After trekking to New York City for MobileActive’s last Mobile Technology for Social Change (M4Change) event, I was thrilled to take the metro down to Google’s DC offices for last week’s M4Change barcamp. Following a keynote address from NDI’s Ian Schuler, 100 participants from all walks of life – including government, academia, industry, and NGOs – self-organized in traditional "unconference" style to tackle the day’s diverse topics.

In his keynote presentation (available here) Ian Schuler delivered an excellent primer on integrating mobile phones into development projects. With experience using mobile phones to track election monitoring data, Schuler advised participants to integrate mobile tools only after considering the project’s "theory of change". Next, he argued, you should decide who you want to reach, what their technological literacy is, whether to introduce one way (broadcast) or two way (interactive) messaging, and how you’ll pay for it. Schuler then introduced several exemplary tools, many of which are led by contacts of our ICT team, and also acknowledged the limitations of the medium, as well as fact that "bad guys" are also using these tools. This includes repressive regimes, telecom providers, and negative/disruptive actors.

After Schuler’s presentation, I attended three breakout sessions:

• Rapid prototyping mobile phone tools – led by "futurist" Scott Smith of Changeism, participants in this session were asked to consider randomly distributed pieces of information and design a mobile solution that responded to the various conditions, trends, and limitations. With two partners – a mobile application designer and a representative from Witness – and 30 minutes, my group created a secure mobile phone application to support the efforts of politically-motivated activists seeking to draw attention to corruption in a Chinese city. Smith liked our solution enough to include it in his blog wrap of the event.
• Mobile phones and the Obama campaign – led by Jeff Lee of Distributive Networks, this session featured lessons learned from managing Barack Obama’s opt-in text messaging platform during the presidential election season. The Obama campaign used a complex keyword system with 55,000 entries to disaggregate more than a million subscribers by location and topic. Among other recommendations, Lee suggested integrating SMS sign-up information into all media collateral and channels, developing incentives for participating ("text in now and get VIP seating at the next event"), and developing mechanisms for monitoring users’ satisfaction with the SMS campaign. Lee noted that the most powerful incentive for participation was the simple fact that texting in enabled supporters to feel more connected to the campaign – and the campaign reacted by responding individually to texts, featuring messages at events, and more.
• Promise and pitfalls of crowdsourcing crisis data – participants in this session debated the potential and limits of crowdsourcing, or gathering data from disparate local sources. Ushahidi’s engine, initially used to track violent acts in the wake Kenya’s 2007 elections, remains the leading example of grassroots-based crowdsourcing. The system was thus a focal point in the discussion as was Ushahidi's latest project, Swift River, which is designed to improve the signal to noise ratio – the quality of information passing through the system. A main point of contention: the relationship between the speed of data sharing and the importance of data verification, particularly in incendiary, tense circumstances where violence or illness (H1N1, or "Swine Flu", had just broken out) threatens lives and can affect public action.

All in all this M4Change event offered excellent opportunities to discuss mobile phone-based solutions with a wide range of actors.

By Paul Goodman, guest contributor to the Global Development Commons blog.