How many Americans can get their U.S. Senator on the line? Whose call does your Congressman take: yours or the deep-pocketed lobbyist’s or campaign contributor? Democracy suffers when citizens have little meaningful access to or influence over elected officials or a news media focused more on the ‘boxing match’ than issues relevant to citizens’ lives.

With Capitol News Connection's interactive Ask Your Lawmaker website (www.askyourlawmaker.org) and customizable content-rich widgets, anyone with an Internet connection or a cell phone can hold power to account on the issues that matter where they live and work. Ask Your Lawmaker gives citizens a powerful voice: It is our experience that asking questions can help shape policy and the news agenda. Bad stuff happens when no one is watching, and our elected representatives need to know citizens are watching them – closely.  Ask Your Lawmaker utilizes the interactivity, customizability and viral nature of the Web to connect citizens both to each other and to their Congressional lawmakers. It raises the level of discourse and debate and shines the light of transparency on the political process.

By adding a variety of mobile services and applications, AYL plans to extend its reach beyond the Internet so that people can participate any time, any place, and away from their desktops or laptops. Whether submitting a question via SMS, finding out who your Congress person is via GPS or a street address, mapping a question, recording audio of your question on an iPhone, listening, sharing or ‘truth-squading’ an answer, CNC's proposed suite of mobile solutions will make lawmaker's ears as accessible as the phone in your pocket.

The plan is to start simple with SMS. By allowing users to pair their cell phone number with their AYL user account they will be able to: send question to ‘All U.S. Congress’ and individual lawmakers, receive notifications when their questions have been answered, and share answers with their friends – all using text messaging.

A more advanced application will also be developed for different smart phone platforms (BlackBerry, iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile). These more feature-rich applications will replicate the existing functionality of the widget. It will allow users to toggle between questions and answers, ask and vote on questions, read and listen to answers, comment and share answers and ask follow up questions. It will also feature the same customization options offered by the widget, allowing users to configure by topic (Climate Change Qs&As, Bailout Qs&As), location (California Qs&As), individual lawmaker (Speaker Pelosi’s Qs&As) and by user ID (“My Qs&As).  Additionally, new functionality will let users figure out who their lawmaker is (GPS or street address), submit questions, share content with friends, ‘truth squad’ answers and collaborate around new questions.

Ultimately – and we recognize this a year or two down the line, but ultimately – we plan to develop more sophisticated applications that turn mobile devices into multimedia, multiplatform reporting or newsgathering devices. With such a technology, users could submit audio and video of their own questions directly to the system, as well as a lawmaker’s answer gathered by citizen ‘super users’ when lawmakers are home in their districts. Using the same technology, CNC reporters would be able to get an answer to the question using the same technology and post the answer with audio and video back to the website and the user’s phone. We understand this requires some heavy lifting (video capable cell phones, higher capacity networks, and reliable speech to text conversion) but by looking ahead of the curve and anticipating needs we hope to successfully fundraise and deliver cutting edge solutions.

Maneno is multilingual, lightweight blogging platform being built from the ground up to serve the authoring needs of those living and working in Sub-Saharan Africa.  At its core, Maneno is a web-based system and is built to be used on internet connections that are predominantly low-bandwidth.  Even access to these connections is often limited, which is why mobile access via SMS is being planned as an alternative method to web input for those wishing to write articles.

 The mobile component is being developed for deployment within 2009, focusing on Central African countries, specifically the Eastern Congo region, in order to provide a point of accessibility for people who have traditionally had their stories told (and filtered) via US/European media outlets.  Through working on the ground in this region as well as others, Maneno will function as a portal for new voices in citizen journalism from Sub-Saharan Africa.

Why Mobile
Mobile phones are the one ubiquitous technology found all over the globe -if the goal of Ushahidi is to let ordinary people submit reports during a crisis and know of incidents happening around them, then we must ensure that any phone can be used for this purpose. 

What
The following features will be incorporated into Ushahidi’s mobile development: 
•    ability to send and receive SMS alerts;
•    ability to set up a local or international alert number at short notice;
•    ability work on different smartphones;
•    ability to send MMS messages (images and video);
•    ability to send GPS coordinates.

Who
There is an 8-person team already beginning the work on Ushahidi’s mobile phone functionality.  Java experts working on J2ME applications for GPRS phones, iPhone and Android developers, a 3-person team focused on FrontlineSMS integration and other SMS connection points, and a design team that manages the usability and functionality on each platform as it gets developed.

When
Development for the J2ME, iPhone and Android applications began in October 2008.  The full development team is now shifting into gear for a much broader push into all things mobile that touch the Ushahidi Engine.  Our goal is to have almost all of the work done by early 2009 for beta release.

Impact
Mobile functionality will extend the reach and applicability of Ushahidi, especially in the developing world due to the widespread nature of the mobile phones and the simplicity of of using text messages.  It will facilitate the ability to draw and disseminate information and alerts among a wider population that may not necessarily have access to the internet. 

(Find out more at Ushahidi.com and the Ushahidi Wiki at http://wiki.ushahididev.com.)