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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:
Election monitoring and circumventing government restrictions
For anyone interested in two specific examples of mobile phone use in citizen election monitoring (Nigeria, 2007) and bloggers circumventing government restrictions using SMS (Pakistan, 2007), feel free to check out these two documents. Both, written by the activists themselves, give a good sense of what they were looking to do, and how they did it. They were distributed through kiwanja.net (they used, or are using, FrontlineSMS).
Nigeria: http://www.kiwanja.net/miscellaneous/NMEM_Election_Report.pdf
Pakistan: http://www.kiwanja.net/miscellaneous/FrontlineSMS_Pakistan.pdf
Anyone interested in the application itself can read more at http://www.frontlinesms.com
Ken