mobileactive

MobileActive.org meets again! Join us for the second MobileActive gathering, this year at Mobilefest, in Sao Paulo, Brazil. MobileActive07 will take place November 24-25, 2007.

We know that you are interested and passionate about what the mobile revolution means for social good. MobileActive.org and Mobilefest have partnered to bring together leading thinkers, practitioners and technologist in the mobile revolution from around the world to explore how mobiles are fundamentally changing the way we organize ourselves, do business, and make the world a better place.

MobileActive07 is an intensive camp of NGO practitioners, technologists, researchers, and activist who use mobile technology in their work to make the world a better place. With highly interactive working sessions and workshops, and tool and strategy speed-geeks, MobileActive is a focused and collaborative learning space for people with interest and experience in mobile tech for humanity.

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The Myanmar military continued to suppress demonstrations in Burma/Myanmar today with harrowing pictures of tear gas, guns, and beatings directed at the monks and many more civilian protesters, estimated at 70,000 people. We wrote earlier about the use of mobile phones in transmitting information. The BBC today has an update on the use of the Internet in getting information out of Burma, as the country is called by democracy supporters and dissidents. The article notes that mobiles were used to get information out of the country, but also as a tool by the military junta to disseminate rumors and false information.

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Grameen Foundation's Village Phone program has long been touted as the poster child for using mobiles in the economic empowerment of poor women. The program gives villagers in Bangladesh-- and now in several other countries -- access to microcredit to buy a mobile phone that can then be rented to other villagers who do not have a mobile of their own.

Much has been written about Village Phones in the media and in research reports, often describing in glowing terms the economic impact and gain in social status that the women in the program have achieved. Yet, most of these studies are fairly old at this point, predating the exponential growth of mobiles around the world.

Now questions are being raised in some mainstream media about whether renting out minutes on mobile phones is economically beneficial to the so-called village phone operators -- at a time when mobiles have become so much more ubiquitous, even in remote rural areas.

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MobileActive.org wants to hire you! If you are a cracker-jack research and writing intern, we want you for research and data entry on organizations and projects around the world using mobile phones to make the world a better place.

Online and telephone research, some interviews, writing reports and short blog posts. Must be a thorough researcher, and persuasive and clear writer. This is an ideal position for journalism student with a great interest in mobile tech, or for a tech student interested in the social implications of the mobile revolution.

Paid internship, location Massachusetts or New York preferred but could be done from anywhere IF it's the right person. Fluency in Spanish would be a great plus.

Send a resume, cover letter explaining why we should hire you, and at least TWO written pieces pertaining to this or a related subject matter of at least 300-500 words.

Send your materials to katrin [at] mobileactive [dot] org. Search is open until we find the perfect candidate(s), so hurry.

Reposted from humanitarian.info.

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.

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Much was made of a poll conducted by Zogby International and Rock the Vote just before the 2004 Presidential election. The poll, taken solely over mobile phones, showed John Kerry with a significant lead over George W. Bush. The predictive failure of this groundbreaking poll may be due to the fact that while only 2.3% of the 18- to 29-year-old poll respondents said they did not plan to vote, U.S. census data shows that the actual turnout by the youngest voting blocks was much lower than the national average of 64%, with participation at a mere 47% among those age 18 to 24.

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Calling all mobile vendors working with nonprofit organizations and NGOs!

List yourself in our new MobileActive directory.

Nonprofit and NGO leaders and practitioners some to us daily looking for reliable vendors experienced in locales around the world. If you work or want to work with nonprofit organizations, campaigns, and activists and you provide mobile services, please list yourself today.

Submissions are subject to verification and approval before publication, so please be thorough and truthful. We require references and will check them.

To list your company or firm, please go here.

Photo courtesy of T-Salon (Creative Commons)

In the West African nation of Mali, back street vendors power the mobile phone market. The major players -- Ikatel, a division of France Telecom, along with the homegrown Malitel -- have official stores, but most of their sales come from the street. In West Africa, subscription service is rare. Instead, mobile phone users purchase plastic-wrapped cards of varying denominations, scratch off a silvery bar much like those found on an instant lottery ticket, and recharge their phones with the code hidden underneath. These cards can be purchased from tin-roofed convenience shacks, egg sandwich vendors, or random men walking down the street, stacks of soccer jerseys slung over their shoulders.

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We are pleased to welcome Bart Lacroix to MobileActive.org. He will be writing an occasional blog on AfricaNews' Voices of Africa project, an experiment in mobile citizen reporting. AfricaNews currently has three citizen reporters covering stories in their using mobile countries, phones to produce video footage, written reports and photographs.

Using GPRS-enabled phones, on-the-ground citizens reporters don’t need an internet connection at all - only mobile coverage - to send video, voice, and text. The Voices of Africa is deploying reporters in Ghana, South Africa, and Kenya to date who are using Nokia E61i phones to send in their stories. These countries have, admittedly, better mobile coverage than others, so are good for this pilot project. Bart will tell us how it's going, what citizens are reporting on, and what they are learning about content and technical production before sacaling up the project.

A bit of background from AfricaNews' press release:

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In Sierra Leone's national election today, 500 election observers at polling stations around the country are reporting on any irregularities via SMS with their mobile phones. Independent monitoring of elections via cell phone is growing aqround the world, spearheaded by a few innovative NGOs.

The story starts in Montenegro, a small country in the former Yugoslavia. On May 21, 2006 the country saw the first instance of volunteer monitors using SMS, also known as text messaging, as their main election reporting tool. A Montenegrin NGO, the Center for Democratic Transition (CDT), with technical assistance from the National Democratic Institute (NDI) in the United States, was the first organization in the world to use text messaging to meet all election day reporting requirements.

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