Do mobile phones answer all our prayers? I’ve written about the role that mobile telephony can play in humanitarian assistance quite a few times now, without really talking about it directly. The one line I have consistently taken is that cellphone coverage is not reliable or secure enough to be used as the primary means of communication in an insecure environment.
Putting that to one side for a moment, however, it’s clear that mobile telephony really is the key communications technology for the poor - and that means it should be the key communications technology for the humanitarian community.
Missed our last Mobile Tech Salon? Have no fear! We focused on how artists and activists using mobiles in their work: Urban Speaker broadcasts phone calls in public spaces over a loudspeaker; TXTual Healing and SMS Slingshot plaster text messages on walls; Pathways to Housing encourages people on the street to interact with a light projection via text; and Amphibious Architecture allows people to send text messages to and receive messages from animals in the rivers surrounding New York City. Watch the video below to get a taste of the artists' presentations:
The event was a great way to explore how mobiles can bring a new level of interactivity to art, and how art can be used to inspire activism. Presenters remarked on how the ubiquity of mobile devices make them ideal for encouraging people to interact with their surroundings. If you want to learn more about these projects, check out our posts on TXTual Healing, Amphibious Architecture and Pathways to Housing here, or watch an interview with Carlos J. Gomez de Llarena (creator of the Urban Speaker) here. Urban Collective, creators of the SMS Slingshot couldn't join us in person for the tech salon, but check out a video of their presentation here.
Thanks to Idealist.org for hosting us in their space, and thanks to the artists for showing their work!
KickStart’s mission is to help millions of people out of poverty. The organization promotes sustainable economic growth and employment creation in Kenya and other countries. It develops and promotes technologies that can be used by dynamic entrepreneurs to establish and run profitable small scale enterprises.
The Mobile Minute is here to bring you the day's mobile-for-development new. Today's Minute covers disaster assistance applications on smartphones, a BBC guide to using pocket-sized video cameras for reporting, the UN ICT Hub's first Briefing Report on ICT4D in the Asia-Pacific region, the development of two new systems that allow mobile phones to work in areas with no reception, an intriguing idea for an iPhone app to combat homelessness, and an event on mobile payments in the Tech@State series in Washington DC.
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.
The Vodafone Americas Foundation is announcing the last call for nominations for the second annual Wireless Innovation Project, a competition to identify and reward the most promising advances in wireless related technologies that can be used to solve critical problems around the globe. Proposals will be accepted through February 1, 2010, with the final winners announced on April 19, 2010 at the annual Global Philanthropy Forum in Redwood City, California.
I am thinking a lot about how nonprofits and NGOs can use mobile phones for fundraising (this being the holiday season and all) and have been collecting examples of campaigns that I like to extract some lessons and data on how it's working. Here are my picks of some that I have come across. I'll tell you what I like and why (and what's not so great here). Note that I have no data yet on how WELL they have worked but believe me, we are on it for a whiteb paper on the topic later in the season...So, here is November's pick!
How it works: Donors can text the word “TOT” to 864233 (UNICEF) to make a $5 donation via premium SMS that gets billed to the user's phone bill or prepaid card.
What's nice about this: This campaign uses the just-in-time feature of mobile perfectly and had great potential to be used during the Halloween season where kids walk around with little donation boxes when the go door to door -- kids collecting for kids. Most people at the door give a few coins as opposed to $5, so with the right promotion, this campaign could generate extra money in addition to the collection.
Understanding a housing mortgage isn't easy, especially within today's so-called subprime mortgages filled with legalese, deceptive interest rates and dishonest brokers. Having English as a second language doesn't make it any easier. Jeremy Liu and Tad Hirsch, the developers of Speakeasy, are using mobile phones to help non-English speakers fight the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States with an Asian-language specific foreclosure prevention hotline. MobileActive interviewed Liu for more information on this still-developing project.
Liu and Hirsch have developed a hotline that will connect Asian-language speakers faced with foreclosure or subprime mortgages with information in their native languages. Liu said that although similar hotlines exist in Spanish, there is no language-specific hotline for Asian languages. This leads to an information gap for Asian homeowners with subprime mortgages, many of whom don't know where to turn for foreclosure prevention assistance.
Programs all over the world have shown how mobiles can be an effective tool in providing services to homeless individuals, people with AIDS, and other marginalized populations. Here are a few of the most effective efforts to involve mobiles in innovative ways.
The stereotype is that homeless people don't need mobiles. Why bother with a phone when you can barely afford to put food on the table or don't even have a bed to sleep in? But several different projects have shown that mobile phones can be an important stepping stone in brealing a cycle of poverty. Most importantly, mobiles allow homeless people to get jobs. Employers aren't likely to respond to a resume that lists the phone number of the local homeless shelter, or worse, one without a phone number at all.
