A global network of people using mobile technology for social impact.
The monthly magazine of the Association Center, Now Magazine, has an article in its September 2009 edition on how associations are using and should be thinking about mobiles in theior engagement strategies. Katrin Verclas from MobileActive.org is extensively quoted.
Wired Magazine reports on the Knight Foundation News Challenge winners, including MobileActive.org which won the Challenge for the Mobile Media Toolkit, a resource site with tools and how-to materials on mobiles in independent and community media.
MIT Media Lab and 2009 TED fellow Katrin Verclas receives $200,000 to create a Mobile Media Toolkit — a downloadable production tool for various mobile phone platforms. “The toolkit will include applications for video and audio recording, a distribution tool for mobile content to social media sites and detailed how-to information that outlines what users can do with the phones they have.”
The Boston Globe also reports on MobileActive.org as a winner of the New Challenge.
ITWorld has a report on the Open Mobile Consortium launch in May 2009. MobileActive.org a co-founder of the Consortium and is quoted in the article.
"The Open Mobile Consortium has launched a global development community to help organizations collaborate and share mobile technologies. The OMC's development community compromises several organizations that develop open-source software tools that help organizations better serve the health, humanitarian and development needs of the "bottom billion" of the world's population," says ITWorld.
Business Week profiled TED attendees and projects in this article, including MobileActive's Katrin Verclas. Katrin was one of the 40 TED fellows at the event.
The Inquirer notes, tongue in cheek, that "apparently the mobile phone is the way forward for political protest, citizen journalism and empowerment..One after another, TED speakers seem to be trying to convince us our mobiles are actually so much more than flashy little devices we play Snake on, or send pictures of recently built snowmen with, they can actually be used as weapons of information. A mobile rocket-in-your-pocket, if you will."
MobileActive.org's Katrin Verclas is a 2009 TED Fellow. Business Week has a 'curtain raiser' overview as well on TED 2009 and Katrin.
Spectrum is a significant national resource and needs to be allocated in a transparent way. This is according to Steve Song, fellow at the Shuttleworth Foundation, who presented at this year's MobileActive08 Summit, hosted by the Southern African NGO Network and MobileActive.org, this week.
He says countries across the world are allocating spectrum to telecommunications providers and many are exploring an open policy to do it. “With spectrum being opened around the world, I believe that SA could follow in those footsteps and drastically increase competition and innovation.”
Hundreds of NGO representatives, businessmen and software developers are hunkered down at the MobileActive08 conference in Johannesburg this week, thrashing out ideas and finding out what others are up to in the industry. Encouragingly, there's been talk of collaborating on projects or sharing resources -- why build something from scratch if it already exists?
Part of the buzz around cellphones and the power they have to bring about social changes is due to the pervasiveness of the medium and the greater affordability of handsets, calls and data transfer. Competition among providers has also helped to drive down costs, according to Katrin Verclas, an organiser of the conference.
The rude honk of vuvuzelas rang through the halls of the Wanderers Club in Johannesburg as the MobileActive08 conference got under way on Monday. The conference brings together upwards of 350 IT professionals, NGOs and others from more than 40 countries to thrash out the role of cellphones in development.
Delegates from five continents were asked to blow the horns as a way of introducing South Africa's hosting of the Soccer World Cup, which, according to David Barnard from NGO Sangonet, was either a reason to attend the event in 2010, or stay away. Delegates also started to get to grips with the challenges of bringing social change using technology.
Thomas Mueller, from Child Helpline International, shared his experiences in setting up a free help service in Uganda. The service now receives thousands of calls every month from children in need of assistance, and local telecom companies carry the cost of the call.
MobileActive's Katrin Verclas was on a panel called "Mobileactive: How Mobile Technology Impacts Politics and Vice Versa at SXSW. Listen to a podcast here.
MobileActive's Katrin Verclas was interviewed for a BBC Global Businesss segment on social entrepreunership when she was at the Skoll World Forum on Entrepreneurship. Listen to the segment here.
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