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This post was authored by Ariel Gilbert-Knight, Technology Analyst for TechSoup, and originally appeared on The TechSoup Blog.
I'm very excited to introduce a new Microsoft-funded project we're working on here at TechSoup, called "App It Up." Apps can be very helpful tools: they can help engage and inform constituents, tell your organization's story, and improve your internal workflows. However, many nonprofits and libraries aren't using apps, for various reasons. The App It Up project is here to help, by identifying - and even creating - apps specifically for nonprofits and libraries.
MobileActive is a global network of organizations, technologists, organizers, and activists who are using mobile phones in their social change work.
Mobile phones have emerged as a campaign organizing tool across traditional socio-economic and cultural boundaries. Mobile phone campaigns have swung elections through innovative get-out-the-vote activities, have been used to ensure impartial elections through monitoring, have resulted in massive collective action to free political prisoners, and are being used in public health strategies.
Yet, while there is significant innovation all over the world, there is little aggregation of lessons learned from these campaigns and activities that is being collected and aggregated by civil society practitioners for their peers.
MobileActive seeks to better understand the strengths and limits of the medium, available technologies for campaigners, share lessons learned, feature campaign examples and tech tools so to increase activists’ ability to organize our constituencies with this new technology.
MobileActive 2005 convened in Toronto to bring together, for the first time, activists from around the world to explore the use of mobile phones in civic action campaigns. The MobileActive community and web site is an aggregation of the learnings from this convergence, stories from participants and their projects, and resources for activists interested in using mobiles in their campaigns.
MobileActive is now growing the network of mobile activists, to share knowledge and skills, and to provide a peer network, training, and resources to those interested in exploring mobile phones in their civic engagagement, mobilization, and civic action campaigns.
If you used mobiles in your campaign, please share your story at http://www.mobileactive.org! If you need resources, let us know! And if you want to join this growing network of activists from around the globe, profile yourself: http://www.mobileactive.org/profile
Welcome to MobileActive - http://www.mobileactive.org
Eric Rice is the co-founder of Hipcast, formerly known as Audioblog.com.
He is a prolific podcaster and an active evangelist for personal media creation.
I ran into Eric at the South by Southwest festival, recognized his name and voice from appearances on a number of different podcasts and asked him to do an interview with me.
I heart my text messages.
Who doesn't like to get a note from their sweety during the day or confirm the address of where you're meeting your friend without having to take notes and loose it on the way there?
On my new cell phone when I call 411 they send the number I was calling about as a text message to my phone. I think that's cool. Why? Because I don't have to try and write it down and then program it back in my phone after they connect me. Also, I don't always have to call them back every time I want a specific number because I'm too lazy to program it. Now, I just program it right way in a few buttons. It saves them money, I'm sure, because I have unlimited 411 on my plan and they want to reduce the number of times I'm calling, no doubt.
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