MobileActive's Blog

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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Here are some of the main actions people would like to take as a result of collaboration and learnings at MobileActive '08.

1. Mobile Bill of Rights

2. Open Source Consortium

3. Global Mapping Project for Global SMS Interoperability

4. Enhanced Mobile Project/Vendor/Tool Directory

5. Communicability Strategy Research Group

6. More sharing and collaboration on social mobile projects

7. Mobile web wiki

8. OpenContent - especially HIV content including content, terminology, translation.

9. Group formed to collect cross-country comparisons of interventions using mobile technology

10. Group for agriculture and mobile technology

Reposted from www.mobileactive08.org

According to Microsoft’s Unlimited Potential division, there are several barriers standing in the way of effectively reaching the large masses of underserved communities. Among these are infrastructural obstacles, localization issues, the need for personalized solutions, and the prohibitive cost of technology.

As a solution to these problems they are looking at ways of tapping into the most basic a ubiquitous form of technology on the continent: mobile phones. This would enable users of mobile phones to access services from Microsoft’s services in the ether to mobile phones through pcs. To this end, there has been a lot of research into bringing the Microsoft platform to basic mobile phones by providing the technology to do this as well as by partnering with service providers as well as governmental and non-governmental actors.

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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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As Katrin Verclas posted last week, the 2008 USAID Development 2.0 has launched.  The challenge is seeking innovative mobile technology projects.

Hosted on the NetSquared community site, you are invited to submitt your project idea to a community process:

1. You will have an opportunity to submit your idea and receive feedback from NetSquared's 13,000 members.
2. When the submission period ends, registered NetSquared users can partiicpate in an on-line vote to select 15 featured projects.
3. 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.

I spoke with Ian Puttergill of Microsoft Digital Divide Solutions. They are working on taking the power of web and data capabilities and extending that to mobiles. He demonstrated an SMS hookup to Excel based on SMS Toolkit that can be used for data collection and analysis in rural areas. In Kampala, Uganda they consulted with midwives to design a system that would find out what equipment, training, and medication local populations needed. They are currently still working on that system and its feasability - it's not yet in the field.

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.