A global network of people using mobile technology for social impact.
On July 5th, Mexicans will go to the polls to elect new members of the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of Congress. Two Mexican initiatives, Cuidemos El Voto and Anulo Mi Voto, are using SMS in different ways to make people's voices heard in what they fear will be a less-than-democratic election.
Cuidamos El Voto
By simply sending a text message, citizens will be able to report any voting irregularities or other problems. But Oscar Salazar hopes that Cuidemos El Voto, the vote monitoring system, doesn't receive too many texts.
"We really hope that the number of incidents is low, this will mean Mexican democracy is for real," wrote Salazar in an email interview with MobileActive, who is coordinating the project. "However, if this is not the case, we want to provide NGOs and common citizens with the tools to enforce this process."
At a small agrarian cooperative in Chile, farmers with little access to the internet have a new source of farming information: text messaging. The messages, a combination of national and international news and farming information about topics like weather and pricing, are part of a project called DatAgro, which aims to bring relevant farming information to rural populations that have little access to computers.
DatAgro is a collaboration between Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit DataDyne and the Santiago-based Zoltner Consulting Group, which looks at ways that ICTs can be used for development. The project is primarily funded by a $325,000 Knight News Challenge Grant and will continue until November 2010.
In Uganda, medical clinics keep track of patient and medical payment records on paper. They then carry these often error-ridden forms to a management agency, where the information is manually entered into a database to receive reimbursements for the care provide. The process is tedious, time-consuming and leads to errors that can be costly for the local clinics. Melissa Ho, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California Berkeley School of Information in the United States, believes that a mobile phone can make the process more efficient and accurate, saving money and resources for local clinics.
In South Africa, mobile phones and HIV/AIDS are two pervsasive realities. Some 75% percent of children and adults in the country have mobile phones, and according to the National HIV Survey, 10.8% of people over two years old are living with HIV. Almost 1,000 AIDS deaths occur every day. Cell-Life, an NGO based in Cape Town, aims to address this growing AIDS epidemic by using mobile phones.
Cell-Life's "Cellphones for HIV" project continues with two new pilot projects. In one pilot, Cell-Life will collaborate with the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) in the Western Cape to provide information to communicty trainers and the wider HIV community. In the second pilot, Cell-Life will work with Soul City, which uses television and radio dramas to discuss issues such as social norms, health, and HIV/AIDS.
A few weeks ago, audience members at a New York Philharmonic concert in New York City's Central Park voted for the encore. Given two options -- Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze" and Rimsky-Korsakov's "Flight of the Bumblebee," the audience members texted in their votes. About 74% of respondents voted for Hendrix, so that piece concluded the concert.
Vince Ford, the Philharmonic's Director of New Media, told MobileActive a bit about the orchestra's first steps into mobile marketing. "We have offered ringtones on our website for two years now, but beyond that we haven't done much with mobile," Ford said. "This week was our first step in that direction." In addition to the SMS voting, the orchestra offered concert status SMS alerts on their website. "Not many people signed up initially, but once it rained on Monday the alerts really took off," he said. Ford said that 5,000 people participated in the concert alerts or SMS voting. About 61,000 people attended the outdoor concert.
Mobile phone use is booming. There are close to 3.5 billion mobile phones in use, and mobile penetration rates are increasing quickly, especially in developing countries. This rise of mobile phone use by low-income and so-called 'base-of-the-pyramid' users raises a number of questions. Are low-income people using mobile technology in different ways than their higher-income counterparts? How can mobile phones be desiged and used in ways that are useful to these populations? Two new studies--one of favelas in Brazil and the other of a low-income township in South Africa--seek to answer these questions.
An article in Vodafone's Receiver magazine, "Cell phone use among low-income communities – an initial study of technology appropriation in the favelas of Brazil," looks at how low-income residents of Rio de Janiero's favelas (or slums) use mobile phones. The author, Adriana de Souza e Silva, conducted a study that involved interviews with the residents of three different favelas in Rio.
In 2007, Sierra Leone had its first election since the end of a 10-year civil war. Previous elections had been run by the United Nations (UN), and there was fear that these highly contested elections would not be run fairly and transparently under the Sierra Leone National Election Commission (NEC).
Faced with the challenge of monitoring elections in a country that lacks infrastructure and reliable Internet access to transmit election data by conventional means, the monitoring group National Election Watch, abbrviated NEW, used a unique tool to transmit election data: SMS. (MobileActive.org had written prevoiously about this election and the role of SMS - see Texting It In: Monitoring Elections With Mobile Phones)
The news is coming. Or at least that's what Guy Berger titled his Knight News Challenge project, which aims to connect diverse populations in Grahamstown, South Africa to news through mobile phone- based citizen journalism and news delivery. Berger, head of the School of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University was recently awarded a Knight News Challenge grant, which funds "digital information innovations that transform community life."
Berger talked with MobileActive about the project. "This is hyperlocal," he said. "It is to expand the town square of Grahamstown in terms of information and opinion flows." The "citizen journalists" will be high school students. In August, Berger's group will conduct workshops with 80 students separated into classes of 20. Each class will have two Saturday workshops about what it means to be a citizen journalist. The students will then submit news stories via SMS.
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.
Note: This primer was written for the NTEN newsletter, targeted at a US audience and thus focuses on America. For more on mobile advocacy in many other parts of the world, see here.
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