Feature 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:
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Realistic use of mobile phones and other tactics
Ken and Wendy,
You both raise very important and critical points.
The New Tactics project advocates for analyzing three areas to help ensure safe and effective human rights work - 1) Know yourself; 2) Know your adversary; and 3) Know the Terrain (from Sun Tzu in the Art of War - you can read Philippe Duhamels great "Learning by Doing" three part series on strategy and tactics on the interTactica blog). I bring this up here because of that need to have a realistic assessment of your own context (what are the laws governing mobile phone use; the level of security; investment of various government and public entities to control or thwart your efforts, etc. - there are so many variables to consider).
A great example comes from Otpor! the student movement in Serbia organizing to create change. They used mobile phones to create their youth network and discovered create ways to call people to police stations for "Plan B" demonstrations when people had been arrested during the first demonstration. (I suppose this might be considered a different kind of a "flash mob' demonstration. Under the period of high repression in that country, they were careful about using their mobile phones and not identifying people in their phones specifically as those involved in the movement.
Our hope is that as New Tactics community memembers and those visiting our website will gain tactical ideas they think will be of use. It's important to take the time needed to think about the variables impacting the implementation of such a tactic in your own context and with your own issue.
Nancy Pearson, New Tactics Program Manager