The hope and promise of technology to improve governance was on display at last week’s Personal Democracy Forum 2010. So too were the technologies created to make those hopes a reality. Some were not yet in beta, others had been in use for over a year; some had official presentations, others were mentioned as asides. Here is a rundown of the applications that were discussed.

Mobilization

Frontline SMS
Cited in the “Digital Divide” panel, Frontline SMS was described as “mobile phones to save the world, used for sending pictures of diseases to doctors far away…”

From the site: FrontlineSMS is the complete text messaging solution for the non-profit sector.  FrontlineSMS turns a laptop – or desktop – computer and a mobile phone or modem into a two-way group messaging hub. Since it works anywhere there’s a mobile signal, it doesn’t need the Internet, a major advantage for many grassroots NGOs. Once you have the software running on your computer, you can send messages to wide groups of people, and collect responses to any questions or surveys you might want to run, all via text message.

Meetup Everywhere

Lets people schedule associated Meetups all over the world for free. Create a topic you’d like to meet up about, and everyone else around the world can either join you or schedule their own Meetup on that topic. Message boards and tweets allow you to discuss scheduling with other interested parties. Examples:

Huff Post Green fans scheduled 329 Meetups all over the world to brainstorm ideas for fixing the BP oil spill

• HuffPostGreen – 329 Meetups around the country have been scheduled to brainstorm ideas for fixing the BP oil spill June 8, after the Huffington Post putu up the idea on Meetup Everywhere.
• Shakira – Fans have organized 89 flash mobs around the world to dance Shakira’s Waka Waka dance in support of 1GOAL: Education for All.
• NY Road Runners – 61 groups in 5 continents are using Meetup Everythere to find each other and train together before coming to NYC for the Marathon.

Civic participation

SeeClickFix
Citizens around the world report non-emergency issues; civil servants who monitor the feed can get them fixed. You can even generate a widget showing unresolved issues, enabling you or your site visitors to monitor your municipality’s progress. Government, media, and community groups can set up their own pages to monitor problems being reported (and resolved) within their purview.

Hope+
A platform, incubated by Aspen Institute, for bringing together volunteers and the NGOs who need them. Its partnership with Monster.com is expected to drive more than 32 million volunteers to the site. The thinking is that, once you volunteer you’re hooked. The funnel of participation they envision goes like this:

1. Your time
2. Your friends
3. Your money

IfWeRanTheWorld
Website (in alpha phase) that asks visitors what they’d do if they ran the world, then takes their answers and translates them into “tangible, do-able microactions that anyone and everyone can do”– sort of like making a project plan out of a mission statement.

Piryx
The Piryx “The Social Giving Platform” is a platform connecting donors to causes, helping member causes to “develop a more intimate relationship with donors.” Once they get to the website, the average donor conversion rate is 11%, says Tom Serres, CEO and co-founder.

Political engagement

Visible Vote lets people see how well their elected officials match their own values.

Visible Vote

From the site: Visible Vote is the first and only application to allow you to cast your virtual vote and then notify your representatives of your position weekly. Visible Vote also monitors how often your Congressmen vote in alignment with you and the people they represent.

Microsoft TownHall
In Microsoft’s words, its free Townhall is “software that allows you to easily create a destination for folks to voice opinions, identify problems, offer solutions and come together around common interests and concerns.” It lets people express their opinions and organizations collect data about them.

10 Questions
Citizens post questions they want their political candidates to answer, and vote up or down the importance of all submitted questions are to them. Candidates then have the chance to answer posted questions via text or video. Only Ohio and Pennsylvania are active in this early stage.

VoteIQ
U.S.- based social network platform for all things politics. Citizens can find the candidates who align with their views and values, see where they really stand on the issues, learn more about the issues, and discuss with others like themselves. Politicians and organizations can reach voters highly targeted because of the information they’ve entered in the system.

Video engagement

Civicovideo streams events for remote viewing and archiving, including concurrent social media feeds, supplemental documents, and indexing.

Civico
London-based Civico covered and archived the event. The firm video streams events for remote viewing and archiving. According to the site it offers these features:

• Fully contextualized and indexed with speaker names, agenda items and auto jump points.
• Access documents, presentations, pictures or data relevant to the meeting
• Integration with social media platforms (e.g. Twitter), everyday web-based tools, feedback forums, questions, polls, surveys and consultations.
• Measured audience and engagement statistics

Watchitoo
Combines video chat with video watching so users can watch content together and talk about it.

Campaign tools

Election Mall + Campaign Cloud
Allows campaigns to apply everything Obama did in one place: website, fundraising, organization tools, email, phone, ads, tasking, calendars, GOTV. Pay-for-use model, so it’s meant to be affordable to candidates from the local level to President. For use in U.S. and international campaigns, candidate and issue advocacy. Open API so long as you use the Microsoft Cloud, so it can work with Drupal or other environments.

Pop Rule
Platform for creating a campaign website for as little as $1,000. Pulls together the candidate’s social media feeds, making the campaign distributable. Andy Pariser, reviewing the idea, said it was a good idea for statewide office where money was more scarce; not enough customizability or innovation for a major campaign.

Data

Sunlight Foundation’s Transparency Data Tool
Working with the Center for Responsive Politics and Taxpayers for Common Sense, the Sunlight Foundation has combined several disparate databases and made them available via API to developers seeking to explore relationships between fundraising, lobbying, and elected officials, for example. Non-technical people can access the data with the organization’s Transparency Data tool and download it for investigation or create widgets from it for visual distribution. Some Poliwidgets can be viewed on OpenSecrets.org.

Web Seer
Compare Google Suggest results to discover trends, and visualize that data in new ways. Try it live here.

Were additional apps mentioned in the panels you attended? Let me know of any I missed, below.

Action Aid Australia’s Project Toto aims to have blog outposts around the world, with the aim to give poverty a voice through social media.

The project which is also running in Tanzania, is aiming to link bloggers in Australia to people experiencing poverty, as well as  raising profile of poverty to a wider network of people within Australia.

Two “outreach bloggers” were selected via a competition process among Australian bloggers,  the winners Joel Katz and Sharna Bremner will be heading out to Bangladesh to work directly with people living in the slums in Dhaka, both blogging about their personal experience as well as setting up facilities  and training community members on how to use social media, audio, video and blogging to share their stories.

It will be interesting to what impact this projects has on raising the awareness of overseas poverty amongst Australians and the direct impact on the lives of those taking part.

If you want your content to be remembered, use color.  More specifically, use natural color.  So says an interesting psychological study I ran across today.

Study finds people would better recall the center image than the versions to the right and left.

In the study, normal-sighted subjects were shown 48 images of landscapes, flowers, rock formations and man-made objects–half of them in color, half in black and white.  Then 48 new pictures were added to the mix to see which original pictures the subjects could recall.  Finding: Subjects remembered the color version of an image better than the black-and-white version. Not too surprising.

Here’s the part that is: When versions of the images with altered colors were added into the mix — ones with green skies or red grass — those pictures weren’t remembered any better than the black-and-white versions.

One would think the unusual would make such an impression it’d be remembered for days or weeks to come.  Evidently not.  “If stimuli are too strange,” explained Karl Gegenfurtner, co-author of the study, “the [brain's] system simply doesn’t engage them as well.”  Gegenfurtner says this shows the brain’s visual memory is specifically set up for natural color schemes.

As fascinating as this is, it’s important to note that subjects weren’t viewing photos by Dorothea Lange, or Ansel Adams.  It’s hard to imagine anyone failing to recall those masters of black-and-white photography.

The study originally appeared in the May 2002 issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, and was reported in Scientific American: Mind that same month. (I only ran across it this morning but thought you might have missed it then too.)

PHOTO CREDIT (original): John Collier, Library of Congress. Photo manipulation by Julie C. Roth.

Google celebrates 30 years of Pac-Man with a playable Google Doodle on their homepage

Pac-Man turns 30 with a raging birthday weekend. Do not expect to find a happy Ms. Pac-Man waiting when he gets home. That pretty lady is only two years from her 30th and I suspect itching for a ring. Some advice for your big 3-0 Pac-Man: Lock that down! Don’t make me quote Beyonce.

For those of you who want to party it up with the big guy, Google has helped with a playable Google Doodle. There’s an “insert coin” button you can click from Google.com and let the fun begin! Click it twice to play two players simultaneously with Ms. Pac-Man joining the rager (use W-A-S-D for her controls). Happy Birthday, old friend.

Think big. Think really big. Double that, and you have an idea of why 1GOAL uses all caps in its name.

First there’s the goal: provide education to the 72 million children around the world who currently have no access to it. Then there are the partners: the whole of FIFA, the most popular sports league in the world, about to launch the planet into World Cup hysteria.

The 1GOAL mobile site: http://1gol.mobi/

Then there’s the mobile campaign: 24 mobile providers, covering every corner of the globe, agreeing to text their 1.5 billion subscribers in support of the campaign. Unsolicited text messages, mind you, to 1.5 billion. With a B.

The Ask

The text message will invite subscribers to respond “YES” to sign a petition to world leaders, urging them to provide more funding for education, schooling 72 million children currently without it. Alternatively, mobile subscribers can sign up at 1goal.mobi or info@join1goal.org . Nokia and Samsung are also creating a 1GOAL mobile app their customers can download.

The campaign aims to get millions of people to sign on to the effort and calculates that a 1% response rate to the mobile campaign would mean 15 million participants all by itself – the equivalent to the entire population of Holland. Numbers translate to pressure where petitions are concerned, but clearly the campaign hopes the staggering number will make news in itself.

“Teaming up with the mobile phone industry, 1GOAL can now reach over a billion people worldwide, making it the largest, cause-related campaign in history,” said Her Majesty, Queen Rania of Jordan, Co-founder and Co-Chair of 1GOAL.

How Mobile Was Enlisted

Queen Rania was personally instrumental in enlisting the GSMA to support the campaign. The GSMA represents the worldwide mobile communications industry – nearly 800 mobile operators in 219 countries. Queen Rania delivered the keynote address at the association’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona three months ago and urged the organization’s members to champion education.

Evidently she was very persuasive.

Participating mobile groups and networks include some of the world’s largest: AT&T Wireless, Axiata Group Berhad, Batelco Group, Bharti-Airtel, CSL, Hutchison 3 Group, KT, MTN, NTT DOCOMO, Mobitel, Orascom Group, SingTel Group, Smart Communications, SOFTBANK MOBILE, SK Telecom, Telenor Group, Telefónica Group, TMN, Umniah, VimpelCom and Zain Group.

Said César Alierta, chairman and CEO of Telefónica: “We believe actions speak louder than words and as we have been striving to make a difference in education for the past 12 years, we are delighted to support 1GOAL.”

(Disclosure: Jason Wojciechowski of this site and I are both working on the 1GOAL project.)

Location based social network Foursquare counted their 40 millionth checkin according to a tweet from one of their developers.

Foursquare’s growth rate is also accelerating.  According to Pete Cashmore over at Mashable:

The number shows that Foursquare’s growth rate is accelerating: Five weeks ago, the company announced that the total number of checkins had reached 22 million. In short: Foursquare appears to have doubled its checkin rate in just over a month. -Mashable

The internets rumor mill is also a buzz about Facebook’s potential foray into the location based market with their own product.  Nobody knows for certain if they will develop their own location check-in product or integrate with Foursqare and Gowalla.

What’s clear is that location based services will be a large part of the social media landscape in the coming months, but how can nonprofits begin to use geotagging to benefit our community?  Is this something we should even be spending resources in?

Some of the things we need to think about is the reason why people use and enjoy geotagging.  It sounds simple, but behind many of these features is the basic necessity of people needing interactions.  Interactions become more involved and meaningful the closer the other person is part of your network.  One of the ways that this happens is proximity.  Knowing where your network is at any time can be a powerful tool in increasing your perceived connectivity to your network.

But how can we use this psychology to increase the nonprofit community? We need to use geotagging for more than making a Flickr maps of where people are uploading pictures. I would love to hear your ideas but here are some initial thoughts:

• Mobile Volunteering – People have shown that they enjoy showing that they are part of nonprofit campaigns (adding badges, causes etc. to their accounts).  Maybe this mentality carries over into the geotagging world where we can show your friends what nonprofit projects you’re involved in.  “Hey i’m volunteering at a food bank at X location, come join me”
• Twitter () advocacy – This can be done from either a local or national level.  If you have a local issue, show a local representative a visual map of how many people are talking about it on twitter.  Sending emails is great but what if you could show a politician a real time map of incoming tweets coming in directly from his district?
• Geogames – Foursqure became popular because of the game features they used, why can’t we do the same?  Geotag whenever you attend a rally or event, gain points or karma or whatever your community finds valuable.
• Community mapping – This is something more popular in developing countries but there is no reason why everyone can’t get involved.  Use your phone and location to identify problem areas in your community and force government to fix the problems.

What are some of your geotagging ideas?

The Internet has surpassed TV and radio as the most essential medium for Americans, a new study finds, and roughly as many people would choose to live without TV as the Internet if forced to choose.  Given the usage metrics reported in the rest of the study, it’s no wonder.

(Click image to enlarge.)

Arbitron and Edison Research conducted the national telephone survey (landline and cell phone) February 2010, querying 1,753, people aged 12 and above. The survey explored American consumption patterns of texting, social media, video, radio, mp3 players, and podcasting.  Here are highlights of its findings.

Most essential medium

(Click image to enlarge.)

For the first time, the Internet has surpassed other media as the most essential medium. Percent of respondents who said each medium was the most essential to them:

• 42% – Internet
• 37% – TV
• 14% – Radio
• 05% – Newspapers

It was a toss-up which of the two media they would give up if they had to, TV or the Internet:

• 49% – TV
• 48% – Internet

Unsurprisingly, this varies by age, with younger choosing to live without TV and older choosing to live without the Internet. TV begins to win out starting in the age 45-54 age cohort.

Social media

(Click image to enlarge.)

As social media has continued to boom, the percentage of people with profile pages has risen to 48% of respondents. This varies by age but, as the report says, “older age groups experienced triple digit growth in social network adoption” this year.  Percent of respondents with profile pages, broken out by age:

• 78% – 12-17
• 77% – 18-24
• 65% – 25-34
• 51% – 35-44
• 35% – 45-54
• 31% – 55-64
• 13% – 65+

Texting

(Click image to enlarge.)

• 75% – 12-17
• 76% – 18-24
• 63% – 25-34
• 42% – 35-44
• 37% – 45-54
• 17% – 55-64
• 07% – 65+

Media penetration

TV still has the greatest market penetration, with 98% of the sample owning or using one. Cell phones, however, are making gains.

(Click image to enlarge.)

• 98% – TV
• 92% – Local AM/FM Radio
• 84% – Cell phone
• 52% – Online radio
• 49% – Online video
• 48% – Social networking sites
• 46% – YouTube
• 41% – DVR
• 28% – iPod
• 23% – non-iPod mp3 player
• 23% – Audio podcasts
• 20% – video podcasts
• 15% – Hulu
• 12% – Satellite radio
• 09% – Blackberry
• 07% – iPhone
• 07% – Twitter
• 03% – eReaders
• 03% – HD Radio

Access speed

Access speed is little changed from last year’s report, but 62% respondents now have wifi in their homes.

• 84% broadband
• 13% dial-up

Dial-up users have significantly lower education and income levels, concrete proof of the digital divide.

The report provides a lot more data about these and other media, with loads of graphs you may want to use in your own presentations. I recommend filling out their form and downloading the full report to get every drop.

GoogleLabs launched Living Stories last year, as an experiment with content partners The Washington Post and The New York Times. While the experiment has now finished,  Google has open-sourced the code it and made a Wordpress plug-in to boot.

The video explains the concept but for the skim readers, Living Stories, basically brings current events into a wider context by providing a background on a current news stories, by serving up related information about the event/issue, instead of traditional search which returns information mainly about the incident itself.

Living Stories was an interesting venture into the contextual web and explores how users are  engaging deeper into issues, by gathering online  information from a variety of sources to get a more rounded picture of a news event rather than the headline, top-line facts that fill many mainstream news reports.

If you have seen any other examples Living Stories or any other method for contextualising coverage of “breaking news”,  share the love and let us know.

A joint Nielsen/Facebook report, The Value of Social Media Ad Impressions, found friend endorsement of brands through the site’s “Become a Fan” functionality increased ad recall 30%, brand awareness 13%, and purchase intent 8% with certain levels of social context.

Starting with the knowledge that people trust their friends and peers most when making purchase decisions, the study sought to determine what kind of friend endorsement was most effective in brand recognition.

(Click image to enlarge.)

Results

Homepage engagement ads increased all three measurements:

• Ad recall 10%
• Brand awareness 4%
• Purchase intent 2%

Social context ads increased them even more:

• Ad recall 16%
• Brand awareness 8%
• Purchase intent 8%

Organic ads increased them still more:

• Ad recall 30%
• Brand awareness 13%
• Purchase intent 8%

You can fill out a form to obtain the full report.

With 17,396 views on YouTube since it was posted eight days ago, this Brazilian video may have what it takes to “go viral.” Real ants actually carry protest “signs” against an insecticide. As the description says, “Real ants, real cardboards, a real motive: a protest against Baygon.”