A global network of people using mobile technology for social impact.
As a part of the Mobile Media Toolkit, we are producing how-to screencasts that show how to use various mobile tools that have to do with the production and dissemination of content and media.
I argued recently that content publishers should publish for the mobile web rather than build more apps. So it only felt appropriate to do a how-to screencast on how to actually produce content for the mobile web. One way is to use the polular and open source blogging software Wordpress as the back-end of the website, and optimize it so the front end is suitable for mobile viewing. We help viewers go through this process in a brief how-to screencast. See it below or click through to the How To article.
Mobile Media Toolkit Screencast: Mobile Optimize your Wordpress-based Website from MobileActive.org on Vimeo.
There are now over 5 billion mobile subscriptions around the world. Smartphone ownership is steadily growing, both in the United States and abroad. Smartphone ownership is projected to be above 50% of all mobile phones in the United States by next year. This has many NGOs and other content and media prodicers wondering about how best to produce content for mobile phones (high-end devices, in particular). SMS and voice-based applications have their use cases, but many content producers today are wondering whether to produce a mobile website or a mobile application (app) to distribute their content.
We have another new case study up where we report on an innovative audio-based citizen journalism project in Chhattisgarh, India. Tribal citizen journalists have been reporting news in their own languages through a new service called CGNet Swara. CGNet stands for Chhattisgarh Net). The service allows citizen journalists to call in and record news in one of four local languages. The news that has been produced has been picked up in India's mainstream media, and some reports have led to concrete action: in one case, teachers whose salaries hadn't been paid for months were paid after a news report elicited a calling campaign from listeners. We've previously mentioned the project in a short blog post. This much more extensive case study is a part of some work we have been doing on citizen media projects using audio, radio, and mobile
I had the pleasure of attending the Global Voices Citizen Media Summit in Santiago, Chile last week. The summit brought together bloggers, activists, and thinkers working to advance citizen media all around the world. While the discussions that took place were informative, most presentations and panels fell short in recognizing the role mobile phones have played and exploring the potential mobile phones can play in citizen media. I'd like to highlight some of the potential for mobiles in citizen media that were not adequately discussed.
At the recent Global Voices Citizen Media Summit in Santiago, Chile, I facilitated as session on "Mobile Phone as a Tool for Reporting." We started off the discussion with the question of whether SMS is useful for reporters.
David Sasaki of Global Voices expressed skepticism about SMS as a reporting tool. Sasaki noted that Rising Voices, a Global Voices project that provides small funds to budding citizen media projects, had tried to find an SMS or mobile-based reporting project to fund, but hasn't been able to. Instead, David saw projects using technologies like Twitter for reporting. The 160 characters of SMS messages is simply not enough, David proposed, and pointed out that similar technologies like Twitter are more useful because they are able to transcend the character limitations as they can include links to much lengthier content.
Note: This is the second of two articles about Mobile Voices, a project based in Southern California. The first post can be found here.
Voces Móviles / Mobile Voices is a Los Angeles-based citizen media project, a collaboration between the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California (ASC) and the Institute of Popular Education of Southern California (IDEPSCA). Mobile Voices describes itself as "a platform for immigrant workers in Los Angeles to create stories about their lives and communities directly from cell phones. [The project] helps people with limited computer access gain greater participation in the digital public sphere."
Note: This is the first of two articles about Mobile Voices, a project based in Southern California. The second article is here.
Voces Móviles / Mobile Voices is a Los Angeles-based citizen media project, a collaboration between the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California (ASC) and the Institute of Popular Education of Southern California (IDEPSCA). Mobile Voices is "a platform for immigrant workers in Los Angeles to create stories about their lives and communities directly from cell phones. Vozmob helps people with limited computer access gain greater participation in the digital public sphere."
Relief efforts are ongoing after a powerful 7.0 earthquake that struck Haiti yesterday. Mobile phones play a huge part in relief efforts today, from supporting donations, citizen media coming from affected areas, to emergency relief coordination. Here are some links and information you might find useful in responding to and learning more about the Haiti earthquakes.
[This section last updated 01/15/2010 12:59 pm]
Text message donations are exploding in the aftermath of the earthquake, similar to what happened in 2004 after the Indonesian Tsunami. $9 million has already been donated by noon on Friday January 15 just to the Red Cross via the 90999 number.
A list of all short codes to text to to donate on your phone bill in the United States:
A list of all the non-US short codes that we know are serving as donation lines.
More organizations that are working in Haiti in relief efforts are listed on The NYTimes Lede Blog and more on MSNBC's How to Help page.
[Update, as of 01/15/2010, ~1:30pm]
Telecoms Sans Frontieres is hooking up terminals to facilitate communications for U.N. relief workers in Haiti, and will eventually let Haitians make free two-minute phone calls to anywhere in the world. The group's U.S. representative, Paul Margie, said the biggest challenge isn't technology but security. "The security and logistics situation on the ground is pretty bad, so finding secure locations to do these things is hard," he told me.
[Following was the section as it was posted the day after the earthquake, 01/13/2010, ~1:00pm]
Port-au-Prince has been severely affected including critical services such as, electricity, water and phone lines. Communication appears to be almost impossible at this time, with phone lines down. Numerous buildings, including the United Nations building, are reported to have been seriously damaged.
Facing this humanitarian catastrophe, TSF has deployed an emergency team from the American base in Managua to provide a vital support in emergency telecoms. They are carrying satellite mobile and fixed telecommunications tools. Reinforcements will also be sent from TSF’s international Headquarters. In close contact with the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and the European Commission’s Humanitarian Aid Department (ECHO), they are now flying to Saint-Domingue in order to rejoin Port-au-Prince as soon as possible.
At this stage there is very limited access because of debris and other obstacles on the roads. It seems that no communication can be made with the airport either, which is reported to be closed.
Twitter lists have become a quick-fire way to organize and aggregate information related to events and topics. Quite a few twitter lists have been set up by several news organizations after the Haiti earthquake. Here is a sample:
The twitter hashtag #haiti and a search for haiti on twitter yield lots of info.
Barack Obama in speech to Americans this morning listed several ways in which the US government is trying to help relief efforts in Haiti:
Many blogs are covering the happenings live, and incorporating photos and videos coming in from citizen reporters in Haiti:
(More here). Compiling citizen voices in Haiti are on this Global Voices Online page, to be updated as more content comes in.
Youtube's search on earthquake Haiti yields many videos, and there are some dedicated channels and playlists on the cause like this one from CitizenTube.
We have also compiled some references for those interested in reading more about previous relief efforts and resources that might help organizations running relief efforts:
Reuters EIS is Emergency Information Services being developed by the Reuters Thompson Foundation in partnership with INSTEDD and UNICEF. INSTEDD has staffers deployed in Haiti to determined whether EIS might be useful there.
CellBazaar, often called the "Mobile Craigslist of Bangladesh", has provided a martketplace to buy and sell goods and service to Bangladeshis for three and a half years now. We reported on the organization previously in April 2008. Since then, the service has grown and has now user base of just under 4 million. Cell Bazaar processes 1000 posts/day, and founder Kamal Qadir was chosen by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader in 2009.
I caught up with Kamal recently and talked to him about two things that I had wondered about CellBazaar that had not been emphasized in the coverage they have received.
People in the developed world consider the phone a very personal object, something that is always on and always with us. In many developing countries, that's not always the case. People share phones, and many don't own handsets because they are too expensive.
A new company, Movirtu (with a catchy tag line: "Mobile for the next Billion"), wants to extend coverage to so-called bottom-of-the-pyramid customers by using a handset-independent way to connect to the mobile network. The company's goal is to "expand the use of mobile communication by the rural poor communities in Sub-Sahara Africa and South Asia living on less than $2 a day" - in order to improve their livelihoods. The method for doing this is to detach owning a phone number from owning a handset--and to allow users to own numbers without owning handsets. And its gaining attention: CEO Nigel Waller was awarded a PopTech Social Innovation fellowship this year, and Movirtu has been shortlisted for Africom's Changing Lives Award.
The idea
Opera Software
eLuminous Technologies
Cell phones
SOFT SOLUTIONS SARL