea and receive feedback from NetSquared's 13,000 members.
When the submission period ends, registered NetSquared users can partiicpate in an on-line vote to select 15 featured projects.
Senior USAID staff will select a first place and two runners up. The first place winner will receive a grant of $10,000, with runners up receiving grants of $5,000 each. All three will have an opportunity to present their ideas to senior officials and the public.
To find out more about the challenge and, we hope, enter your idea, please visit: 2008 USAID Development 2.0 has launched. We look forward to seeing what you are working on.
Mobile researcher Andi Friedman just presented the results of his survey of the MobileActive '08 attendees. He showed us a Google map mashup using the dialing code of attendees to show where they come from, and there are people here from every continent but Antarctica. South Africa heads the list and Zimbabwe is in second place.
Other facts: 65% of attendees are NGO's, if attendees had $1 million to spend on a mobile application for social change the top sectors they'd choose to bulid it for are education and health, with government in last place.
Unsurprisingly, 0% of attendees don't own a mobile.
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.
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.
As more than 300 mobile social innovators set out to Johannesburg to convene at MobileActive08, we wanted to let you know how you can follow the proceedings and participate remotely. We will be blogging many of the amazing sessions here on this blog, on MobileActive08's blog; and you can follow and discuss proceedings through these channels:
There is yet another competition focused on mobile app development, this time sponsored by USAID and Netsquared. Starting on October 13, Development 2.0 will reward the innovative uses of mobile technologies for international development withup to $10,000 for the winner. While this is less than some of the other recent competitions, applicants can get advice and improve their ideas and clarify their project submissions during the entire application process on a project gallery.
A open voting process will determine the best projects, and then a jury of USAID senior staff will select the final winners. More info is here.
Other compeitions open right now:
Knight News Challenge -- $5 million awarded to digital media projects, including mobile citizen media projects;
This article was written by Lisa Campbell of the Youth Action Network and is reprinted here with permission. Lisa's research and articles are on her blog Mobile Revolutions.
Mobile phones are the first telecommunications technology to be more popular in developing nations, than their developed counterparts, far outnumbering internet coverage (Zuckerman 2007). More and more people are using their phones to access the internet instead of computers. Soon there will be more cell phone users than literate people on the planet. This signifies a shift into a new age of digital literacy, where avatars, emoticons, pictures, sounds and videos often hold more power than names and numbers.
Economists around the world are hailing cell phones as the solution for ICT development and a ray of hope in bridging the digital divide.
In our occasional mobile tool reviews, we are featuring this week two reviews of similar mobile applications that provide bulk messaging focused on NGO needs. Today's review is of RapidSMS, an open source enterprise level bulk messaging application developed by UNICEF. Later this week we'll be reviewing FrontlineSMS, the much-touted grassroots bulk messaging desktop application.
We are pleased and proud to welcome and thank the sponsors and supporters of MobileActive08. We are very grateful for the generous and amazing funding from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) in Canada which is a major supporter of the event. IDRC has also been instrumental in the mobile-for-social-impact field with extraordinary research and support, so we are very pleased that IDRC staff and grantees will be contributing their expertise and innovations to MobileActive08.
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:
Forum Nokia has announced a new global contest: "Calling All Innovators" for developers to create mobile applications that will help to better society. Nokia will award up to USD 150,000 in cash and prizes, in addition to helping the winning developers distribute their mobile applications.
In its announcement of the contest, Nokia notes that
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:
One India reports on how mobile phones are used after the devastating floods in Bihar, India. While relief and aid have been very slow to get to Bihar, mobiles are proving to be a life saver. According to One India,
[Mobiles] are playing the most crucial role in largescale evacuation and rescue of marooned people from far flung areas. The availability of mobile phones to all sections of people across the flooded regions and their 24 hour connectivity during the crisis period, greatly helped the rescue teams to locate the cut off villages and localities besides saving many lives even from remote areas.
Through cell phones the marnooed people were also able to remain connected with the district officials to guide them about their need and the urgency of rescuing them.
In absence of any other mode of communication, particularly the land line telephones, as most of which went under six to eight feet of water in the worst affected districts of Madhepura, Supoul, Araria and Sitamarhi, it was the connectivity of mobile phone network that had kept the hopes of lakhs of people alive.
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."
When we hosted MobileActive07 in Brazil last year, this beautiful mobile baby was still in his mother's belly -- Graziela from Avaaz.org who was a MobileActive07 participant.
As we are getting ready for MobileActive08 in Johannesburg, we are happy to report that, in true MobileActive.org fashion, this child (a baby no more) MOVES! We hope to see more of the next generation of MobileActives in South Africa! Register now for MobileActive08 as the spaces (and baby motos) are filling up fast! And congratulations, Mama Graziela!
