Interview: Katrin Verclas, MobileActive
From Shareideas
Katrin Verclas is Executive Director of NTEN, a membership organization of nonprofit technology and program staff and technology providers in the U.S. She also coordinates MobileActive, a global network of activists and NGOs using mobile phones for social change.
How did you first get involved with using technology for social change?
In the early 90s I was working with foundations that were interested in civic participation and campaign finance reform. At that time, campaign finance records were handwritten and hidden away in dusty files. There was no way to track contributions against particular industries. Slowly and for the first time, nonprofit advocacy organizations were able to use technology, and databases in particular, to look at campaign finance contributions systematically, often painstakingly transcribing records on clunky computers in state offices all around the country. That was eye opening for these organizations that were now able to use computers to track contribution data against particular policy outcomes. Using databases to look at campaign contributions was my first interaction with how powerful technology can be in social change work. After the fifth database, I had this ‘ah ha’ moment looking at the enormous potential for nonprofits and NGOs to use technology to analyze data, get out their message and reach their constituencies in different ways. It’s been an ongoing love affair ever since.
What were the origins of MobileActive?
Mobile Active was the brainchild of a colleague, Marty Kearns, a visionary nonprofit advocate. He came to us (I was working for another NGO at the time) and suggested that we find and convene practitioners from around the world who use mobile phones for civic engagement, advocacy, and social action. I was charged with finding these individuals and scouted around the world for these kinds of activists. We identified roughly 100 people then and convened 40 in Toronto in 2005.
It was a great event and I think everyone got a lot out of it. It was the genesis of MobileActive. There was this recognition that there is this amazing tool, the mobile phone, that is so widespread and holds so much potential in social change organizing, and a realization amongst the participants that they are not alone and there’s much more we could all be doing with the knowledge that we hold. It was a very heterogenous crowd – technologists, civil society practitioners, some from the commercial sector. This cross-disciplinary conversation led to lots of collaborations and innovations. MobileActive evolved as a global volunteer network of hundreds of people who are doing this because of the potential of mobiles in their work. We haven’t even begun to touch the tip of the iceberg. There are so many interesting examples, case studies, strategies, ideas, campaigns, and even more possibilities.
So now, we have the website and a blog, and we’ve developed research and strategy guides for using mobile phones in advocacy, getting out the vote, and running fundraising campaigns in different part of the world.
How big is the MobileActive community now?
The community is around 500-800 people on various lists and in our contact database, although the site traffic is higher. We have about 1,500 visitors a week from all around the world, with consistent growth, indicating that there is a lot of potential to build a peer community and knowledge base for using mobile phones in social change work.
As examples and case studies abound of how mobiles are being used in health care and education, and how important a mobile infrastructure is in the economic development of countries (there are several interesting studies on that topic alone), it’s more and more important that we tell the stories and make the case for the use of mobiles to monitor elections, report on human rights violations, mobilize people, organize campaigns, and so on and so forth. We are at the same stage in some ways as we were in the early 90s when the Web started to take off. How wonderful would it be if we do not repeat all the mistakes we did then but - from the get go - learn from one another and strategize on the technology, on the strategies, and on the messaging needed to maximize the effectiveness of using mobiles in our work.
Have you noticed any specific trends recently in the use of mobile technology for civic engagement?
It’s growing by leaps and bounds! And advocates and social change practitiones are getting more sophisticated. On the MobileActive wiki in one of our strategy materials, we detail the various ways in which mobile phones can be used in advocacy and social change work and there are case studies and lessons learned for all of them.
Take for example, mobiles in election monitoring. The first time mobiles were used very systematically in election monitoring was in the referendum in Montenegro last year where results on 56 different candidates were tracked at the polls via real-time SMS reporting – from remote areas to central polling stations. The real key in elections, when you suspect any voting irregularities, is to have results faster than the official results. You, as a monitor, want to report what is happening at the polls so you can spot trends and report BEFORE the official and sometimes tainted results come out – to be proactive, rather than reactive. In areas where you don't have great Internet access, mobile phones give you enormous potential for very speedy transmission of information. An American NGO is leading this effort, so one of the key project managers wrote up what they learned in this election, what worked and what did not on the MobileActive blog so other NGOs can learn from this experience.
Mobile phones have always been used as a mobilization tool. I think we’ll see more use of mobile phones and SMS as a campaign tool now that the infrastructure is developing. Mobile chat has also emerged as a means to protect human rights workers and human rights violations.
There are 2.7 billion people with cell phones in their hands. Who knows what can happen when they start putting their heads together? We have for the first time in history a set of tools that are truly widely available and allow for mass communication and peer-to-peer communication. People will use this tool in interesting ways we can’t even begin to predict. I think we’ll all be surprised at the good ideas that emerge from this and we are determined to track and report on them, as well as bring the people with the ideas into a peer network where innovation abounds.
What are your plans for MobileActive moving forward?
We’re redesigning the site to be truly more of a community site. We’ll have more country data and much more in-depth stats and data on particular providers, carriers, aggregators, and infrastructure information that pertains to practitioners and NGOs wanting to run campaigns. If you’re working in a specific country, for example, you won’t have to spend weeks trying to figure out who’s who, what the costs are, the barriers, etc. We’re taking steps to aggregate that in a comprehensive and searchable way.
A second goal is to have more in-depth profiles of people and projects that are out there doing this work so that if there is something that an NGO is doing in Argentina, this can be shared with someone in Malaysia that’s trying to do the same thing. We will also be highlighting a couple organizations that are involved in the MobileActive network that are rolling out new initiatives. Lastly, we’re trying to tie in with the academic community and the research that’s out there in terms of the cultural and anthropological uses of mobile phones that are pertinent to civil society organizations. There’s certainly a growing body of literature that we should be looking at so that NGOs adapt their strategies to the ways people are already using mobile phones.
All in all, mobile phones in civil society, is, as you well know, an exciting and exhilarating area to be in where there is real innovation and possibility. If we can find ways to share the passion, the knowledge, the skills, the tools, and the strategies amongst each other, we maybe just can make the world a better place.
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