MobileActive's Blog

Souktel and Ushahidi have been in the news as they have partnered with Al Jazeera for an interactive SMS-enabled crowdsourced map as the conflict in Gaza continues.

The guys of ICT4D.at shot some great videos of the two key people at Souktel and at Ushahidi -- Jacob Korenblum and Eirk Hersman -- describing their respective projects. Even though filmed a few months ago, both describe vividly how they are using mobiles in their work. Well worth watching! 

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Al Jazeera launched a new site today for citizens in Gaza to report incidences of various kinds in Gaza via SMS and Twitter. The deployment is using Ushahidi and Souktel's SMS gateway, one of the few able to deliver SMS in Gaza.  In this latest citizen journalism effort, Al Jazeera is both mapping reports from its own journalists and incidences reported by the public.  So far, there are few citizens texting in, however; the majority of the content consists of Al Jazeera news reports for now.  Al Jazeera and its new media team are doing a great job, however, in their labs  -- very impressive innivations coming from the Arab satellite news service and its New Media folks like Ryaad M, for example. 

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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.

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We are very privileged to co-host MobileTech for Social Change New York, a barcamp on February 21, 2009 in New York.  We are especially pleased to co-organize the event with Hunter College's Integrated Media Arts Program.

The second in the MobileActive barcamp series, 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 New York 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 and info again is here.

There is a fascinating discussion about the fuure of mobile apps going on over at Change.org.  Nathanial Whittemore started it all with a hopeful and visionary blog post on how mobiles will be changing the world.  The discussion thread turned into a thoughtful discussion on mobile appplications and how this emerging eco-system of tools scales and interoperates to maximize resources.

Isaac Holeman, working on (and twittering about) MobilizeMRS, points out that "interoperability is a very important point..where it's not necessary for any one installation of anything to scale completely because data can move into or out of any system.  Mobile health stuff is so new that interoperability of medical data has hardly been considered, to my knowledge. With MobilizeMRS, one of the primary reasons we want to interface with medical records systems is that a huge amount of work has already been done to promote medical record interoperability with standards such as HL7."

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Wired has finally picked up the story that has been circulating for a while -- the phenomenal medical diagnostic hack using a mobile and beginning to turn it into a lab for developing countries.

Aydogan Ozcan, assistant professor of electrical engineering at the UCLA School of Engineering and Applied Science and a member of the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI), and his team of graduate and udergraduate students developed a medical diagnostic application from a mobile phone, in effect bringing the hospital to the patient. 

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Ethopia again this year has experienced crippling droughts.  Faced with the possibility of famine, UNICEF Ethiopia launched a massive food distribution program to supply the high-protein food Plumpy'nut to under-nourished children using mobile phones for monitoring and delivering supplies its more than 1,8000 feeding centers in the country. 

To coordinate the distribution and maintain appropriate stocks, field monitors reported on supplies and number of children fed through an SMS reporting system using a UNICEF-built mobile data collection and monitoring software, RapidSMS.  We have previously reviewed RapidSMS here, comparing it with a less scaleable lower-end tool, Frontline SMS. 

The emergency food supply chain before RapidSMS

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Jonathan Donner,  Kentaro Toyama, and I recently wrote a paper -- "Reflections on the M4D Landscape" -- in which we critically examine the current diversity of projects and approaches in M4D.

We identify four common choices facing individual projects in mobiles for development: who are the intended users, how technically accessible the solution is, whether the project links to other platforms or content, and what the project requires from handset manufacturers and operators. 

We think that these choices collectively mark aspects of the current landscape of M4D. We also think that these choices made at the project level may create different M4D landscapes with implications for the breadth and depth of the technology’s impact on development. 

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MobileActive.org welcomes on staff Patricia Mechael, an expert in mobiles for health, and mobiles for development.  I am personally so pleased to work with Patty!

Here is a bit more: Dr. Patricia Mechael has been involved in the field of International Health for over 12 years with field experience in over 25 countries with a special focus on Africa. She holds a Masters in International Health from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and Hygiene, and a PhD in Public Health and Policy from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where she examined the role of mobile phones in health in Egypt.

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CGAP, one of the leading organizations conducting research and providing leadership in the mobile banking space in the developing world, is holding a live webcast today from 2-5 pm Eastern Time (-5 GMT). Here are the details:

Mobile Banking for Poor People: Pioneer Perspectives
a CGAP roundtable and webinar

Dec. 11, 2008 | 2:00pm – 5:00pm
World Bank Headquarters, Washington DC | online at http://technology.cgap.org

By the end of 2008, the UN says there will be four billion mobile phone connections globally. Millions of air-time resellers and retail agents in developing countries make it possible to distribute financial services at far lower cost than through traditional channels.

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