A global network of people using mobile technology for social impact.
Here are some mobile events for the month of September that we thought are noteworthy and of interest to the MobileActive.org community. If you know of others, please mail us at info at MobileActive dot org.
Wed Sep 2 – Fri Sep 4: M4Life, Barcelona
mDevelopment, one of the three events at the conference, explores the impact of mobile technologies on economic and social development.
Fri Sep 4: Mobile Tech 4 Social Change Bangalore
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.
Mobile Tech 4 Social Change Camp in Bangalore includes:
As smartphones proliferate around the world, we ought to remain cognizant of what information we share on those phones with applications, application developers, advertisers and marketers. Phones are incredibly personal, always on, and always with most of us. As a result, they can reveal sensitive information. In fact, it is time for smartphone users to put pressure on application developers, platform providers, and eventually legislators to protect private and potentially sensitive information.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation recently published a paper on locational privacy. Because smartphones know where we are (using GPS, and if not, using applications such as Google’s My Location service), they can reveal a lot of information about activities, patterns of behaviour, and relationships we have.
Our excellent and long-time MobileActive.org friends over at Development Seed have released a new light-weight open source SMS gateway that can run on a laptop or a USB stick.
From Development Seed's Tm McWright: "Using an GSM modem or cellphone, SlingshotSMS will send and receive text messages on behalf of your web application. It builds on the work of pygsm, an excellent Python library for dealing with AT-compatible modems. What this means is that SlingshotSMS is compatible with Mac, Windows, and Linux, and can interface with a wide range of GSM modems and cell phones - including many sub-$200 field-ready modems like the one we used for testing when we were field-testing last week as part of our participation in Camp Roberts experiments. All code is available on github.
Here is a breakdown of the SlingshotSMS workflow...
Where Ideas Navigate, or WIN, a technology service provider in the U.K., has said they will waive SMS fees for charities that use their services.
Hannah Jordan writes in Third Sector:
A company that provides charity text donation services is believed to be the first to waive its commission on donations to third sector organisations. Win handles ‘short code transactions', or texts to numbers of about five digits, between charities and donors. It usually receives between five and 10 pence per standard £1.50 text donation, but has said this week that it will waive the fee for charities and other not-for-profit organisations using its services. About 30 per cent of every text donation made to sector organisations in the UK is taken in charges by third-party service providers and mobile networks.
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.
We are proud and happy that six months of hard work have paid off - the Open Mobile Consortium has launched officially today. Conceived at MobileActive08 in South Africa, the OMC is featuring a suite of fully open source mobile applications focused on health and humanitarian work. The OMC is an unprecedented collaboration amongst nine high-profile organizations to develop an interopable set of platforms of high-quality open source mobile tools for humanitarian and civil society work.
Here is our press release:
New York, NY – May 26, 2009 – The Open Mobile Consortium today launched its global development community to help organizations working towards social good to better collaborate and share mobile phone-based technologies. The OMC’s open source software tools help organizations to better serve the health, humanitarian and development needs of the “bottom billion,” the poorest and most disenfranchised citizens of the world.
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
MCX (Pty) Ltd
Advirtek
student
Ben Freda Consulting