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VozMob: Mobile Voices / Voces Móviles

Submitted by fbar on April 3, 2009 - 12:08pm
Project URL: 
http://vozmob.net
Short Project Overview: 

Marginalized populations lack access to digital technology yet aspire to participate meaningfully in the digital public sphere. Mobile Voices offers an open-source multi-media platform optimized for low-cost mobile phones that lets users create, share, and reflect on stories about their lives and communities. An academic-community partnership, the project brings together immigrant day laborers, scholars, software developers, and community organizers for participatory design, curriculum development, evaluation and research around this emerging media tool and its social impact.

Detailed Project Overview: 

WHAT, WHERE, WHY: PROJECT OVERVIEW
Mobile Voices is an academic-community partnership to research and design a digital networking platform for low wage immigrants in LA to publish stories about their lives and their communities directly from their mobile phones. This low-cost, open source, customizable, and easy to deploy multimedia mobile storytelling platform is being designed in collaboration with its users, to help recent immigrants who lack computer access gain greater participation in the digital public sphere. In parallel, our research team is studying and documenting participatory approaches to building and deploying low-cost new media, explore how storytelling helps community building and organizing, and investigate how emerging media tools can best be leveraged to promote digital inclusion and assist marginalized groups.

Our project outputs will include a mobile-customized version of the popular free and open source content management system Drupal; a free and open source application for low-cost mobile handsets; and a popular communication toolkit for grassroots mobile organizing. In addition, the documentation and research we are doing to inform similar or future projects will include a case study on participatory technology design; pre- and post- evaluations of communication skills and practices among the partner community; a systematic review of existing mobile services for organizing and advocacy efforts; and a participatory evaluation of the project's impact.

Mobile Voices is also a hands-on workshop where curriculum design is a participatory, iterative process: the initial team of day laborers develops teaching materials, including short clips that can be shared via mobile phones, and later trains other teams around the city at day labor centers managed by the community partner.

WHO:

1) PROJECT PARTNERS:Mobile Voices is a collaboration between the Annenberg Research Network on International Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California (ARNIC - http://arnic.info), and the Institute of Popular Education of Southern California (IDEPSCA - http://idepsca.org), a nonprofit serving low-income Latino immigrants in Los Angeles. IDEPSCA organizes six day laborer centers and corners throughout the city of Los Angeles, has a health program which seeks to increase awareness of the workers health rights, health access, health and safety, advocacy, and alternative medicine, an environmentally friendly women’s cooperative, an alternative K-3 school using popular education methodology, a teen group in Pasadena who are involved in changing the school system, and a parents group fighting for equitable education. Research team members have experience with technology-based and open source media projects (including Indymedia, FilmAid International, and the Chiapas Media Project), and we are drawing on USC colleagues for specialty programming talent. In addition, we are receiving expert advice from the creators of Zexe.net (a network of collectives reporting from cell phones), Mologogo.com (a location aware social application), and technical experts at UC San Diego.
All core team members are bilingual, and several have experience with open source and other community media projects. We work with Bay Area Drupal developer Mark Burdett and Canadian web collective Koumbit.net. Together, our team draws on an extensive international network of coders, designers, researchers, and community organizers for support.

2) TARGET PARTICIPANTS & AUDIENCE: The primary target participants and audience are low-wage immigrant workers and the community-based organizations that work with them, beginning with IDEPSCA and day laborers in LA. At a later stage, the project will expand to additional community-based organizations in LA. We have begun building relationships with community-based organizations that work with other immigrant communities in LA, in anticipation of future project rollout beyond IDEPSCA. This includes organizations that work with LA’s Korean, Pilipino, and South Asian communities. Beyond that, the target is any community where the mobile phone is the primary means of two-way communication. These groups of people will gain access to a free, open source, mobile storytelling platform, as well as training materials on how to use it. Researchers, ICT4D projects, and technology designers are a secondary target, and will be able to learn from our experience in participatory technology design, deployment, and evaluation. Our project's tools will be distributed via our ties to progressive funders that support community-based organizations around the country, such as Funding Exchange partners. Our research findings will be disseminated via academic publications, conference presentations, and via the ARNIC network. Both our toolkit and research reports will be circulated among the ICT4D community, for example through the ARNIC website as well as through our ties to the Association for Progressive Communications, the Global Knowledge Partnership, LIRNE Asia, and DIRSI. We will also contribute regularly to the popular mobile activism blog http://mobileactive.org. Finally, our ties to the Journalism department at the Annenberg School of Communication will help us amplify project stories and visibility in the mass media (print and broadcast).

WHEN:
By the start of 2010, some 60 day laborers will be part of a network for community and public discourse, sharing skills and local narratives through audiovisual material captured on cell phones. In Spring 2010, Mobile Voices will expand to other immigrant communities in Los Angeles. By Summer 2010, a Mobile Voices toolkit that bundles all software and curriculum, designed for easy localization, customization, and scaling, will be made freely available for wide distribution.

FOR MORE INFO:
Read Alex Steed's interview at http://www.netsquared.org/blog/alexsteed/interview-fran%C3%A7ois-bar-mob...

PROJECT URLS:
http://blog.vozmob.net -  research blog
http://wiki.vozmob.net -  project wiki
http://class.vozmob.net -  USC class wiki
http://tags.vozmob.net -   del.icio.us tags for ‘vozmob’
http://list.vozmob.net -  project mailing list
http://devlist.vozmob.net – development mailing list archive
http://dev.vozmob.net/ -   project management: bugs, features requests, tasks
http://code.vozmob.net -  github code repository

What else have you done in this area?: 

Mobile Voices comes out of an ongoing, two-year effort to use Communication for Social Change methodology to analyze the political, technical, and organizing needs of innovative multiethnic media projects controlled by low-wage immigrant workers in Los Angeles. This participatory communication project has been focused on, first, strengthening internal, intragroup, and external communication channels among Los Angeles' low-wage immigrant populations, second, developing specific and appropriate technology solutions in this context, and third, carefully documenting the research process and the tools developed in order to make them available to others for adaptation and local re-use.

In 2007, members of our team mapped the communication ecology of low-wage immigrant worker organizations in LA and, through interviews, surveys, and a participatory production workshop, identified audio (radio and CD) and mobile phones as the two most important communication tools for the community partners. That stage of work produced a strategic communication plan for community partners as well as an ongoing audio production workshop, two CDs worth of audio material, worker-created and administered surveys, and other outputs. Additional information about that stage of research, including a summary of the context and conditions for low-wage immigrant workers in LA, is available from the Small Collaborative Grant description at the SSRC 's Media Research Hub (http://mediaresearchhub.ssrc.org/grants/default-research-bounties/migran... social-change-methodology).  

The status of progress toward Mobile Voices' current goal of creating a city-wide network of low-wage immigrants producing mobile citizen journalism -- as well as what we're learning through our research -- is detailed in a recent report to the Social Science Research Council at: http://dev.vozmob.net/projects/1/wiki/VozMobSSRCMidTerm.

Is there a video that helps describe your Project? If so, enter the embed code here: 
Project RSS Feed: 
http://prueba.vozmob.net/en/rss.xml
Additional Project RSS Feed: 
http://dashboard.vozmob.net
Organization supporting your Project, if any: 
The Institute of Popular Education of Southern California (IDEPSCA)
Supporting Organization URL: 
http://idepsca.org
City: 
Los Angeles
State/Region: 
California
Country: 
United States
Does your Project have financial support?: 
Yes
Is the impact area of your Project global?: 
No
If no, what country(s) does it impact?: 
United States
Type of expertise needed: 
Technical Expertise
Description: 

Drupal: Our core development team includes drupal programmers Mark Burdett, Gabriella Rodriguez, and Josh Haglund. They can always use extra help and we welcome volunteer contributions. We are also looking for help with theming. To coordinate, please see:

Type of expertise needed: 
Technical Expertise
Description: 

Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS): Some of the current limitations of our system come from the largely undocumented quirks of the mobile carriers MMS-to-email gateways. We could use expertise on MMS format and handling.

Java/Symbian: Some features on our technology roadmap require handset programming  expertise we do not currently have. We would welcome help in this area. For example:

 

Type of expertise needed: 
Other
Description: 

We keep a list of various ways in which people and organizations can support vozmob at http://support.vozmob.net

Sustainability (financial) Model: 

This project is being carried out in the most cost-efficient manner, working with free software and inexpensive or donated hardware. To date, Mobile Voices does not include an income generation component for the project itself, though one of the functions of the Mobile Voices platform will be to enable day laborers and domestic workers to find and coordinate better and more consistent employment opportunities. Our research team and IDEPSCA staff members consistently collaborate on fundraising efforts to support the project, primarily through grant proposals.

Identified Obstacles: 

Successful development and implementation of VozMob requires a network of people
and organizations with diverse skills. Our team includes experts in communication for
development and participatory media from USC, a community-based organization that
works with immigrants in Los Angeles, software developers who specialize in mobile
applications, and Drupal developers. 

Project Milestones: 

Over the past six months, the Mobile Voices project was launched and has made great progress toward our goal of establishing a citywide, mobile, multiethnic, immigrant communication network. Grounded in a popular communication approach, we have developed a prototype of the mobile storytelling platform through an iterative process of participatory design, which engages low-wage immigrants in developing their own communication tools and practices. The Popular Communication Team (PCT), a group of volunteer day laborers and domestic workers devoted to using citizen journalism and other forms of communication for social change, has been piloting the platform and will soon be teaching others in their communities how to use it. The Mobile Voices ‘sandbox’ site is now operational (see http://prueba.vozmob.net), Drupal modules for mobiles are being developed, and the PCT is producing a continuous stream of multimedia content. As we begin to transition from the prototyping phase to deployment at each of IDEPSCA’s six worker centers (and shortly thereafter, to other community organizations), plans are underway for the roll-out of the Mobile Voices platform through popular communication workshops using the mobile "toolkit."

Consistent with our open-source and participatory approach, Mobile Voices is sharing with and learning from others; we have been participating in a variety of presentations and conferences which are also detailed in a recent report at: http://dev.vozmob.net/projects/1/wiki/VozMobSSRCMidTerm.

In addition, we have used the past six months to build on the seed funding from The Social Science Research Council (SSRC  - http://www.ssrc.org/) and the Annenberg Program on Online Communities (APOC - http://annenbergonlinecommunities.com) to secure technical, in-kind and financial support from the Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto, CA. (http://research.nokia.com/centers/palo-alto/)

Additional Project Idea Representative: 
Amanda Garces, IDEPSCA
Additional Project Idea Representative: 
Sasha Costanza-Chock, USC
Additional Project Idea Representative NetSquared User Name: 
schock

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