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