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.

 

Many of us in the United States have heard or read about the widespread use of cell phone text messaging in the recent organizing against House Resolution 4437 on Immigration. Internationally, though, this was far from the first time that large numbers of people have been mobilized by campaigns using mobile phones.

In September of 2005, organizations and activists from around the world working on mobile technology in activism met together in Toronto. They drafted a Declaration of Intent and MobileActive was born. Their Declaration articulates a list of values they bring to this intersection of technology and social change, including a "people-centric" view, prioritizing inclusion, democratization and ecological responsibility.

In addition to the most well known cases of mobile activism in the Philippines, Indonesia and Bolivia, Kartin told me that Argentina and the Congo are places that have seen substantial mobile activism. MobileActive highlights some key case studies in their resource wiki online. For an in-depth, academic perspective on mobile use and social change, Katrin pointed me to the Rutgers Center for Mobile Communication Studies.

One of the ways that mobile phones are being used for political purposes is in gathering signatures for petitions. A mainstream TV station in India, for example, recently initiated an SMS campaign for Indians to express their outrage over corruption and police cover-up in the acquittal of a politician's son arrested for the murder of a bartender.

Katrin asked me if I had heard of ring tones being used for political purposes and I had no idea how it could be done. She told me a fascinating story about Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, the president of the Philippines, who allegedly made a phone call to an elections commissioner that proved the vote was rigged. The call was surreptitiously intercepted, recorded and posted on the web - where a key selection was quickly turned into a cell phone ring tone. Subsequent political rallies saw streets filled with people waving phones ringing with her voice uttering the incriminating words. Her government banned media coverage of the recording, but it was downloaded more than a million times from activist web sites.

You can listen to one remix of that phone conversation by clicking here: 

People in the US have done similar things as well: 

 

While all of this might sound very optimistic, there are also serious concerns amongst MobileActive community members around security. Almost all cell phones are now easy to locate, for example. Katrin says that mobile activists need to be aware of government abilities to locate use and possession of a phone, to capture data on the phone if seized, to use your phone as a remote listening device and engage in other nefarious tactics. Fortunately, MobileActive maintains a checklist and tips on cell phone security on their wiki.

The preceeding was based on an interview with Katrin Verclas of MobileActive. The MobileActive site is a great place to find out more and updated information through their community features, resyndicated newswires and richly developed wiki.