Our Mobile World

A few articles on the role mobile played in the Kenyan Election

johnnychatterton — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 08:00:59 +0000

In 2011 Oxfam sent me to Kenya and Tanzania to research how mobile phones could be used for campaigning. The trip went well and it left me with a deep fascination in the way mobiles are being used to strengthen civil society, share information and shape the future. When I left a few people told me to keep a close eye on the next election in Kenya, since mobile played a big part in the crisis surrounding the 2008 election.

I’ve just been catching up on a few articles and thought I’d share them with you:

Bloomberg: To Report Election Violence in Kenya, Text Ushahidi - a good article published before the election showing how Usahidi, a platform born out of the 2008 Kenyan election violence

Ushahidi hopes Kenyans can help avoid repeating the crisis. The group has put ads on buses and taxis encouraging people to text 3002 to report what’s going on at polling places. The group’s staff and volunteers will watch the reports streaming in by text message, email, Facebook, and Twitter, and verify them with the 30,000 election monitors that civil society groups are sending to the polls. The citizens’ accounts will be published on the web site Uchaguzi, the Swahili word for elections.

Techpost.ug How Al Jazeera used mobile Technology to aid its extensive coverage and citizen reporting of the Kenyan elections

Al Jazeera employed both voice and SMS technologies to aid its extensive coverage and citizen reporting of the Kenyan elections. Kenya is known for its high mobile phone penetration, as well as related innovations like M-PESA (mobile money) and Ushahidi, a crisis-mapping tool that had its roots in the 2007-2008 post-election violence that marred the previous Kenyan elections.

The Economist: Language in Kenyan politics - Coded red

#KENYADECIDES is the tag for Africa-watchers this week, but some of the most important post-election activity is atwitter on mobile phones. With the post-election violence five years ago still raw in Kenya’s memory, it’s little wonder that observers are holding their breath—and their phones—today. Mass media were used to incite violence after the last election. Joshua Sang, for example, broadcast fighting words from his radio station in 2007 and 2008. He was indicted by the International Criminal Court in 2011. Texting fed rumour mills and bred ethnic hatred, too. Several different media distributed fuel for violence in the Kenyan crisis, just as in other conflicts since.

techpost.ug - How Kenyans used #TweetLikeAForeignJournalist in response to global coverage of elections « A great reality check on twitter hype from abroad

Finally, here’s a great project that really caught my imagination. Flashcast runs information systems on public busses across Kenya and have set up a peace promotion system. It’s super simple, people SMS in messages encouraging peace and they get displayed on dot matrix displays to bus riders and on this website.

I’m sure there are many more articles. Let me know what else I should read on twitter

Worth reading: Taking mHealth Applications to Scale

johnnychatterton — Sun, 17 Mar 2013 09:00:29 +0000

Just came across a great article in the Stanford Social Innovation review on the big question of how best to take mobile health applications to scale. Here a taster:

mHealth has the potential to transform healthcare, particularly for the hardest-to-reach women and children around the world. The debate about exactly how, when, and in what form is alive and well. Successful pilots are in abundance, but most of the sector has been slow to reach scale. In short, the sector has a case of mHealth Pilotitis. In the first debate of a series on mobile health, the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship partnered with Johnson & Johnson and Stanford Social Innovation Review to surface important lessons and learning from some of the world’s leading organizations who have taken mHealth services to scale. This debate will also set the stage for a larger discussion on mobile for development at this year’s Skoll World Forum in Oxford, UK.

Read it in full here.

How Nextrdrop is successfully using mobile to bring water to the thirsty in India

johnnychatterton — Sun, 17 Mar 2013 08:00:54 +0000

This is a blog I drafted in India in January but never managed to publish, I’ve finally got around to getting it up now. Sorry for the delay!

Urban residents in most Indian cities with more than 40,000 households receive municipal water supply once every 3-10 days for only 2-3 hours.. The middle classes can cope with this by getting big domestic tanks and automatically pumping them full whenever the water comes on. For those who can’t afford the expensive tanks and machinery this erratic supply is a serious problem. It means that you an waste a huge amount of time waiting around for the water to come on or know that you may not have enough water for your household to function.

Because of the state of urban infrastructure the solution isn’t a regular scheduled water supply. In a lot of areas electricity is make the pumps work that keep the water pressure up. There isn’t enough water to keep the pipes full all the time either. So every area needs specialist “valve man” and engineers whose job it is to ensure every area gets water for a few hours every other day. They have to carefully allocate figure out the best times to give each area water, and try to ensure everyone gets a decent pressure. The end result is households may get water any time from 5am to the dead of night.

This is obviously a big problem for poorer households. Into that gap steps Nextdrop which is working with valve men to allow them to send out automated calls or text messages to allow householders to know when their water is coming on. The system is very simple. The valve man will normally know the day before when each area is going to get water. They then just need to call an automated system, tap in ID number for the valve they’re going to open and the times it will be open. Although The valve man generally knows when the water is going to arrive a day in advance, he normally calls in the IVR only 1-2 hrs prior to the supply

Then Nextdrop sounds out automated calls and text messages to let residents know when to expect water.

Last week Nextdrop took me on a fieldtrip to visit a pilot area for this work in Bangalore. Here’s a photo tour. (note, this is my first attempt at a photo tour blog. Would love any feedback - tweet me at @j_chatterton)

The area we visited was a Bandappa Garden, an established slum in the North East of Bangalore. The first thing that struck me is that the valves that the staff have to open are right in the middle of the road - it’s the hole in the foreground. The local water work has to stand in the middle of the road to bring water to open the water valve.

The area I visited was made up of small streets with 4-6 houses on each 40 meter street. Each household had small water drums outside that contained their entire water supply for two days. The households couldn’t get larger drums because they need to be able to move them - if they are evicted:

and here are the drums:

Each house that joins the NextDrop trial has a little flyer next to their electricity meters:

and many of them have posters explaining to residents how the scheme works. Note, many residents are illiterate so the scheme explains this pictorially.

I was struck at how much the residents love the service. Here is Mahadevamma who was extremely enthusiastic and showed me exactly how it works!

And here’s what the service is all about - the text messages that users receive as soon as the valveman turns the water on.

Want to read more?

Here’s the Nextdrop website and blog

Here are a few good articles about them

FastCompany: How NextDrop Is Using Cell Phones, Crowdsourcing To Get Water To The Thirsty
INC: Testing a Start-up 8,000 Miles From Silicon Valley
The Washington Post: Women, water and the ugly global crisis we’re not talking about
The Times Of India: Know when next drop of water will come from your tap
Here’s NextDrop’s CEO, Anu Sridharan at TEDx Mumbai to talk about NextDrop

Meet Mswipe -- India's Square

johnnychatterton — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 08:00:52 +0000

This isn’t campaigning but it is a great example of a great use of appropriate technology so I’m going to blog it anyway!

Square is pretty great, it lets shops accept credit and debit cards via iPhones, iPads and Android phones. That’s super convenient for shops and it’s also cheaper than traditional card systems. Here’s a snap of their website to show you what their devices look like:

This is a big growth sector, a few months back Square announced they were processing US$10 billion in payments a year. It’s such a big deal that PayPal have created a rival called PayPal here, here’s a quick video explaining how it works:

But here’s a problem - this is all irrelevant for India. Square only works in the US and Canada at the moment. PayPal here is only in United State, Canada, Japan, Hong Kong and Australia. But even if it was available here it would require retailers to buy an expensive iPhone or a cheaper but stil pricey smartphone. Smartphones are still expensive to most Indian’s - which is one of the reasons only 3% of Indian’s have bought one.

But a few weeks ago in India we were in a shop and asked to pay by card and the staff member got out this:

It works just like Square, except you don’t need a snazzy iPhone or Android - it works on much cheaper feature phones. The retailer pops in the amount, swipes the card and your phone number and your sent an SMS receipt like this:

A little bit of Googling reveals Mswipe has only being going for 4 months but already is in use in 200 cities across India by 4,000 merchants. It’s clearly attracting attention, it just got an investment from Matrix Partners.

Here’s their slick video explaining how it works:

This week I'm at the Greenpeace Digital Mobilisation skill share

johnnychatterton — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 08:00:41 +0000

This week I’m hanging out with over 100 campaigners from all over the world at the Greenpeace Mobilisation Skill Share, here in Barcelona.

The aim of the event is:

To share state-of-the-art strategy and tactics in citizen engagement and digital mobilisation from around the world
To build on our successes and learn from our failures
To grow a powerful network and community of practice to innovate, test, mobilise, and win

It’s been going a few years, here’s a video of last years:

I’ll be trying to blog from this, but it looks like it will be a hectic time. You can get updates and see what we’re up to here.

Zuckerberg - Facebook is now a mobile company

johnnychatterton — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 02:30:24 +0000

This matters for campaigners, Facebook has completed it’s transition to a mobile company. Bloomberg reports:

“Today there is no argument: Facebook is a mobile company,” Mark Zuckerberg said on a conference call Wednesday with analysts.

Why does this matter? A few reasons:
- Facebook accounts for a vast amount of traffic for campaign groups. If the majority of their traffic is now mobile you need to be optimising your entire campaign experience for mobile
- Facebook usage reflects what users want to do. Facebook has focussed a lot on getting users hooked. They do this through lots of tricks including providing a decent service no matter what device you are on. This huge growth in mobile is happening because that’s what internet users want to do - use the web on a small screen.
- the internet is changing. Most people campaigning today grew up with the internet on desktops. That’s spoilt us with fast connections and big screens. Tomorrow’s campaigns will play out on 4 inch screens on slower connections. We need to figure out what that means.

Source http://mobile.businessweek.com/articles/2013-01-30/while-facebook-pivots-to-mobile-investors-remain-jittery

A masterclass in sharing from UpWorthy -- How to Make That One Thing Go Viral

johnnychatterton — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 03:30:41 +0000

Upworthy.com is a newish site in the US that finds meaningful content on the internet, improves the content and then promotes the cause behind it. In 1/2 a year they have exploded from from 0 unique pageviews to 3 million. That’s a staggering rate of growth and it is in part because they put a huge amount of effort into figuring out why people share and how they can get more people to share. We campaigners should take note!

The good news is the kind folk at upworthy have decided to share how they did it on SlideShare. Here it is:

How To Make That One Thing Go Viral from Upworthy

H/T @danielvockins

Great to see Amnesty UK experimenting with SMS campaigning. I...

johnnychatterton — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 02:30:38 +0000

Great to see Amnesty UK experimenting with SMS campaigning. I wish they would include the SMS details in the tweet though, would make it that little bit easier.

Twitter brings in more revenue from mobile users than from...

johnnychatterton — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 03:30:46 +0000

Twitter brings in more revenue from mobile users than from desktop users according to Fortune India. Interesting…

Oh my word, no wonder Romney’s campaign flopped. Outplayed...

johnnychatterton — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 02:30:44 +0000

Oh my word, no wonder Romney’s campaign flopped. Outplayed by data rigour.

Campaigning in India - Delhi residents stand up to overcharging auto drivers

johnnychatterton — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 03:30:39 +0000

The campaign against errant auto-rickshaw drivers has spread from Mumbai to Delhi after the Times of India highlighted how auto-drivers were breaking rules by over-charging or refusing certain fares. The story led to a spike in complaints via SMS and phone calls.

This is a great example of a campaign using appropriate technology. No fancy apps or mobile websites - this uses SMS and voice so anyone can get involved. That means that those without mobile internet, or those who are illiterate can still get involved.

If you’re in Delhi and want to report an overcharging rickshare here’s how:

Delhiites can complain by sending an SMS to 56767 with the nature of complaint, auto number, location of incident and time. They can also call the traffic police helpline at 1095 or 25844444 and give a verbal complaint.

More details here.

Campaigning in India - Freeze mob highlights acid attacks on women

johnnychatterton — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 02:30:36 +0000

The Times of India is reporting on a moving form of protest for women victims of acid attacks:

At 4pm sharp, a whistle was heard outside Pallika Bazaar after which youngsters, who had taken up positions from the Metro station to Block A of CP, ‘froze’ for seven minutes. “It was a symbolic expression of how life for an acid attack victim freezes in time,”

More here.

Not campaigning but I thought worth sharing...

johnnychatterton — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 03:30:30 +0000

Not campaigning but I thought worth sharing anyway.

Cleartrip.com is India’s Expedia, it seems to be the best way to book flights, hotels and train trips. They also have a good error message as I just found out!

I’ve spotted these car stickers a few times across Delhi....

johnnychatterton — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 02:30:48 +0000

I’ve spotted these car stickers a few times across Delhi. Daughter of the Nation is the victim of the Delhi Gang Rape.

There are many internets -- ramblings on the Indian internet and 2G

johnnychatterton — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 03:30:30 +0000

As I highlighted earlier this week 55444 is a great solution for the hundreds of millions of mobile phone users in India who don’t have smartphones but want to get access to the internet.

Since I wrote that blog I’ve been delving more into how people who have bought a smartphone here use them.

Two things have struck me:
1 - a lot of people buy smartphones but don’t get mobile data
2 - 2G is a big deal. A lot of smartphones users prefer to buy 2G access than faster 3G.

These observations are not based on hard data, because I haven’t been able to find them. Phone networks don’t seem keen to share those numbers. Instead I’ve been talking to people I meet on buses, in restaurants and on the street. It’s not super scientific I know, but I’m sure I’m on to something.

Why? Because networks are desperate to get smartphone users online. As you walk down the street there are adverts like this:
It’s not just posters in the street - the networks send very regular texts urging you to sign up for 2,3,7,30 day bundles of data. Like this:

It’s clear that networks are coming up with cheap plans to tempt users online. This deal from Reliance caught my eye - it gives you unlimted Facebook and WhatsApp usage for a month for just 16 rupees ($US0.30). That’s a bargain but also a smart way of getting people hooked - only Facebook and WhatsApp are free - if you click on any link you’ll have to pay to access that:

Now my second observation - 2G seems to be a huge deal. I noticed this when talking to colleagues, many of them seemed to prefer 2G. Why? It keeps money in your wallet and power in your phone’s battery. 2G is a lot cheaper - check out the prices below:
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Remember 2G? In the UK it’s the slow painful internet that your network only serves up if something has gone very wrong, or you’re in an area of the country they can’t make much money from.

I like to imagine that an extremely well paid economist advised all the phone networks that the best thing they could do was lure in people with cheap smartphones and cheap 2G and in time they’d get hooked on the internet and upgrade to 3G. The problem is that isn’t happening - networks are now admitting they underpriced 2G and are gradually upping the prices

Why does all this matter? It means most sites I use everyday in the UK are inaccessible for the everyday Indian who has smartphone on 2G. Take one website I use very very regularly – I tried it on a full 2G signal and it took over 20 minutes to become usable. On 3G it is working in under 20 seconds. Even that is slow - Google recommends that mobile sites should be usable in 5 seconds or at a push 10 seconds.

I came to India for a geeks holiday - I wanted to see what the mobile revolution looked like here. This has hammered home to something I already knew, but hadn’t seen. The internet is very different all around the world. There isn’t one internet. It depends on the device you use, the speed of your connection and the language you speak. That means that if you are producing content you want to be accessible around the world you have to create a site that is usable on the slowest of connections. Delve into the settings on your phone and restrict it to 2G - then you’ll see how bad the situation is.

I’m going to keep digging into this to try and find hard numbers on the behaviour of the average Indian internet user. If you know where I can get hard numbers please get in touch!

Will I get water today? How Nextdrop tell residents when water is coming

johnnychatterton — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 02:30:29 +0000

Over the last month I’ve been looking out for interesting uses of mobiles to fix important problems.

Here’s a fascinating one - millions of people across India only have access to treated, piped water for a few a week. To make it worse residents have no way of knowing when that’ll be.

Next Drop are trying to fix that - by giving residents SMS or phone call alerts with the time water is going to be available that day. In Hubli so far 25,000 households have signed up for the service so far.

They’re doing some trials in Bangalore too so I’m hoping to visit them over the next few days. If I do I’ll update the blog with photos, and maybe even videos, of the service in action.

You can find out more about Nextdrop on their site, their blog is also worth checking out.

38 Degrees launch paid campaign internship. Apply by 6pm Feb 4th

johnnychatterton — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 16:05:09 +0000

My friends at 38 Degrees just launched a paid campaign internship. It’s one of the best places to kick start a career in campaigning. Check it out and apply here. Details below:

CAMPAIGNS INTERN (PAID POSITION)

Deadline for applications: 6.00pm, 4th Feb 2013
Interviews will be held: w/c 11th Feb 2013

38 Degrees is one of the leading campaigning organisations in the UK. In under four years, we’ve grown to over a million members. Together, we’ve helped stop the privatisation of England’s forests and seen off some of the worst aspects of the government’s plans for the NHS. 38 Degrees members choose our campaigns, and keep the organisation going: all our funding comes from our members chipping in.

In 2013, 38 Degrees is starting a paid internship scheme, and we’re looking for bright, enthusiastic people with a can-do attitude to come and join our small staff team for a year. We’d want successful candidates to work hard and learn fast. In return, the successful candidate will be equipped with all the skills and experiences they need to build a career in the fastest-growing area of campaigning, as well as becoming a valued part of our friendly, close-knit office team in the process.

ROLE

Work alongside the 38 Degrees campaigns staff in every aspect of planning and running our people-powered campaigns.
Lead on specific projects and particular areas of work.
Develop your strategic and practical understanding of delivering campaigns, as well as acquiring highly-transferable technical and communications skills

PERSON SPECIFICATION

Passionate about the issues that 38 Degrees works on, including protecting public services, making our tax and banking systems fairer and protecting the environment.
Keen to learn how campaigning works and how to use people power to make change happen.
Experience of running campaigns in your own community or as a student would be an advantage.
Energetic with a flexible can-do attitude, and ready to work hard alongside everyone on our tight-knit team.
Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, enabling you to work well with other team members and ask for help when it’s needed.
Clear, concise writing style.
Good organisation and administration skills, including familiarity with managing your own workload.
Used to applying attention to detail and concentration in busy surroundings, whether the job is big or small.
Comfortable with using different software packages and able learn new IT skills quickly. Some knowledge of HTML or other technical skill is desirable, but not essential.

HOW TO APPLY
You can download an application form on the 38 Degrees website here.

In your personal statement, please outline clearly how you meet the criteria listed in the the person specification above. Please include details of voluntary positions in the employment history section of the form where relevant.

TERMS
12 month contract
Full time with some flexibility - average 40 hours/week
Salary: £20,000 per annum
27 days holiday per annum plus public holidays

Campaigning in India - Meter Down aims to "put errant Rickshaw drivers to task" in Mumbai

johnnychatterton — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 12:32:47 +0000

Rickshaws (AKA autos) are the best way to get around the city quickly, and if you can get over the traffic noise and the feeling you’re about to die in a terrible road traffic accident they can be a lot of fun.

However, actually getting a rickshaw to take you somewhere is often not fun. The rules are pretty simple, the drivers should take you wherever you want to go on a meter. In reality the drivers refuse and instead give you a fixed and inflated price. If they think you’re an out of touch foreigner you’ll often find the fare is twice or triple what it should be. This is infuriating and can lead to you being stuck in the dark waiting for a driver who will give you a reasonable price. That’s not fun when in a group but can be really scary if you’re alone at night.

This isn’t just an issue for tourists. Mumbai residents get subjected to this too - which is why Mid Day, a mumbai newspaper, launched their “Meter Down” campaign.

Here’s how they decribe it:

MiD DAY has partnered with Mumbai Traffic Police to launch METER DOWN, a campaign to rein in errant autorickshaw drivers, and help youreach your destination.

They’ve got celeb support from Bollywood’s John Abraham. But the thing that really caught my eye is the way they want you to report naughty meter dodging auto-drivers:

Call 24937755 or SMS METER Your Location Autorickshaw NumberYour Complaint and send it to 57272*

Since this is in partnership with the police things are actually starting to change:

Last year’s Mid-Day Meter Down campaign, which targeted the taxi drivers, received overwhelming support. In a span of just one month, the campaign saw as many as 1,551 taxis being booked for refusing fares across the city. In addition about 317 taxi drivers’ licenses were cancelled.

The Times of India is running 1/4 page ads on why men should...

johnnychatterton — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 02:30:00 +0000

The Times of India is running 1/4 page ads on why men should respect women.

Update 29th January 10:51

You can read more about campaigns in India here.
You can sign the petition for ensuring women’s rights in India here. Disclosure - I work for Change.org, the site that this petition is hosted on.

Campaigning in India - Greenpeace wins! Airtel agrees to go renewable

johnnychatterton — Sat, 26 Jan 2013 02:30:44 +0000

Here’s the second in my “campaigning in India’ series. News of a great victory from Greenpeace that combined traditional campaigning via online petitions with old technology (faxes) and accesible technology (SMS) to win.

Great news from Greenpeace India.

The campaign started back in 2011 when Greenpeace highlighted how the the telecom sector was powered by subsidised diesel. They zeroed in on Airtel, India’s largest network, and urged them to step up.

At first they were ignored. But through banner drops:

and determination:

Greenpeace activists and supporters continued with their demand, asking the telecom giant to switch-off diesel from its operations through online petitions, fax and SMS.

Earlier this week Airtel published a sustainability report, which was splashed all over their homepage:

The campaign clearly shook Airtel up - they even made a fancy microsite to showcase their new found focus on sustainability.

Here’s a small extract from Greenpeace’s victory statement. It’s in full here.

Our continuous engagement with Bharti Airtel resulted in them releasing their sustainability report this year. This is a welcome step and we hope to see more companies follow suit. Vodafone had already released their sustainability report in the year 2011.

Moreover when the diesel prices were revised recently, the government brought in the concept of dual pricing. The bulk consumers like telecom companies will have to pay a higher price for purchasing diesel for their operations, making dirty diesel even more economically unviable for the sector.

This campaign achieved what it aimed for. Along with lakhs of supporters like you, Greenpeace has been able to move the industry towards clean energy. We hope that more organisations come forward and advocate for growth decoupled with carbon emissions and create more success stories for our planet.

Congratulations to everyone involved!