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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:
Welcome, questions, and mobile phones in election monitoring
Hello, it's great to meet you all! I am very interested in hearing more aabout how you all use mobiles in yoursocial change and human rights work.
By way of introduction, I coordinate http://mobileactive.org, a global volunteer network of more than 1,000 NGO and social change practitioners using mobile phones in their work. We run a community blog, a resource wiki, and have developed a number of resources (with more to come!) on how mobiles can be used.
Here are a few links:
Our Strategy Guides on Mobiles in Fundraising, Advocacy, and Election Monitoring are here: http://mobileactive.org/resources/list
We also have a Spanish Strategy Guide about South America/¡Acción Móvil¡ Guía de Móvil Activismo para Latino América at http://mobileactive.org/Mobilactive-Strategy-Guide-4
So, from me to jumpstart the conversation a few questions:
1. Evans mentioned citizen journalism and election monitoring as two areas where mobiles are increasingly used. Natasa (hi!) talks about some campaigns where they used mobiles (and some of the challenges!). What is the kind of work where you think mobiles are most useful? What are some examples?
2. Election monitoring is a really interesting field. We here at MobileActive have been working pretty closely with NDI, a US-based NGo that provides technical assistance to NGOs in emerging democracies, and tracked their work closely. For an article in how they used mobile phones in their work in the recent election in Sierra Leone, see http://mobileactive.org/texting-it-in. Has anyone in this community used mobiles in elections, and wht was the experience? What did you learn?
(Incidentally, NDi will publish a step-by-step guide on how to do this work in the next few weeks in conjunction with MobileActive, so I will keep you posted on when that is finished)
3. Lastly, I would love to hear what you might need in your work. We here at MobileActive are committed to reducing the learning curve for NGOs using mobiles and as a volunteer network, to extract knowledge and peer learning from this rich community to develop resources and materials so that NGOs the world over have an idea how to effectively use mobiles in their work strategically and tactically. What information or skills would you like to see so that you can better take advantage of this pervasive communication device?
Looking forward to the discussion in the next few days! All the best, Katrin at MobilActive.org