Printer-friendly version
Send to friend
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."
Table of Contents
The following table of contents was developed to make the dialogue easier to navigate. Important themes and different discussions have been highlighted for archival purposes and for new users. The preferred method of viewing the comments is with "Thread list - expanded" option, which is explained here.
A list of resources and videos featured in this dialogue can be found here.
[Photo: from the Private Sector Development blog]
Using Mobiles | SMS (Short Message Service)
Resources |
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!
 |  |  |
| |||
| ||||||
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:
Using mobile phones to end impunity
Mobile phones have revolutionised communication in Africa. They provide tools for citizens to participate in governance, connect families separated by long distances and can even be used to mobilize communities. This year’s Kenyan elections will be a milestone in the role of mobiles in promoting democracy.Kenya is one of four countries involved in a pilot programme, Voices of Africa, which aims to use new mobile technology to better equip struggling young journalists and community volunters to use mobile phones to enhance advocacy.
However, there are major problems that we face. Lack of a legal regime to protect and promote the use of mobile phones to end impunity have impacted negatively in enhancing democratic goverance.
Lack of a witness protection mechanism have resulted to most people to be afraid in freely sharing their mobilephone videos and photos due to lack of a legal provision that would protect them.
In a human rights system, legislative provisions to promote and protect evidence obtained from mobile phones would enable citizens to effectivelt participate in the administartion of good goverance and democratic decision making.
In Kenya, we are working with major broadcasters and News papers willing to publish and broadcast photos and videos obtained by mobile phones. Like in the case of Burma, without a legal provision that allows the used of visual or photographic evidence in criminal jurispudence, citizen journalism will be erodded and the impact caused by mobile phones for change will be threatened.
What perhaps we need, is the strengthening of legal provisions to encourage the use of mobile phones as tools of providing eye witness account-based evidence for purposes of holding perpetrators accountable.