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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:
Philippine monitoring
Ellene
It's nice to hear a little more about the Philippine example. From a personal perspective, I'm interested in what happened, and who did what, because of FrontlineSMS's (http://www.frontlinesms.com) involvement in helping co-ordinate some of the monitors. However, unlike the Nigerian example (discussed in this forum) this wasn't picked up by the mainstream press so is less known. Also, the Nigerian NGO were very quick to produce a comprehensive report about their experience, something which has proved very useful to fellow NGOs thinking about doing something similar (three different NGOs in different countries are currently talking to me about monitoring their national elections).
Ken