A global network of people using mobile technology for social impact.
You are invited to CrisisCamp Ignite Session at the World Bank!
CrisisCamp DC is part of a global movement who is bringing together volunteers, academia, non-profits, companies and government officials to share best practices and lessons learned to advocate for further use of technology and telecommunications to assist citizens and communities during crisis.
Sharek961 is another effort in Lebanon to monitor the election there today on June 7. Unlike LADE which uses more than 2,000 trained volunteer election monitors to systematically report from polling stations throughout the day, Sharek961 aims to get ordinary Lebanese citizen to text, call, and email in incidences from polling stations, crowdsourcing the conduct of the critically important election there.
According to Sharek961's press release,
"Sharek961.org [is[... empowering citizens to report in Arabic and in English, through four means; SMS, email, Twitter and web reports. Reports can address anything election-related happening around the country, from political rallies and polling queues to vote-buying and violence. Sharek961 anonymously publishes these reports alongside news reports, blog posts, photos, videos and tweets, on an interactive map, making them publicly available to all citizens, media outlets, and organizations."
Sharek961 notes that it
Lebanon will hold a critically important parliamentary election on June 7, and election observers from around the world have descended on the country. However, as in many other countries now, there are local organizations and citizen efforts on the ground that are using mobile technology for sophisticated election observation efforts. The Lebanese Association for Democratic Elections (LADE) and the Coalition Libanaise pour l’Observation Elections (CLOE), for example, have put in place an extensive SMS reporting system, for example. LADE will deploy a total of 2,500 volunteer citizen observers throughout the country directly at the 5181 polling stations.
After all the planning and promoting for Mobile Tech 4 Social Change Halifax, it was exciting to have the big day finally arrive!
With the proliferation of interest in Mobile Tech 4 Social Change Camps around the world, we have now put up a wiki to keep track of and provide resources for this growing movement of M4Change Camps. The wiki includes a detaied FAQ on how you can run your own Mobile Tech 4 Social Change camp (because this small team here is, well, very small!). Spread the love and roll a camp in your town!
Mobile Tech 4 Social Change Camps are local events for people passionate about using mobile technology for social impact and to make the world a better place.
Each event includes interactive discussions, hands-on-demos, collaborative scheming about ways to use, develop, and deploy mobile technologies in health, advocacy, economic development, environment, human rights, citizen media, to name a few areas.
I attended Mobile Tech 4 Social Change in New York back in February. It was a bit of a trek from Halifax, Nova Scotia but Jacob Colker (co-founder of The Extraordinaries) convinced me it was good opportunity to meet like-minded people interested in using mobile technologies for social good. Jacob was right, I was absolutely blown away by the incredible people devoting their lives to helping make the world a better place. I was so inspired by the event, I decided to organize the same event in Halifax.
I am a member of the Working Group of the Open Mobile Consortium, a now publicly launching collaboration among organizations around the world focused on developing open source mobile solutions for social impact and change.
There have been many myths surrounding open source software and little conversation in this field why open source software is important and successful, especially in the context of developing countries and in the field of mobiles for development. I'd like to debunk some of these myths and clarify why the Open Mobile Consortium is focused on open source mobile solutions that build on, and talk to one another. I also invite comments for anything that I have missed or differing point of views.
Firstly, No Dogma
Ken Banks has a theory: The long tail theory of mobile applications for social development. It goes something like this, paraphrasing him from his incendiary blog post:
Mobiles are the most rapidly adopted technology in history. But if mobiles truly are as revolutionary and empowering, then don't we have a moral duty in the ICT for Development (ICT4D) community to see that they fulfill that potential?
Banks says that indeed, we do have that moral duty, and I agree with him wholeheartedly there.
Imagine you are an NGO (a non-governmental organization) in a developing country, working on a critical development issue -- say, developing an educational infrastructure for women and girls. You know that mobile technology can help you in this regard and you have a project in mind that you want to try out, involving the use of SMS content and mobile information services for rural teachers. You think that there are tools and content out there for your particular needs - but you may have no idea how to access relevant expertise, mobile tools, or content.
Enter Vodafone, one of the largest mobile telecommunications network companies in the world, operating in 25 countries with partner networks in another 42 countries.
UPDATE: In an email conversation with Yaw, he pointed out a few additional noteworthy things about the Open Data Kit.
Here is how our client is different:
As researchers we want to push the boundaries of what organizations
can do today to collect their rich data. We want users to own, visualize and share this data without the difficulties of setting up and maintaining servers. We want the tools to be easy to deploy, easy to use, open source and freely available. It is only now that technology (hardware, software and infrastructure) which matches our above ideals have become available.
ODK is more than open source, it is open standards, easy to work with and available today. We use xforms standard for input and output. Organizations can start with low end java phones and run Javarosa. When they are ready to collect data on a more powerful platform, they can move up to the ODK Collect on android phones and all their forms will still work. Results can be sent to any compatible xforms server (in fact, RapidsSMS support is coming soon).
For developers, the code base is easy to use. For example, if you wanted to add barcode reading or submission to Openmrs servers over wifi, it will take very few lines of code. We already have local African developers working on similar functionality.
We've piloted the application and are scaling rapidly. We started with
twenty devices in Uganda which were used to collect over 1000 geotagged forms with images. Our upcoming deployment will be a couple of hundred devices collecting millions of forms.
ODK also has a ton of features and we adding more each day. Touchscreen UI with swipe navigation and progress bar, xforms compatible gps and photo support, question grouping, repeats and constraints, answer defaults and constraints, logic and branching in forms, and much more is coming. We put the roadmap at http://code.google.com/p/open-data-kit/wiki/RoadMap
We think we've pushed the state of data collection a bit forward. Certainly, ODK Collect is not for every organization who wants to do data collection, but for our partners who are using it now, it is providing a lot of value.
Open Data Kit (ODK) is a suite of tools aimed at resource-poor organizations to collect, transform and report their data. Developed by Yaw Anokwa and Carl Hartung from the University of Washington, ODK Collect enables mobile data collection on the Android platform. ODK is one of a growing number of mobile data caollection apps, many of which are reviewed here and here on MobileActive. This video gives an overview of the Open Data Kit. You can download the source code here.
Check out RapidSMS on Android as well, and Nokia Data Gathering here.
MCX (Pty) Ltd
Advirtek
student
Ben Freda Consulting