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Mobile technology is being used by citizens all over the world as the most affordable and massively adopted piece of technology. How can we harness this technology for advancing human rights and civil society participation? This dialogue is a space to share and discuss many ideas for "Using Mobile Phones for Action."
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[Photo: from the Private Sector Development blog]
Using Mobiles | SMS (Short Message Service)
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Intro
Mobile technology is being used by citizens all over the world as the most affordable and massively adopted piece of technology. How can we harness this technology for advancing human rights and civil society participation?
Our outstanding resource practitioners for the November-December tactical discussion shared and discussed many ideas for "Using Mobile Phones for Action". You can still contribute your ideas, questions and experiences!
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Philippe Duhamel - in his interTactica blog - Harnessing new technology for new tactics provides some great examples to get our creative ideas flowing.
- Sending out an SMS -- Supporting human rights work and activism with text messaging, or SMS - Short Messaging Service - functionality
- Organizing demonstrations -- Such as the Orange Revolution in Ukraine
- Coup de text -- Like ousting a president, it happened in the Philippines
- Protest Ringtones -- Highlighting corruption, it's being used in the Philippines
Links from the dicussion:
Welcome and introduction
Hi all!
It's great to be involved in this evolving discussion, one which started some time ago, which comes to a head this week, and which will continue on into the future. I hope I can help move things along and share my own experiences with you all.
I've been in IT since the 1980's, in mobile specifically for the past five years, and have worked and lived in a number of African countries. My professional qualification is social anthropology, something I find very useful - interesting things happen at the point where people meet technology. I've been involved in a number of mobile initiatives, and am currently working on a new version of my FrontlineSMS system (http://www.frontlinesms.com) which has been used for election monitoring in Nigeria and the Philippines, and more recently in Pakistan to help get news in and out of the country, among others. I'm also running an SMS competition for NGOs at http://www.ngomobile.org and working with Grameen in Uganda on the future development of their Village Phone scheme. There's a full Bio at http://www.kiwanja.net/kenbanks.htm if you're interested.
One of the key problems I have noticed out in the field over the past 15 years has been the gulf between technical specialists and fieldworkers. There's more than one digital divide! Techical people don't tend to understand the nature of human rights work, and human rights activists are often too busy dealing with their own pressing conditions to keep abreast with technical developments and emerging mobile technology.
My work tries to address what I consider the three key issues. I try to:
Firstly, provide mobile-related information to those who need it most
Secondly, once you have it, helping you make sense of it
Finally, once you understand it, providing the tools to help you act on it
As well as gaining an understanding of you and your own work, and getting a sense of what you currently do with mobiles (if anything) and, more importantly, what you would like to do with them, I'd be interested in hearing about which of the three areas above provide you with the most difficulty. There are maybe more...
I'm very much looking forward to joining the discussion this week. Mobile can be hugely empowering, but also hugely frustrating!
Ken
http://www.kiwanja.net