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:
sms hitches and glitches
hi. i thought i'd mention here some of the hitches/ glitches we encounter in the more than 1 year of activation of the sos sms system:
1. delay in auto forwarding the messages to several recipients -- i asked our IT colleagues about it --they say it could be a case of the system being "choked" ... because after a while, we get the messages in "bulk";
2. a variation of 1 is the auto forwarding NOT auto forwarding the messages unless the system is restarted. the IT team is not clear yet on the main cause of this erratic behavior, but they are saying that the only thing that has changed since its activation last year is the regular updates of the windows system....
3 . a case of difference between telcoms? --a third observation was the "selective" auto forwarding of the messages, excluding a certain recipient number from receiving the sms.. our suspicion is that this is a problem between the telcoms since we use two different telcoms in the sos sms system -- one to send the SMS to; and the second one --to auto forward the sms to select recipients...
4. delays in the system -- when there is interruption in internet connectivity and/or power supply...
5. of course, the auto forwarding functionality will stop if we run out of bulk sms! fortunately, the system is such that the sms is first automatically logged in the system so we can still check on the messages in the central database....
the sos sms system is definitely still a work in progress....
ellene