An election monitoring SMS template

I was speaking with David Kobia from Ushahidi today and remembered that my post on election monitoring in Sri Lanka (Election monitoring using new media: Notes from my experience in Sri Lanka) had forgotten to mention the SMS template that I had developed for election monitoring in Sri Lanka. The template can be seen here. It …

Location based information in real time: Help or hindrance?

Looking at this Google Map created by Omar Chatriwala, a web journalist at Al Jazeera, and the plethora of location aware devices plus options to put up geo-referenced information and news on the web in real time, I wondered whether this was helpful or not in times of crisis? Ushahidi's leading the field in addressing …

Some thoughts on mobile phones and the digital divide

  Ken Banks has a super article up on PC World on using mobile phones to address the digital divide. In it Ken points to two aspects of mobile phones and their usage that not everyone even in developing countries quite understands.  "They can make and receive calls, they have an address book, they can send …

kiwanja.net launches the new FrontlineSMS

This is something I rarely do - plug a product. But my friend Ken Banks has something special with FrontlineSMS and I encourage you strongly to try it out.  I've played with the beta and written about it (in sum, not a very positive experience) but Ken assures me that the feedback received from the …

Mobiles for Social Development

There's a very interesting paper on the web I came across recently that deals with the pros and cons of using mobiles for social development and linked to the discussions on Lirneasia's recent post on the future of telecentres and the role of mobiles in complementing and / or supplanting them.  The paper seems to …

Sahana SMS Module – Thoughts and suggestions

I was invited by Lirneasia to a presentation on Sahana's new SMS module yesterday. Lara's live blogging of the event is available here. The module works well and looks nice and is particularly well suited for sending early warning messages to the disaster response network of Sarvodaya around Sri Lanka (there's an acronym for this …

Papers and research on ICT in peacebuilding, Online Dispute Resolution, Conflict Early Warning, Disaster Mitigation and Response

A collection of papers I've written over the years on ICT4Peace, ODR and the use of technology in disaster warning, mitigation and response.   Daring to Dream: CSCW for Peacebuilding This study will examine research around the areas of Computer Supported Cooperative Frameworks (CSCW) and in particular, the Locale Framework, to examine the possible use …

New York City clamps down on SMS and mobile phone activism

Mr. Hirsch said that the idea for TXTmob evolved from conversations about how police departments were adopting strategies to counter large-scale marches that converged at a single spot. While preparing for the 2004 political conventions in New York and Boston, some demonstrators decided to plan decentralized protests in which small, mobile groups held rallies and …

Ideas on SMS news from New Mexico!

I've just read a post on a blog called New Media in New Mexico comment on JNW, the SMS news service in Sri Lanka. It's not the most obvious place to find some ideas that can gain traction here in Sri Lanka with SMS news services, but I guess the essential idea of news through …

SMS News Alerts in Sri Lanka – A short review of JNW’s new site and service

JNW was the first to introduce news and information through SMS in Sri Lanka. Writing about it around two years ago, I pointed out that their fundamental problem at the time was their subscription model, which they now seem to have overcome with deals with various mobile phone operators in the country. JNW's forays into …