In my companion blog post on Why Apps Are Green, I talked about how apps permit the use of lighter IT infrastructure like mobile phones to accomplish things we previously used to do just on PCs. Mobile phones use much less electricity than PCs, and another benefit is that they make Internet and IT readily available in developing countries.

Another way that apps can be green is because some of them do environmental things. There's a surprising array of them actually. Planet Green's 7 Best Green Apps for Mobile Phones are a good example.

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.

One of the major shift is not the growth of mobile phones, but its transformations to a multi-purpose tool and its ubiquitous nature. Being it a calculator, a translator or a broadcasting, sensing or analyzing medium – the mobile phone will affect much more daily life than personal computers did. Antonella Pastore looks at the latest ITU-report and asks "It’s a mobile world… and the end of the Web as we know it?"

"A world in which nearly everyone owns a mobile linked into networks advanced enough to offer video and location-based services is years, not decades, away." (Internews report)

Project Entry: Resdida's Mobile Content Distribution Platform

Project Link: http://netsquared.org/projects-0 

Resdida was founded to address the challenges of distribution of information, 2-way dialog and engagement of communities as opposed to "pushing" issues & content at marginalized communities. In addition, how can we provide a product/service to organizations (large and small) that enables them to scale their impact and increase their reach to people who need it most? We believe there is a way to solve these problems that is financially sustainable, affordable for organizations and extremely easy to use.

During the past few months I've been researching the role of mobile phones as an emerging tool for participation in civil society.  The result is a series of Strategy Guides published by MobileActive that are designed to equip organizations around the world with the know-how to deploy effective mobile campaigns for a variety of types of activism and advocacy. The first Guide in this series (published today) focuses on using mobile phones in electoral and voter registration campaigns. Other Guides will focus on advocacy, fundraising, and mobile organizing.  This first Guide looks at uses of mobile phones in electoral monitoring (case studies in Thailand, the Philippines, and Montenegro), voter registration (U.S.-based Rock the Vote, MobileVoter, and Voto Latino), and candidate and political party support (case studies in Spain and U.S.).  The Guides are a joint project of MobileActive, Green Media Toolshed, and NTEN, and are made possible with support from the Surdna Foundation, a leader in supporting civic engagement and the use of technology in nonprofit organizations.  My personal thanks to everyone who spent time helping me with research and fact finding. You can grab MobileActive Strategy Guide #1 at http://www.mobileactive.org/guides/.