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Send to friendFeature Online Dialogue: Using Mobile Phones for Action
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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:
Election monitoring with mobile phones
The report from the Nigeria election monitoring this past April 2007 shares very concrete information for those who might be considering using mobile phones for this purpose. It would be great to hear from others who have had experience in this area to share your insights as well.
One very interesting aspect of the Nigeria experience was reported as follows:
"The use of ordinary Nigerians to observe and report on the election we believe encourages participation by people that would be apathetic as well as provide timely, accurate and impartial information on the conduct of the elections. It is worth noting that it is ultimately the same ordinary citizens who validate the credibility and legitimacy of the eventual electoral outcome. Our monitoring is peculiar because people knew that if they try to rig the election there could be someone behind them that may send a text message reporting the incident."
This aspect of ordinary citizens taking responsibility to to report an incident is especially noteworthy for discussion. I have a couple of questions about that:
1) Is it the relative anonymity of sending text messages that provide those who report incidents with a level of security to make such a report?
2) Given that a person could be using his or her cell phone for a variety of reasons, was the SMS election monitoring campaign widely publicized so people felt they may indeed be watched and reported for trying to cheat on the election?
Nancy Pearson, New Tactics Program Manager
Nancy Pearson, New Tactics in Human Rights Program Manager