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From Katrin Verclas at MobileActive.org: SANGONeT and MobileActive.org invite you to contribute your expertise to MobileActive08 to take place from 13-15 October 2008 in Johannesburg, South Africa. Do you have expertise in the field of mobile technologies for social development? Are you a researcher working on mobile technology for social impact? Are you a mobile service provider with specific [...]...

Now that I’ve got my snark out of the way regarding Twitter’s role in breaking the news about the earthquake in China, it’s time for some more positive. One of the projects going on behind the Burma cyclone is the development of Geochat - basically a spatially-enabled Twitter - as a disaster response tool. Given [...]...

So, cyclone in Burma followed a week later by earthquake in China. Business as usual, I’m afraid - we live in a world of accidents waiting to happen. When an accident does happen, though, how do we know about it? There’s been a blizzard of coverage in the blogosphere about how Twitter beat the US Geological [...]...

So it all kicked off in Myanmar this week, except that it didn’t, because the military regime has managed to bungle the response to Cyclone Nargis. We could get into a long discussion about the whys and wherefores, and there’s some frightening talk about the “right to respond” over-riding sovereignty, but let’s stay focused on [...]...

The ConnectivIT lab at the University of Colorado has done some fascinating research in the last couple of years, which I’ve been meaning to blog about, but never quite got round to. Such are the workings of the web that these things always come around if you wait long enough. So I’ll preface this blog [...]...

Katrin Verclas at MobileActive and Sheila Kinkade (of ShareIdeas.org) have finished Wireless Technology for Social Change: Trends in Mobile Use by NGOs [pdf]. The report covers a wide range of uses, including public health, advocacy and disaster response, with some interesting case studies (including the recent post-election riots in Kenya). You can read more about...

There’s been frequent discussion here - and blogs like MobileActive, of course - about how cellphones can be used in humanitarian responses. It’s worth remembering, however, that technology is neutral - both “good guys” and “bad guys” use it (if you can be bothered with that way of looking at the world) - and that, in conflict situations, communications technology is seen as a legitimate target. So for all the talk of how empowering mobile technology is, we haven’t had much discussion about the other side of the coin. This bring us neatly to an amazingly interesting post by Barnett Rubin on Informed Comment, entitled Taliban and Telecoms — Secret Negotiations Just Got Easier, and at a Price You Can Afford! Rubin is interested mainly in...

Following the collapse of the political process in Kenya, bloggers White African and Kenyan Pundit - both of whom are worth reading, by the way - have developed a Google Maps mash-up which deals with electoral violence in the country.  Called Ushaidi (’witness’ in Swahili, I think?), it enables people to report events either online or via SMS.  It’s not the first time something like this has been tried, but this an interesting organic attempt to pin down exactly what’s happening in the country.  As anybody working in human rights knows, gathering this sort of information is extremely difficult - particularly later on when it might be needed.  More explanation from White African in this blog post, coverage at Global Voices (with an interesting article on cyber...

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ll know that I’m not convinced that cellphones are secure and stable enough to rely on in an emergency. Yesterday, a bomb went off just down the road from Sanjana’s home, killing 17 people and injuring 30. Sure enough, the mobile network went down immediately after the explosion: However, for around two hours after the bomb went off in Nugegoda, not a single SMS went out from my phone. Also from 6pm to 8pm, not a single call (to mobile as well as land lines) I tried was patched through. While I was able to sporadically get messages, incoming and outgoing voice and outgoing SMS communications were completely off the air....

Last year, the first Mobile Response International Symposium on Mobile Information Technology for Emergency Response was held - they’ve published the proceedings in a proper book and everything (why aren’t we doing that at ISCRAM again?). Mobile Response is much more along the “emergency management” axis than the “humanitarian response” axis (you know, critical infrastructure, rescue operations and so on), but obviously there’s a lot of crossover (although at some point I’m going to have to write about the distinction and what it means for ICT issues in particular). So the Call for Papers for Mobile Response 2008 has just been issued. To give you an idea of the topics that they’re interested in, take a look at this list: Mobile and...

At the same time as my discussion with Sanjana about mobile phones as a human right (summary: he thinks they are, I don’t), I just had an interesting conversation with Katrin Verclas of Mobileactive, who is doing some research into cellphone use in different sectors, and in the course of our discussion a few points emerged about how cellphones are being used in the humanitarian sector. Cellphones are ubiquitous in the humanitarian community - everybody uses them now as the main channel of communication, particularly in country offices. The reasons are obvious: they’re extremely convenient, relatively reliable, inexpensive, and coverage is improving all the time. These are exactly the same reasons why everybody else has adopted them as well, of course. So basically...

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. Now, via the NGO Security Blog, I read that UNHCR and WFP have been using SMS to notify Iraqi refugees in Syria about upcoming food distributions. A total of10,000 SMS have been sent out, which should be enough to reach...