Many lament that mobile phones can isolate us from our immediate surroundings as we walk down the street texting friends and not paying attention. These three different projects are encouraging people to actively engage with what's around them - with and on their mobile phones. TXTual Healing, Amphibious Architecture and Pathways to Housing take regular text messages and turn them into an interactive experience.
Txtual Healing
In 2006, Paul Notzold showed the first presentation of TXTual Healing as his MFA thesis project for Parsons School of Design. The project consisted of speech bubbles projected onto the side of a building; viewers texted in messages to fill the speech bubbles. Since then, the project has been shown around the world, including France, Italy, Romania, the USA, the Netherlands and China.
Spring has us ready to get out and share new ideas, so it’s time for our monthly event roundup. Below are some of the mobile events happening around the world that we think might be of interest to the MobileActive.org community. If you know of any great M4D events happening near you, let us know over email (info at mobileactive dot org) or in the comments or on our Facebook page.
FAILfaire, April 14 New York, NY: Of course, we have to start off with promoting our own FAILfaire, which is taking place on April 14th, 5:00-7:00 p.m., in New York City. At FAILfaire, we want to learn from each others’ failures in ICT and mobiles for development – speaking openly about what didn’t work is the best way to improve for the future. Gather round with some wine and a sense of humor, and get ready to talk about FAIL! Sign up here.
There are two new projects in India that are taking advantage of the ubiquity of mobile phones and cheap voice calling there in order to get news to rural villagers. Widespread illiteracy makes newspapers and SMS alerts inadequate as news delivery systems, and irregular electricity makes television and radio unreliable. Voice calls are also very inexpensive in India, with per-second billing and a downward price-war among the main operators. Voice calls over mobile phones are an easy way for villagers to stay informed.
In the region of Uttar Pradesh, Gaon Ki Awaaz delivers twice-daily news updates via voice calls to villagers in their native Avhadi language. Launched in December 2009, the project now has 250 subscribers spread throughout 20 villages. Read our case study on the project here.
Further south, a similar project is operating among the members of the Adivassi tribe in India. Like Gaon Ki Awaaz, it allows villagers to share and receive news over their mobile phones in their native language (in this case, Gondi). Launched by Shubhranshu Choudhary of the International Center for Journalists, the project focuses on citizen reports with dozens of citizen journalists reporting throughout the region. Watch the video below to see how the project works. For more on audio services, see also our recent scan of projects and tools, Talk to Me: A Survey of Voice-Based Mobile Tech.
These two projects highlight the promise of the mobile phone for targeted news reporting; mobiles can provide cheap, reliable access to hyper-local news that may be more independent than government-controlled media. As mobiles become more common in rural areas, similar projects can provide a way to keep citizens connected.
Anne-Ryan Heatwole is a writer for MobileActive.org
Calling all failures! On April 14 we're hosting the first FAILfaire featuring a close look at ICT and mobile development projects that have crashed, burned, and simply FAILED.
While we often focus on highlighting successes and gains in this field, it's no secret that many projects just don't work - some aren't scalable, some aren't sustainable, some can't get around bureaucratic hoops, and many fail due to completely unanticipated barriers. FAILfaire is a platform to openly and honestly discuss failures so that we can learn from what hasn't worked in the past in order to make our future projects stronger and better.
This is where YOU come in. Have you been a part of a project that flopped? Maybe the project used the wrong technology for its region. Maybe it didn't engage the intended community. Did not take culture, people, or both into consieration. Or maybe the rollout was too rushed. Whatever the reason, we want to hear from you.
Later this month, Souktel, a Palestinian NGO, and UNICEF will host a two-day bootcamp and mobile programming workshop with young Palestinian developers in Ramallah. The bootcamp hopes to jumpstart a mobile open source developer community in the region.
“There are a lot of young Palestinians who are unemployed. […] We wanted to work with young people who have time and are creative. We hope to create the first mobile open source community in the Middle East,” says Souktel’s Katie Highet.
A video filmed on a mobile phone made history when it won the George Polk Award for Journalism this year. Not only was it the first video to win in the newly-created videography category, it was also the first video in the Polk's 61-year history awarded to an anonymous citizen journalist.
The video shows the death of Neda Agha-Soltan, a young Iranian woman shot and killed during the protests in June 2009 following the Iranian elections. After the release of the video, newsorganizationsaround the world took note. Hundreds of thousands of viewers have seen the video of the young woman's death and it galvanized protests around the world. The press release from the Polk Awards describes the video:
Vodafone's release of a $15 cell phone earlier this year at the GSMA Mobile World Conference made waves in the mobile industry, but the phone may have some stiff competition. Shanzhai phones coming out of China provide smartphone capabilities with prices that are significantly lower than phones from Western mainstream brands.
Shanzai.com describes the shanzhai (alternate spelling shanzai) as “1. mountain fortress/bandit 2. a vendor, who operates a business without observing the traditional rules or practices often resulting in innovative and unusual products or business models.” The production of knock-off phones in the Shanzen region of China is having an impact on the mobile industry as a whole. The shanzhai phenomenon is relatively new. New York Times explored the shanzhai phone explosion noting:
The United Nations Environment Programme has released a new study on managing e-waste for developing countries. The report focuses one three major points: the market potential of e-waste recycling, encouraging the adoption of the UNEP’s guidelines to foster innovation in e-waste recycling technologies, and identifying places in which e-waste recycling is thriving.
The study acknowledges that data of e-waste is insufficient, but the United Nations University estimates “that current e-waste arising across the twenty-seven members of the European Usnion amount to around 8.3 – 9.1 million per year; global arising are estimated to be around 40 million tons per year.”
The report used data from 11 representative developing countries to estimate current and future e-waste generation - which includes old and dilapidated desk and laptop computers, printers, mobile phones, pagers, digital photo and music devices, refrigerators, toys and televisions.
We are releasing today the first-ever Nonprofit Text Messaging Benchmark Study. The study, sponsored by Mobile Commons and mGive, takes a look at how organizations in the United States are using text messaging and how subscribers are responding. It reveals that mobile phones are becoming increasingly popular for advocacy with organizations.
Written by Michael Amoruso and Jessica Bosanko of M+R Strategic Services and Katrin Verclas of MobileActive.org, the report “provides benchmarks and metrics by which nonprofit organizations can measure their success with text messaging and illustrate the various ways in which organizations are using text messages.”
