Category — Video

Two organisations I’ve had the pleasure of working with – Tactical Tech and Fahamu – have independently announced the release of a film and a book which cover different aspects of non-profit digital activism. Both are well worth a look.

Info-activism.org – a Tactical Tech initiative – explores how rights advocates “use information and digital technology to create positive change”. Actions are broken down into 10 tactics which, through the site, provide original and artful ways for rights advocates to capture attention and communicate a cause (see video, above). The website includes a 50-minute film documenting inspiring info-activism stories from around the world and a set of cards, with tools tips and advice to help people plan their own info-activism campaigns. Further details of the launch are available on the BBC News website.

Turning to more traditional media, Fahamu/Pambazuka have published a new book – SMS Uprising: Mobile Phone Activism in Africa – which provides “a unique insight into how activists and social change advocates are addressing Africa’s many challenges from within, and how they are using mobile telephone technologies to facilitate these changes”.

The book is essentially a collection of essays by people engaged in using mobile phone technologies for social change, and it provides an analysis of the socio-economic, political and media contexts faced by activists in Africa today. The essays address a broad range of issues including inequalities in access to technology based on gender, rural and urban usage, as well as offering practical examples of how activists are using mobile technology to organise and document their experiences. Contributors include friends Sokari Ekine (Blacklooks) – also the editor – Amanda Atwood (Kubatana.net), Juliana Rotich (Ushahidi), Christian Kreutz (Crisscrossed.net) and others.

Congratulations to everyone at Tactical Tech and Fahamu on their initiatives, both of which provide valuable contributions to a growing body of literature on digital activism. Thanks also for the invitations to contribute – an honour and a pleasure!

We’ve been planning for some time to create a cool (possibly animated) introductory film for people interested in the FrontlineSMS basics, but haven’t managed to get round to it yet. So, as a stop-gap, yesterday I put together this quick eight minute welcome video, which covers most of the more frequently asked questions.

This video, and others, can be found on the FrontlineSMS Community. The “Quick Start Guide” mentioned towards the end can be downloaded from here (PDF, 1Mb).

Earlier this year we were asked to work with some colleagues over at the Gates Foundation to highlight a few of the uses of FrontlineSMS in the agriculture sector. There have been numerous projects in Aceh, El Salvador and Cambodia, and the number of initiatives continues to grow.

Here’s a short five minute video which they put together. You can find this, and other videos, on the FrontlineSMS Community site.

As a keen cyclist for most of my life, I’ve always been shocked at how little many car drivers care or care to understand the challenges of two wheels in heavy or fast moving traffic. This lack of respect is not only frustrating – it can also be dangerous. In my younger days I thought I had the answer. Force all learner drivers to spend a month on a push bike before issuing them their licence. There’s no better way than learning by experiencing, after all.

As I’ve got older I realise that my bike riding solution may not have been the most practical, but the “learning by experiencing” point is as strong and relevant as ever, particularly in the world of international development. You can’t beat experience. Pretty-much everyone I respect and turn to for guidance – both spiritual and practical – has got their hands dirty in the field at some stage. I feel at times that a stint in the field should be compulsory. How else can you truly understand the problem?

One of the down-sides to a discipline which doesn’t insist on “compulsory” fieldwork is the rise of a culture of politics. Losing sight of the bigger picture and becoming embroiled in competitive, overly critical behaviour can be a huge distraction and hugely destructive. Development suddenly becomes a battle of “a versus b” or “x versus y” and not about the alleviation of poverty and suffering that it should be. I steer well clear at every available opportunity, and draw on much of what I’ve seen and experienced over the past sixteen years to do so.

I also have my “War Dance” DVD. One of the toughest films I’ve ever seen, “War Dance” – based in the camps of Northern Uganda – puts everything into perspective. For those of us who have seen this kind of suffering it’s a stark reminder – and a cry – to remain focused. Get a copy and watch it each time you need reminding why you’re doing what you doing. Politics has no place in a world like this.

It doesn’t have a place here, either. Whether you agree or disagree with the approach, this recent Medecins Sans Frontiers video drives home a message not a million miles away. It may be messy, it may be challenging, and it may be confrontational – but if this is the reality for everyone on the ground then we need to be having these conversations.

Be warned: It’s difficult to watch (well, listen to), as is “War Dance”. But it’s powerful, and it’s a reminder to all of us that we need to focus on what matters, where it matters. Poverty is not about politics, and should not be driven by it. It’s about people. Every single one of them.

Last week I was contacted by the Production Co-Ordinator at VoxAfrica TV, a Pan African, bilingual, independent TV channel which broadcasts throughout the African continent via satellite. Following Michael Joseph’s recent comments that mobile technology has had a greater impact on Africa’s development than international aid, the producers were keen to explore the state of ICT across the continent, and I was invited to take part in a live broadcast with another guest, Tunde Adebayo, on Sunday evening.

The one hour programme – “Shoot the Messenger” – was hosted by Henry Bonsu, and features appearances from Tim Unwin (Royal Holloway), James Mbugua (Radio Africa), Samuel Burke (Hearts to Africa) and Mariéme Jamme (SpotOne Global Solutions Group and Africa Gathering).

The video is also available on the VoxAfrica TV website.

Over the past four years FrontlineSMS has taught us a lot, and I write about it frequently (see my recent misconceptions and observations posts). One of the biggest – and most underestimated – challenges is outreach. If you’re building a tool for grassroots NGOs, particularly those working on the margins, promoting social mobile tools to them is inherently tricky.

Over the past year, and over the past few months in particular, increasing numbers of local, national and international NGOs have begun promoting FrontlineSMS themselves, to their own field offices, partners and NGO friends. This is hugely significant for us, amplifying our own efforts considerably. This short video, courtesy of United Methodist Communications (UMC), shows a handful of delegates at a recent crisis management conference talk briefly about their thoughts on the software.

They may only be a few words, but for us they speak volumes. We took on the grassroots challenge, and it’s great to see others joining in to help us.

After all, it doesn’t matter how good your mobile solutions are if no-one knows they exist.

Today is a very exciting day for many colleagues in Uganda, a day which sees the launch of a suite of new services from Grameen’s AppLab project. I was fortunate enough to be involved in the very early stages of the initiative, spending a month on the ground studying a mixture of geography, culture, challenges, data availability and technologies in and around Kampala (and occasionally beyond).

One of the best times to be involved in something like this is at the very beginning – the time when everything is on the table, nothing is ruled out and there’s no such thing as a bad idea. Over the course of the month we came out with around fifty ideas for mobile services, based on our research of the Ugandan landscape, and the kinds of issues, gaps and concerns which potentially lend themselves to a mobile solution.

A large part of the fun is without doubt this multi-faceted research – understanding the landscape from multiple perspectives and sources. TV, radio, conversations with taxi drivers (who, regardless of where they drive seem to have answers to all the world’s problems), newspapers, villagers, village phone operators, waiters, children and eavesdropping conversations in bars, all of which helps build a picture of what matters to people and what doesn’t.

Image: Understanding local and national issues is an essential starting point in the mobile applications development process

Although it’s vital to start with the need, figuring out how to meet it becomes the next big challenge. Rural communities aren’t just passive recipients of information, but content generators in their own right. Communities are rich with knowledge, but more often than not this knowledge – not to mention more official sources of information – are rarely stored in anything resembling digital-friendly. Finding out who has the information you need, who owns it, how often it gets updated and how it’s stored are all part of the ongoing puzzle.

One of the most interesting and exciting phases of the AppLab work was the rapid protoyping – getting out into the field (or the matatu [bus] stations, to be precise) and offering people the opportunity to text in agriculture- or health-based questions. Any questions. What seemed to them like a smart, fully-automated system was in fact a handful of health and agriculture students sitting at computers in the MTN/AppLab offices, manually reading incoming questions and formulating 160-character answers. Suffice to say, the data gathered over a few days gave the strongest indication yet of the need and perception of such a service to potential users. The value of this kind of work cannot be understated.

Photo: Students respond to incoming queries using the early version of FrontlineSMS, which was set up to help gather the data

Going back to today’s announcement, out of the original fifty early-stage ideas, AppLab have launched an initial suite of five:

Health Tips
Provides sexual and reproductive health information, paired with Clinic Finder…

Clinic Finder
Helps locate nearby health clinics and their services

Farmer’s Friend
A searchable database with both agricultural advice and targeted weather forecasts

Google Trader
Matches buyers and sellers of agricultural produce and commodities as well as other products (Google explains how it works here)

As part of the initial research, we looked at a whole suite of technologies on which to base solutions, including J2ME, WAP, high-end smart phones, 3G and MMS. As is usually the case, however, SMS won through and all of the services launched today are, according to AppLab,  SMS-based and:

designed to work with basic mobile phones to reach the broadest possible audience. Users can access the services quickly and privately at the time of their choosing and search relevant content on-demand, like someone with access to the Internet

A lot of work continues to go into AppLab’s work in Uganda, and today hopefully marks the beginning of many new announcements (believe me, many other exciting initiatives are already in pilot stage). By working through existing structures in the country (principally MTN and the Grameen Village Phone network, not to forget Google’s growing influence), AppLab is well-placed to identify, build and deliver appropriate, relevant mobile-related services to local communities, and my congratulations go out to David, Eric and everyone who has worked so hard on the project over the past two years.

For a little more indepth analysis on today’s announcement, check out White African’s excellent blog post and the short Grameen video below. The official Press Release is available here.

Fortunately for us, many of the day-to-day technologies which drive large chunks of our on-line lives quietly tick away in the background, only reminding us of our total dependence on them when something breaks or goes wrong. We take the complex ecosystem which drives much of this for granted.

Last month I was invited to speak at a conference at Georgia Tech and give my perspective on building social mobile tools that work in the opposite, resource-challenged environments, a reality for the majority of people in the world today. My short ten minute talk is available above, courtesy of Georgia Tech, along with a PDF of the slides.

The motivation behind the Computing at The Margins Symposium grew out of a research agenda at the university aimed at “understanding the technology needs of under-served communities, both domestically and abroad, and driving the creation of innovative technology to serve and empower these communities”.

Figuring out how we build useful, appropriate mobile tools for grassroots NGOs is crucial if we’re not to create a digital divide within the digital divide. Additional posts and video on my thinking behind this “Social Mobile Long Tail” are available here.

What follows is a short extract from the recent “Soul of the New Machine” human rights/technology conference hosted by UC Berkeley, in which I explain my theory of the Social Mobile Long Tail.

This video is also available on the FrontlineSMS Community pages

A full video of the session – PDA’s and Phones for Data Collection – which includes presentations from InSTEDD, Ushahidi, DataDyne and Salesforce.com, is available via the FORA.tv website.

I’ve been friends with Lawrence and Gladys Zikusoka – founders of Conservation Through Public Health (CTPH) – for a few years after meeting them in Stockholm at an ICT4D conference. Our meeting was particularly exciting because of our shared interest in technology and primate conservation, and because of my previous conservation work in Uganda, the country where they’re based.

Today Lawrence sent me an email with news that Gladys had won an award. This is fantastic news, and incredibly well deserved. I’ve been an admirer and supporter of their work for some time, and it’s great to see them continue to get great traction and recognition for their efforts.

CTPH promotes conservation and public health by improving primary health care to people and animals in and around protected areas in Africa. You can see a video of Gladys and her work below, courtesy of the Daily Telegraph website.

(Gladys, Lawrence – remember you owe me a trip to Bwindi!)