NetSquared, an initiative of TechSoup.org - mobileactive

Mobile Phones in Voting and Elections: A new Strategy Guide from MobileActive

mstein63 — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 11:23:30 -0400

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/.

Politicizing your handset: an interview with Katrin Verclas of MobileActive

marshallkirkpatrick — Fri, 12 May 2006 00:45:32 -0400

Katrin Verclas coordinates the secretariat of MobileActive, a global network of activists and campaigners using mobile phones for civic action and engagement. MobileActive is a project of the Green Media Toolshed.

Mobiles have been used around the world to ensure impartial elections through monitoring, mobilize massive collective action to free political prisoners, and advance public health strategies.

MobileActive

Mon, 17 Apr 2006 21:44:35 -0400

Project Screenshot

Supporting organization

Green Media Toolshed and TechStrategy

URL

www.mobileactive.org

Location

Massachusetts

Project Description

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 activistsâ€™ 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