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!