mobile phone

CNN recently reported on mobiles in election  monitoring -- providing real-time data from the polling stations transmitted via mobiles. The article asserts:  "The humble mobile phone is driving a new revolution which some experts hope could bring fairer elections and democracy to some African states. During the 2006 local government elections in Senegal, Radio Sud used reporters and correspondents with cell phones to call in what they saw. Many African countries have struggled against rigged elections and authoritarian rule since gaining independence last century.

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By Katrin Verclas and John Soeren Petterson

There are two notable events this fall focusing on mobile telephony for social impact and for development. The first event is MobileActive08, October 13-15 in South Africa. The second is M4D 2008: Mobile Communication Technology For Development, December 11 and 12 in Sweden.

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Pictures and video out of Lhasa and Xiahe are slowly emerging, yet again initially mainly taken with camera phones and transmitted clandestinely across the border to transmit to a global audience.

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We are happy to announce MobileActive08, a three-day conference on mobile technology for social impact to take place October 13-15 in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Organized with our amazing colleagues at Sangonet in South Africa, the theme of the 2008 event is "Unlocking the Potential of Mobile Technology for Social Impact." MobileActive08 will convene 250 civil society, development and technology practitioners interested in the use and application of mobile technology in civil society. This will be the largest international civil society event to date focusing on this topic.

Participants include non-profit practitioners using mobile phones in innovative and creative ways or considering mobile applications in support of their activities, mobile technologists, researchers studying the use of mobile phones, government officials, donors and representatives from the telecommunications industry.

We are especially pleased to welcome IDRC as a major supporter of the event. IDRC has been conducting research in how mobile telephony is advancing development and civil society goals, and is emerging as the major knowledge center of research on mobiles in health and development.

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Claire Joyce Tempongko, a Filipina immigrant, was murdered by her ex-boyfriend in front of her two young children five years ago. Tempongko had repeatedly tried to get help from state services -- she had called the police before, and her ex-boyfriend had been in jail for domestic violence -- but she was murdered despite the involvement of various services.

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This is the phone we have been waiting for! The Groen Brothers do it again. Hat tip to Steve Albertson of Community Voicemail!

The Stockholm challenge finalists have been announced. We here at MobileActive are content partners of the Stockholm Challenge, and are thus pleased to see that two of the nine finalist projects use mobile phones. The projects, selected from 119 entries, were "chosen by the jury as the best examples of in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for Development."

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Just back from MobileActive07 in Brazil (more on that shortly!) we are immediately jumping into sharing some of our learnings in an online discussion on using mobiles in human rights work over with our colleagues at New Tactics. Please join us there where we'll be dicussing with human rights practitioners all over the world question like:

1) How are you using mobiles in human rights work?

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I interviewed Paul Currion for a research project for the UN Foundation and Vodafone Group Foundation that will be released next year. I asked him about the "state of affairs" of using mobile phones in disaster relief work and humanitarian emergencies. Veritable blogger that he is, he summarized his thoughts on his blog and gave permission to cross-post here.

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We have come across several grant opportunities for MobileActives in health care and education.

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