MobileActive.org

 The paper is based on the findings and experiences of the Rural e-Services Project in India (ReSPI) which resulted in designing of Knowledge Help Extension Technology Initiative (KHETI).

ReSPI was an action research project to bridge the socio-economic divide digitally. The project has demonstrated that a right approach with appropriate mix of methodologies and social context could lead the designing of  Information Communication Technology (ICT) solutions.

In the after math of the project and development of KHETI Technology, claims could be made that designing of Information Communication Technology solutions are very much possible with so called ‘less privileged groups’ using participatory interaction design methodologies and treating users as co-designers.

The paper describes strengths and challenges in the participatory designing processes of KHETI as an M-Agriculture system and examines how it addresses the problems of local poor farmers by recognising their socio-economic realities.

 This paper is a collection of five ethnographic reports examining the role of ICT in Uganda. The first is not particulalrly mobile focused and looks at how those who have access to internet in Uganda use it. The second report is about the ways ICT is changing print media. The third report focuses on the the opportunities ICT present for civil society and non-governmental groups. The next report outlines the way the ICT sector in Uganda was developed. The last report examines ways that ICT may be used in government accountability.

On January 28, 2011, Egypt’s President, Hosni Mubarak, took the drastic and unprecedented step of shutting off the Internet for five days across an entire nation. His reason for doing so was simple: to halt the flow of communication and coordinated assembly taking place over social media platforms, like Facebook and Twitter. That Mubarak took this desperate step — which cost Egypt an estimated $90 million and outraged the international community — demonstrates the incredible power of social media. Mubarak’s decision to shut off the Internet took place after three days of demonstrations by tens of thousands of Egyptians. Although the demonstrations were centered in Cairo’s Tahrir Square (or “Liberation Square”), there were also substantial demonstrations in Alexandria, Mansoura, and Suez. The protesters expressed outrage over several issues, including state corruption, police brutality, and economic oppression. Their demand was clear: President Hosni Mubarak must leave the country.

Various groups, including April 6 Youth Movement, We Are All Khaled Said, National Association for Change, and Kefaya led a coordinated effort using social media platforms, including Facebook and Twitter, to spread a revolutionary message. Prior to the first day of protest, 85,000 Egyptians pledged on Facebook to attend “Revolution Day.” Similarly, April 6 Movement had over 90,000 members during the protests, and We Are Khaled Said had over 40,000 Facebook fans. In the two weeks leading up to and including the first few days of the protest, Egyptians created 32,000 Facebook groups and 14,000 Facebook pages. It is likely that a substantial number of the five million Facebook users in Egypt were in some way encouraged to attend the protests.

A number of countries recently experienced protests organized by citizens that were in pursuit of accountability and openness from government.  It was witnessed that social media played a highly important role in those events; among others, continuously providing updated information, establishing human networks, forming opinions, mobilizing people, and taking concerted actions.

Of course, social media is not the sole reason that made the events happen.  However, it can be at least said that the general public were encouraged to move into the actions for their enhanced well-being.  From a broader perspective, those occurrences also showcase that Information & Communications Technologies (ICTs) can help enhance social development among people.

This short note seeks to develop analysis on the role of social media in social development, in the wake of the increasing diffusion of mobile phone Internet access. 

FrontlineSMS is a software platform that enables structured communication via text messaging, using only a computer and a mobile phone or GSM (Global System for Mobile) modem. The platform enables two-way messaging between users and groups of people via mobile networks without the need for an Internet connection.

The purpose of this guide is to provide users with a framework to understand, analyze, and address the vulnerabilities, risks and threats that can affect the integrity of the information communicated through the FrontlineSMS platform. That said, mobile networks are inherently insecure and end users are only able to mitigate, as opposed to prevent, a significant number of the possible threats to data integrity. While there are a large number of ways that user information can be lost, altered, stolen, changed, or read by third parties, this guide focuses on the ways that users experience information corruption and steps that they can take to mitigate individual threats. This guide is intended to be a useful resource and framework, but is not intended to be comprehensive or prescriptive.

Users and potential users have different needs for protecting sensitive information. The goal of this guide is to outline the actions that can be taken to mitigate the risks posed by information being lost, changed or read by unauthorized third parties. However, it is important to recognize that FrontlineSMS may not be an appropriate tool to use in some environments where data integrity needs go beyond the capabilities of the platform and SMS itself, and that incautious use may put the organization, program and users at risk.

FrontlineSMS does not define the exact details of how users should deploy the software or address issues of data integrity. Users should evaluate their individual program goals, standards, and operating context to decide on the steps that should be taken to protect the integrity of their information

Claim Mobile is a platform designed to support a project that subsidizes healthcare by reimbursing health service providers in Uganda for treatment of patients with sexually transmitted infections. As with many development projects, the Uganda Output-Based Aid (OBA) project involves a number of stakeholders: the service providers, the project implementers,the financiers, and the Ugandan government. Design of an appropriate solution requires meeting the various and conflicting requirements of all of these stakeholders. In this paper we detail the rapid design and testing of a pilot implementation of a mobile and web-based system for processing claims forms, based on two prior field visits to Uganda. Based on a comparative device study, semi-structured interviews, health clinic surveys, and a brief deployment, we affirm the selection of the mobile phone as a platform from the health clinic perspective, and further suggest that effective design for development requires more than addressing requirements of the the “users” of the mobile phones but also all the other stakeholders involved, who may have conflicting requirements.

The purpose of this research is to empirically examine the ways in which Indonesian civil society organisations and groups engage in civic activism by means of the use of Mobile phones, Internet and social media; and how this civic engagement impacts upon the shaping of civil society in Indonesia.

With technology and its use continuously shifting and being shaped, the appropriation of the Internet and social media in Indonesian civil society is more about process than outcome. The technologies are continuously modified and adapted to bring them into alignment with the organisations’ routines. ‘Citizens in action’ are therefore never fixed in format, but rather ‘constituted and reconstituted’ through the everyday practices of the civil society groups and communities involving citizens and activists alike in ongoing actions – where technology serves as a convivial means.

To counter the Zimbabwean government’s tight grip over the traditional media, activists integrated old fashioned tactics of leaflets, graffiti, and small covert meetings with electronic media: short wave radio, pocket sized video cameras, digital cameras, fax machines, the Internet and email.

An early adopter of this mix of ICTs was Kubatana.net, a locally based non-profit which became an important aggregator of civic and human rights information on Zimbabwe. Its free online archive, established in 2001, offered articles, reports, documents and interviews with much of the information sourced from local civic organisations and international watch dogs. Its electronic NGO directory made civil society organisations accessible at a time when contact details were extremely fluid. Its email newsletter mailing list kept thousands of ordinary Zimbabweans regularly informed of events, opportunities and newly added resources to the web site. And its early adoption of SMS proved crucial to keeping Zimbabweans informed during the critical 2008 elections.

The concept of mobile reporting, combined with community reporting is changing the way we perceive previously ignored local issues. While they hardly make it into mainstream media, they are now flooding into the cyberspace and the blogosphere thanks to the Web and the mobile phone technologies. The power of the mobile phone in the context of community reporting approach resides in its simplicity, both through the ordinary tools used by reporters – the phones which almost everyone knows or owns by now – and through the reporters themselves, who are members of the community being reported about.

In this presentation, I want to highlight how one issue – childabuse – is being ‘naturally’ captured and documented by mobile reporters following a training offered by Voices of Africa Media Foundation in various African countries. The capturing is ‘natural’ in the sense that, viewed locally, the abuse is tolerated, justified, or even approved by communities, who do not perceive them as abuse. The idea is to draw the attention of political leaders and decision makers, who mostly rely on mainstream media, the ones known for neglecting non-profit generating local issues.

In this paper, I want to deal with three main points. In the first place, I will conceptualise mobile reporting combined with community reporting in the light of existing theories on culture convergence and participatory media. Secondly, I will focus on one case, child abuse, which our reporters have covered spontaneously. In the end, I will discuss the potential impact of this way of approaching local news on local leadership and politics.

This paper offers an overview of the emerging domain of mobile governance as an offspring of the broader landscape of e-governance. Mobile governance initiatives have been deployed everywhere in parallel to the development of crowdsourced, open source software applications that facilitate the collection, aggregation, and dissemination of both information and data coming from different sources: citizens, organizations, public bodies, etc. Ultimately, mobile governance can be seen as a tool to promote the rule of law from a decentralized, distributed, and bottom-up perspective.

Many services taken for granted in the developed world are often missing from the developing countries. One typical example is that of map systems that form the basis of several location-driven services. Its heavy reliance on content, provides a huge barrier towards building such systems. Further, in developing countries like India, the infrastructure typically has a history of unplanned development, leading to unorganized addresses and absence of standard naming conventions for roads. Detailed map systems such as online maps have only recently started becoming available but for major cities. Remote towns and villages remain out of reach till date.

In this paper, we investigate a community-driven approach for creating maps in developing regions - following Web 2.0 principles, but not entirely relying on the existing Web. Our system, dubbed FOLKSOMAPS is an intelligent, community constructed map system, particularly architected with developing regions in mind. We present the design of FOLKSOMAPS, followed by an implementation of our proof-of-concept system. We present user studies aimed at understanding the uptake, usability and utility of FOLKSOMAPS. The results indicate a strong need for such a community-generated mapping ecosystem.

The use of email by marketers to target audiences has been in serious use for the past 8 years. Equally as long, has been the use of SMS (short message service) or “texting” as generation Y so affectionately adopted that term. SMS has been in use in all parts for the world as a marketing, commerce and communication medium from everything to purchasing sodas from a vending machine to get stock tips and sports scores. Wide spread adoption in the North American market only started to pick up in the past  three years as businesses started realized the SMS was both a simple means to reach the minds and hearts of “handy” users while providing a cost effective means to manage brand equity, marketing communications and build a loyal customer following. With almost every type of business using SMS to grab customers or audiences, few know how to integrate SMS as part of a concerted marketing or CRM strategy to grow their business and generate ROI (Return On Investment). This document will touch on the key criteria for selecting an SMS vendor when looking for expertise to help your enterprise make better decisions on reaching and building an audience.

(Note: While targeting a commercial audience, some good tips for NGOs and nonprofits here as well)

In the context of the rapid growth of mobile phone penetration in developing countries, mobile telephony is currently considered to be particularly important for development. Yet, until recently, very little systematic evidence was available that shed light on the developmental impacts of mobile telecommunication. The Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICT4D) program of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Canada, has played a critical role in filling some of the research gaps through its partnerships with several key actors in this area.

The objective of this paper is to evaluate the case of mobile phones as a tool in solving development problems drawing from the evidence of IDRC supported projects. IDRC has supported around 20 projects that cut across several themes such as livelihoods, poverty reduction, health, education, the environment and disasters. The projects will be analyzed by theme in order to provide a thematic overview as well as a comparative analysis of the development role of mobile phones. In exploring the evidence from completed projects as well as the foci of new projects, the paper summarizes and critically assesses the key findings and suggests possible avenues for future research.