MobileActive
Mobile Security Redux: Comparing the Tools
We have been very keen on exposing the security issues related to mobile communications for activists in insecure environments. To that end we have, to date, produced a number of how-to guides that evaluate some of the tools available.
We just added a matrix of available tools that compares existing applications for secure communications more systematically. So, here is the line-up of mobile security resources on MobileActive for easy reference:
- A Guide to Mobile Security for Journalists (and others who produce content!)
- A Mobile Surveillance Primer
- NEW: A Matrix of Mobile Security Tools (Google spreadsheet, downloadable in various formats).
We will continue to pay close attention to this space as there are not enough tools and resources yet for activists and journalists to communicate securely via mobile. If you are aware of other projects or resources, please add a comment!
Photo courtesy: rafeblandford via flickr
GUIDE: Getting Medical Information into the Hands of Community Health Workers
For community health workers who are far from medical libraries and urban centers, staying up-to-date on the latest medical advancements and disease treatments can be difficult. GUIDE, developed by AED-Satellife, is a conversion and content management system that transforms medical literature into HTML forms that are easily accessible over a mobile phone.
GUIDE currently runs on smartphones (Samsung I780) in a pilot program in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. For the last year, 50 nurses from three different branches of local hospitals have used mobiles to stay up to date on medical developments.
The Mobile Intent Index
Women and Mobile: Is It Really a Global Opportunity?
This review was written by Anne-Ryan Heatwole with Katrin Verclas.
Today is International Women's Day and as we do every year, we are looking at the complex and intriguing issue of women and mobile technology around the world. A new report, “Women and Mobile: A Global Opportunity,” by the GSMA Development Fund, the Cherie Blair Foundation and Vital Wave Consulting, tackles the issue of the gender gap in mobile phone usage with a focus on low- and middle-income countries.
Text Messaging as a Tool for Behavior Change in Disease Prevention and Management: A Systematic Review
How to Manage e- (and m-) Waste: The UNEP Investigates
The United Nations Environment Programme has released a new study on managing e-waste for developing countries. The report focuses one three major points: the market potential of e-waste recycling, encouraging the adoption of the UNEP’s guidelines to foster innovation in e-waste recycling technologies, and identifying places in which e-waste recycling is thriving. The study acknowledges that data of e-waste is insufficient, but the United Nations University estimates “that current e-waste arising across the twenty-seven members of the European Usnion amount to around 8.3 – 9.1 million per year; global arising are estimated to be around 40 million tons per year.”
The report used data from 11 representative developing countries to estimate current and future e-waste generation - which includes old and dilapidated desk and laptop computers, printers, mobile phones, pagers, digital photo and music devices, refrigerators, toys and televisions.
Finding Some ICT Answers in Benin: A Guest Post by Linda Raftree, PLAN International
This guest post was written by Linda Raftree who is using social media and ICTs in youth and community development work in Africa and elsewhere. She works for the NGO Plan. Her article is re-posted here with permission.
Over the past few months, I’ve been supporting the development of a mobile data gathering/ crowd sourcing and mapping workshop for youth in Benin. The training is part of a broader initiative to reduce violence against children. We’ve decided to use Frontline SMS and Ushahidi as tools in the project because we think (and want to test whether) mobile data collection/ crowd sourcing incidents of violence will allow for a better understanding of what is happening in this area. We also think that geo-visualizing reports of violence against children may have an impact on decision makers and might allow them to better plan prevention and treatment programs and services.
A Guide to Mobile Security for Citizen Journalists
Citizen journalism, and with it the rise of alternative media voices, is one of the most exciting possibilities for mobile phones in activism.
Getting the Word Out About HIV: Imbizo Men's Health Program
(This case study is reprinted with permission from Glen Thompson of BulkSMS.com)
HIV support programme uses SMS to keep men connected
This case study illustrates that the use of appropriate mobile technology has a positive impact on maintaining men’s participation in a health programme focusing on HIV testing and education.
Recent research findings on the Imbizo Men’s Health Programme indicate that its male participants responded positively to the use of SMS communications. SMS was used to remind participants to go for HIV testing and inform them of upcoming events promoting AIDS and gender awareness. Taken together, this use of mobile technology has played an important part in ensuring that men have remained involved in this public health initiative.
Election Monitoring with SMS: Lightweight Mobile Data Collection Meets Powerful Mapping Analytics
We can now dynamically map and visualize real-time SMS messages in Managing News using the new SlingshotSMS feature. All the code is available on github.
This release is particularly exciting for us because it ties together two of our core projects in such a way that each is made better. SlingshotSMS is a lightweight SMS gateway that can be run off of a USB drive, needing only a GSM modem and an internet connection to act as a bridge between mobile phones and the web. Managing News is a powerful data aggregator and visualization tool that lets distributed teams work together to make large amounts of information useful. Together, they provide an extensible framework for teams conducting mobile data collection projects in the field.
Extensibility is key here because we need this to meet a wide variety of use cases in order for it to be useful. We have been particularly focused on use cases related to election monitoring, but this is just one of many possible applications. Here's a graphic that Saman made illustrating how the system works:
This technology is meant to accompany your existing processes of data collection. You have people in the field, they have cellphones, you have a phone back in headquarters, and they can text in messages to you that are then relayed to a visualization space, which helps keep you and your team on the same page.
Since SlingshotSMS runs on a USB drive, you just plug it in, plug in your phone, and set up what website you want to have the SMS messages sent to. The SMS messages are turned into RSS 2.0 and PUSHed, like as a fat ping. You computer just needs internet to send these messages.
Going back to this election monitoring example, here you see the election monitor is texting in that the polling station is closed. You'll notice that the text message contains a few things: a polling station ID, the word "closed", and the word "security." These are key terms we are going to want to look for on the Managing News side to flag.
SlingshotSMS just pushes the data up to Managing News. The Managing News site will have a custom parser that will break up this text message, pulling out key words and numbers.
Customizing SMS parsing for each project
Out of the box, the Managing News/SlingshotSMS bridge simply accepts the SMS and incorporates it into the default Managing News workflow, ignoring important information in this example like the fact the polling station is closed and there is a security issue. This is where the pluggable nature of Managing News proves its worth. It is simple to write a custom parser that replaces the default parser that ships with Managing News. With some creative use of the Drupal taxonomy system to filter incoming results into Managing News channels and some very basic regex, you can quickly have a system that is able to capture this data and let Managing News users react to it. We'll publish a blog post soon explaining exactly how to do this.
Authentication
Authentication of incoming SMS messages is vital in these situations, and we took extra care to make sure the Managing News Slingshot feature will only receive data from authorized sources. The framework is dependent on the Drupal KeyAuth module which allows signed messages to pass between a SlingshotSMS installation and Managing News. When setting up the Managing News Slingshot feature, users are given public and private keys that they then copy into the SlingshotSMS configuration file. In the future we are considering switching to an OAuth based solution.
To get set up, you'll need the following:
- The latest version of Managing News, Beta 7
- The latest release of SlingshotSMS - mac_keyauth_04.zip (Mac only for now)
- The Keyauth Module
- The Managing News Slingshot integration feature
M4Girls: Empowering Female Students
The following is the executive summary of M4Girls, prepared by the Mindset Network and Neil Butcher and Associates, and reprinted here with permission from Mindset.
IntroductionThe M4girls project is a partnership between Nokia, Mindset Network, and the Department of Education (North West Province) to test the provision of educational content on a mobile phone platform to girl learners. The project targeted the development of Mathematics competencies in Grade Ten girl learners from underserved communities, and aimed to empower girl learners in the following ways:
• Access to mathematics (as a pilot subject area and driven by priority areas in education in South Africa);
• Exposure to a complementary platform of curriculum-aligned Mathematics content (Mindset content) on mobile phones; and
• Exposure to technology in the form of mobile phones.
HarassMap: Tracking Sexual Harassment in Egypt with SMS
For women in Egypt, sexual harassment is an unwelcome but all too common part of life. In 2008, the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights released statistics stating that 83% of Egyptian women and 98% of foreign women in Egypt reported exposure to sexual harassment. HarassMap, a project based in Cairo, plans to give women an outlet to report instances of haramessnt. Combining FrontlineSMS and Ushahidi’s mapping platform, HarassMap aims to be a voice for women.
ChildCount: Monitoring Children's Health Through SMS
Many mobile projects struggle with scale and impact. While a mobile health project may run well with a small number of patients in one hospital, expanding the scope of a project until it is large enough to have real impact takes money, time, and widespread support of key stakeholders in a given community. ChildCount is well on its way to show scale and, so we hope, significant health impacts using mobile technology for patient support.
In a little over eight months, ChildCount has enrolled nearly 10,000 children under five in their catchment area into the ChildCount health monitoring system – an acceptance rate of more than 95%.
Mobile Benchmarks 2010: How Are Non-Profits Using Text Messaging?
We are releasing today the first-ever Nonprofit Text Messaging Benchmark Study. The study, sponsored by Mobile Commons and mGive, takes a look at how organizations in the United States are using text messaging and how subscribers are responding. It reveals that mobile phones are becoming increasingly popular for advocacy with organizations.
Written by Michael Amoruso and Jessica Bosanko of M+R Strategic Services and Katrin Verclas of MobileActive.org, the report “provides benchmarks and metrics by which nonprofit organizations can measure their success with text messaging and illustrate the various ways in which organizations are using text messages.”
Mobile Voices: Creating a Voice for Day Laborers
Note: This is the second of two articles about Mobile Voices, a project based in Southern California. The first post can be found here.
Voces Móviles / Mobile Voices is a Los Angeles-based citizen media project, a collaboration between the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California (ASC) and the Institute of Popular Education of Southern California (IDEPSCA). Mobile Voices describes itself as "a platform for immigrant workers in Los Angeles to create stories about their lives and communities directly from cell phones. [The project] helps people with limited computer access gain greater participation in the digital public sphere."
Enabling Data-Driven Decisions with the Open Data Kit (ODK)
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