Recap of Mobile Tech 4 Social Change BarCamp
Over a hundred people representing development agencies, government offices, and mobile vendors converged on Google’s DC office yesterday for the Mobile Tech 4 Social Change BarCamp. It was inspiring to have so many minds in one space focused on using mobile technology for doing good.
The day began with an excellent talk by Ian Schuler from the National Democratic Institute. As an expert on using mobile phones for development work, he was able to provide insight on the state of mobile technology in the field. If you do any work in this area, I recommend checking out Ian’s slides.
What followed were over a dozen sessions, including one about tracking the spread of swine flu using SMS. The builders of the crowdsourcing platform Ushahidi put together a tool that allows individuals to report instances of swine flu in their region. The tool plots those cases on a map in realtime and allows other users to confirm or reject the reports.
Another session exposed a lot of ideas about using mobile technology to collect accurate map data in developing regions. Ideas included GPS-enabled applications for iPhone and Android platforms that would allow users to contribute street data directly to the Open Street Map project.
The next Mobile Tech 4 Social Change camps are happening in London and Halifax, both on May 23. A big thanks to Google, Mobile Commons, Forum One, and, of course, Katrin from MobileActive.org for putting together such a useful and inspiring event!
Ushahidi
Hey Chris,
None of the founders were there, but Katrin is on our board and we had one of the volunteer devs there who did some talking for/about us.
As far as shortcodes, we aren’t using one in the US. Instead, we just set up FrontlineSMS as we already had it going locally. Shortcodes are the way to go if you can get them setup quickly and cheaply though. Honestly, the Swine Flu instance set up here was just a side project, we had no idea it was going to be so popular. Last point, having a “normal” US number for it allows us to get reports from other countries too, so it’s a little more useful for the rest of the world that way too.
Did the Ushahidi folks talk
Did the Ushahidi folks talk about how they got ahold of shortcodes for the US? Maybe their swine flu tracker is focused on other countries, where that sort of thing might be easier to get and cheaper. The Gaza war and India election apps they put together are pretty slick.
Also, wish I’d been at this thing!