I’d like to use this post to build up a list of useful guidelines for building mobile application user interfaces that can be effectively used during these situations. More specifically, with the capabilities of modern smartphones (large screen, capacitive/multi-touch touch, accelerometer, compass, camera and so on), what more can an application provide than just dumb entry forms and checkboxes.

Here’s my start… please add your own in the comments!

1. Applications must be INSTANTLY responsive. Not only is there no time to lose in these situations, but the patience of the user will be at an all time low. Any data lookup should be cached, paged or otherwise optimized.
2. Common tasks should be “shortcutable”… perhaps the user should be allowed to define their own shortcuts.
3. Any queries or searches should be auto-magically remembered and available via dropdown so that the same text doesn’t have to be remembered multiple times.
4. All actionable buttons/icons should be large… at least 64×64.
5. Lists of selectable, pre-populated options should always be used instead of freeform text entry to improve accuracy of data entry. If freeform is required, suggestions for existing matches of data should be provided.
6. Any network transmission of data or remote access should be done in the background without interrupting the work at hand. Again, remember the user should be expected to have ZERO patience.
7. All color palettes should be HIGH contrast – the lighting situations may not be good AND the device screen brightness will most likely be set to very low in order to maintain the best battery life
8. If the camera is expected to be used for image capture, remember that a 3 or 5 megapixel image can be quite large. Determine the need for resolution quality of the documented image and downsize that at capture time. Otherwise, loading, saving, and transmitting the captured photo could take up a lot of processor time and battery life.
9. Make sure your UI works in both portrait and landscape modes… you just want the app to work no matter which orientation the device is being held.
10. GPS – if you can use geolocation data to make the life of the user easier by prepopulating data or automatically geotagging items, then do it! However, they may need to turn off GPS in order to save battery life, so make sure to gracefully degrade.
11. Any persisted data should be stored on the external SDCard storage so that it can easily be removed, backed up, read on a PC, etc… the phone might die, but you should be able to pop out the card and put it into a SDCard reader for any device to read. This may mean that instead of using the SQLite database on the device, you instead use an XML, JSON or CSV format on the card.
12. If you need to record audio notes, a bluetooth or wired headset should be used. The built-in mics aren’t very good on most devices out today.
13. Swiping, multi-touch or other gestures can be very natural and intuitive UI control mechanisms if used properly. If your applications lends itself to these, make sure you work closely with users to make sure they work… they should be almost natural for a user to do (like swiping photos left and right in a photo gallery) as opposed to some complex secret handshake.

Any more? Please add your ideas in the comments below…

“I’ve learned an important lesson in working with the Tibetan
independence movement and others:  It’s that we can’t presume what people are
willing – are or are not willing to do for their own freedom and liberty and
democracy.  We can’t say, oh, if they do that, they might get arrested or go to
jail or get killed and we can’t do that.  These are people, as we saw in Iran,
who are willing to take to the streets and die for their freedom, and you know,
the – it’s an important fact to remember to not presume that you want to
protect them.”

“I get asked this question a lot as well because I’m building,
like, an encrypted phone and people are like oh man, the Mafia is going to love
that, or something.  So it is – and my students ask me this as well – and I
don’t, from an engineer perspective, I don’t want to be the guy that said yeah,
just, I made the AK-47 and you know, it’s a great gun.  (Laughter.)  So you
have to be careful.  You need to inject morality into these things, but you do
– it’s a slippery slope.”

“I’m happy for tools like Twitter, that they can be used just as well to cover
the daily lives of Ashton and Demi or break the news of Michael Jackson’s
death.  But the fact that they can be used to broadcast updates from the
streets of Iran or spread the news of political prisoners in Tibet being
executed is a very weighty obligation and responsibility that they’ve taken on.”

Many thanks to my fellow panelists (Daniel Calingaert, Evgeny Morozov, Chris Spence and Shiyu Zhou) for the enjoyable discussion.

Shout-outs to Ushahidi, Alive in Baghdad, Lech Walesa and more in the full un-official transcript.

I greatly appreciate the opportunity to participate in this hearing. Thank you to the members of the commission for the invitation to appear here today, and for your interest in this very important topic. I come here today as a representative of the many, many technology advocates, experts and educators who believe that the most amazing innovations of our generation should be used for more than just acquiring more wealth or as simply new channels entertainment or distractions. I am also a longtime member and former board chair of the international non-profit group Students for a Free Tibet, led by Tibetan activists Lhadon Tethong and Tenzin Dorjee.

From my perspective, the latest wave of new media protest technology began in 2004, with an open-source web service called TXTMob. TXTMob was first developed by MIT’s Institute for Applied Autonomy for protesters at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston and the Republican National Convention in New York. I was part of a team that utilized TXTMob to broadcast thousands of short messages to over 10,000 people on the streets of New York, letting them know what was happening moment by moment. Later in 2004, during the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine, students utilized the service to coordinate their spontaneous protests or flashmobs, strikes and sit-ins. In 2005, two of my colleagues who had been involved TXTMobs use during the RNC went to work for the company that became Twitter, where they showed the demonstrated the power of TXTMobs and short message broadcasting to their coworkers around the office. It was in those times, that Twitter was born. It is not an accident that things have come full circle, with Twitter now being the standard go-to tool for activists around the world.

In my activism work, my areas of focus are Asia and the Americas. I have specific experience traveling in and working with organizations focused on China, Tibet and India. I have developed patented technology, focused on the exchange of data between mobile devices over wireless networks. I am also teaching at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program this semester – a new graduate course I’ve designed entitled “Social Activism using Mobile Technology”.  My personal path in this sphere, as a developer, practitioner and instructor in the use of new media technologies within social movements, is built upon a very long tradition that goes back to the first time someone figured out how to use drums, fire and birds to send signal messages.

During the second world war and the cold war, inventors, mathematicians and the earliest digital computers played a critical role in helping the allies stay one step ahead of the axis. In recent years, open-source hackers, nerds and geeks have gravitated towards the social justice, environmental and human rights movements, creating unique alliances and very rich opportunity for innovation. Four guys in a garage in Silicon Valley, is now multiple activists communicating in realtime through Twitter, Skype, Facebook, all using their iPhones, Blackberries and Google Android phones, to weave together human rights campaigns using true grassroots organizing and tested non-violence tactics with open-source software, cloud-based web services and very powerful, yet very cheap hardware gadgets.

Take the case of Burma in 2007. Video journalists and I.T. student organizations teamed up to provide their own coverage of the Saffron Revolution. As their footage began reaching the outside world, they become bolder and more targeted by the junta. While the revolution never fully materialized, and many of the monks and activists who participated have been imprisoned, tortured or worse, the “VJ” model of Burma is largely considered to have been successful due to the global attention the protests received. A similar model is being used in Iraq, through the well known citizen journalist video service, “Alive in Baghdad”, that works to cover and disseminate stories of the every day lives of Iraqis. We have also seen this model used with simple camera phones in the Kashmir and most recently in Iran, where a single clip of video of an innocent dying girl instantly clarified the issue for a global audience and brought overwhelming sympathy and support to the side of the Iranian people. The power of the moving image is unavoidable.

In many cases, the authoritarian states power proves too formidable for adhoc efforts with new media technology. In Tibet, the largely peaceful uprisings in March 2008, were perceived by the outside world as being “riots”, due to China’s ability to control the story by severely restricting news media access and blocking telephone and internet communication. Thousands of Tibetans were detained, many died, and hundreds were given lengthy sentences, many convicted through evidence gathered via close-circuit security cameras, mobile phones, PCs and the Internet. There are countless stories of Chinese, Tibetan and other activists within China being incriminated through their use of email, Skype and other tools. The evidence gathered by the state is often done in collaboration with the technology providers – Yahoo!, eBay, and so on.

In August of 2008, over seventy activists from around the world traveled to Beijing to protest for Tibetan human rights and independence during the Olympic games. New media tools played a major role during this effort. It provided a loosely coupled link between the various independent activists who were traveling to Beijing to participate. It enabled a team of citizen journalists to document the many different protest that occurred (since mainstream press was mostly unable to due to their “close” relationship with Chinese security agents) – all utilizing broadcast quality HD video cameras, small mobile computers and uploading photos and footage for publishing and broadcast around the world. The Beijing authorities eventually caught on, arresting and detaining for a week, six American citizens who had been documenting the protests. During their detention, they were told that the crimes they were guilty of, documenting and spreading media of protests, was far worse a crime than actually participating in the protest itself. Fortunately, due to their American passports, they were treated fairly and made it home.

During last years presidential elections, I was a member of an adhoc team of people who came together to build “Twitter Vote Report”, a nation wide web 2.0-style election monitoring system that tied together google maps, wikis, and iPhones with human resources on the ground from watchdog groups and the media. Over 30,000 citizens reported from outside their polling places, providing a real time view and instant notice of any long lines, hanging chads and potentially voter fraud. The data captured that day was released freely to the Internet for analysis and research by academic institutions. The open-source code from this project, as well as a few others, has been utilized in India and Afghanistan, and we hope to see it become a standard tool in the fight against election fraud.

As you can tell, I am very enthusiastic and active participant in the use of new media tools for social good and in the fight against authoritarianism. However, the use of these tools also brings about the possibility of serious risk to the user, their friends, family and broader movement. As a friend of mine said, “You cannot twitter your way out of a bludgeoning by security goons”. Mobile phones are unique, always broadcasting personal identifiers; changing SIM cards does nothing, phones are tracked easily tracked by their hardware IDs. Laptop computers are often full of incriminating documents, web caches and email addresses. Digital viruses that deliver actual spy-ware such as GhostNet are common and becoming more powerful and more invisible every day – one slip and your entire email inbox can be copied by an adversary. Use of new media and social networks reveal one’s “social graphs”, buddy lists, friends & followers… in a free country, these provide benefit, amplifying your ability to communicate and connect. In an authoritarian state, these reveal your human networks, make the job of cracking down easier and more efficient. It often takes an entire generation to rebuild when an activist network is decimated. The protests of 2007 and 2008 in Burma and Tibet were at level not seen since 1988 and 1989. That twenty year gap is no accident.

While the free world is easily enamored of applications of new media tools within dictatorships and authoritarian states far way, our own federal, state and local law enforcement are often quite fearful and hostile towards their use within domestic movements. Tad Hirsch, creator of TXTMob, is the subject of a subpoena by the City of New York in connection with several active lawsuits against the City that allege police misconduct during the 2004 Republican National Convention. Elliot Madison, a 41 year old social worker, was been arrested in Pittsburgh on Sept. 24 and charged with hindering apprehension or prosecution, criminal use of a communication facility and possession of instruments of crime. The Pennsylvania State Police said he was found in a hotel room with computers and police scanners while using the social-networking site Twitter to spread information about police movements. Just this week it was announced that In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm, has invested in a company whose technology is capable of powerful data mining from any information openly published on Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites. In summary, acts taken to secure our homeland from violent terrorists often have similar justifications to acts taken by authoritarian governments to squelch dissent and democracy. Our government needs to be mindful of these contradictory positions on the benefit of new media within our own democracy.

Finally, I would like to briefly emphasize the comments from Mary Joyce of DigiActive, who could not be here today, on the topic of embargoes. In the digital age, where a “good” is a string of code that can be delivered anywhere in the world with the click of a mouse, even today’s smart sanctions are not smart enough.  By preventing access to blogging platforms, social networks, and other types of new media, current embargo policies harm the very activists who are furthering our common goals of democracy promotion, while leaving authoritarian governments free to spread propaganda through a range of state-controlled media outlets.

Referenced URLs of note:
TXTMob: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TXTMob
Alive in Baghdad: http://aliveinbaghdad.org/
TwitterVoteReport: http://twittervotereport.com
Beijing Olympics Protest Coverage: http://freetibet2008.tv
GhostNet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GhostNet

“Twitter against Tyrants: New Media in Authoritarian Regimes”
Thursday, October 22, 2009, 2:00 p.m.
1539 Longworth House Office Building

This briefing will consider the ways in which new media and Internet communication technologies affect the balance of power between human rights activists and authoritarian governments. Panelists will focus on new media’s role in protests and elections, the ways in which it empowers civil society activists, and the darker side: how dictators use new technology to control and repress their citizens.

The following panelists are scheduled to speak:

• Daniel Calingaert, Deputy Director of Programs, Freedom House
• Nathan Freitas, Adjunct Professor, New York University Interactive Telecom Program;
developer of groundbreaking technology for protests
• Evgeny Morozov, Yahoo! Fellow at Georgetown University’s E.A. Walsh School of
Foreign Service; contributing editor, Foreign Policy
• Chris Spence, Chief Technology Officer, National Democratic Institute

Read more about the briefing… Hope to see you there!

Another exciting week at ITP. This week the classes was visited by Evan Henshaw-Plath aka Rabble, who both spoke of his personal experiences with mobile technology and activism, and also provided critical feedback to students on their projects during our first Speed Geek.

The second half of the class focused on preparing for the development of actual mobile applications and services. While students are free to choose any software or hardware approach they want, the two platforms that will be covered in class are IMified and Google Android.

Here is the audio of the second hour of class as I walk through the links and slide presentations embedded below:

Referenced links:

• Building an IM Bot for the NY Senate OpenLeg API
• NY Senate Bill Bot source code for the IMified platform
• gReporter: Android application source code
• Android Market app examples: TwitterVoteReport and Inauguration Report

This first presentation provides an overview on approaching the development of mobile applications considering all of the unique factors of using a small, portable device on the go:

The second presentation uses the gReporter application to discuss the development of location and media-capture applications on the Google Android platform.

Finally, for beginning to design and mockup applications, here’s a list of solutions for the iPhone (thanks to TechJini blog)  that can also apply to Android:

1. Use Interface Builder or Dashcode (Mac only)
2. Use Balsamiq mockup tool (Mac, windows, linux) – http://www.balsamiq.com (http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/2009/03/01/iphone-controls-new-icons-and-much-more/)
3. Use Omnigraffle (Mac only) and import an iPhone stencil – (http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnigraffle/download/ and http://www.graffletopia.com/search/iphone)
4. Use paper and a stencil- http://www.designcommission.com/shop/iphone-stencil-kit/
5. Use a pre-printed sketch paper – http://labs.boulevart.be/index.php/2008/06/05/sketch-paper-for-the-mobile-designer/
6. Use photoshop and the iPhone PSD – http://www.teehanlax.com/blog/?p=1628
7. Use Adobe Fireworks – http://blogs.adobe.com/fireworks/2008/08/iphone_gui_as_adobe_fireworks.html and http://www.building43.com/videos/2009/06/23/mockup-iphone-app-adobe-fireworks/
8. Although not there yet, you can try http://iphonemockup.lkmc.ch/
9. Use the stencil kit from Yahoo! which is available in a variety of formats – http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/wireframes/
10. Use the sketchbook available at http://www.mobilesketchbook.com/

Homework:
1) Create diagrams for your cause proposal based on the pyramid and pillar diagrams below.
2) Read the following:

• Gene Sharp, There Are Realistic Alternatives (PDF), The Albert Einstein Institution, 2003
  
• CANVAS Core Curriculum: A Guide to Effective Nonviolent Struggle (PDF), Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies, Belgrade, 2007 (Chapter 3: Pillars of Support)
• Robert L. Helvey, On Strategic Nonviolent Conflict: Thinking About the Fundamentals (PDF), The Albert Einstein Institution, 2004

3) Read this post: Turn Your Blog Into a Native iPhone App in 10 Steps
4) For those interested in Android development, you should download gReporter open-source project and get your development environment setup -> http://developer.android.com/

Here’s the audio from the first hour of class, listen to this while reviewing the text below:

Class begin with a discussion on the use of strategy from the school of non-violent direct action, as means for planning and designing mobile applications for social activism. In other words, approach mobile application design from a typical “product” or “consumer” perspective or even a thoughtful usability/design approach, may not make sense when it comes to trying to implement something to create actual change in society.

In the case of social activism, you must developer a strategy to affect an existing regime. A regime can represent a corporation, government, a specific issue, social prejudice, or any existing state of mind or structure in society that can be targeted for change. A long term strategy is necessary to keep focus on the goal.

Opportunities present themselves over time through the effort to affect change on an issue. They can be expected or unexpected. Your effort should be positioned to take advantage of them as they emerge.

Tactics are short term actions implemented to take advantage of opportunities. They can be of varying length and intensity, but must be aligned with your overall strategy. Multiple tactics can be used at once.

You must also consider deeply the structure of the existing regime you are targeting. Here is a typical governmental regime and the “Pillars of Support” which actually make a government function.

However, this same concept could be applied to more mundane campaigns such as increasing efficiency in shopping or promoting the purchase of only pasture-raised eggs at the Park Slope Food Coop:

These timeless approaches to campaigns, drawing from the likes of Sun Tzu’s “Art of War” as much as from the non-violent victories of Gandhi and Mandela, are useful and powerful constructs within which any campaign must be processed. More specifically, for mobile application design, it is critical that you consider a non-corporate, non-consumer perspective as part of your design process, and ideally throughout your campaigns efforts.

Many thanks to The International Center on Nonviolent Conflict for their great instruction, content and overall efforts in this area of work and practice. Here are some related readings on these concepts and more:

• Gene Sharp, There Are Realistic Alternatives (PDF), The Albert Einstein Institution, 2003
  
• CANVAS Core Curriculum: A Guide to Effective Nonviolent Struggle (PDF), Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies, Belgrade, 2007 (Chapter 3: Pillars of Support)

• Robert L. Helvey, On Strategic Nonviolent Conflict: Thinking About the Fundamentals (PDF), The Albert Einstein Institution, 2004

Guest Speakers

Week 4 features two excellent guest speakers. The first, Ben Stein, presented a US-oriented perspective through the work of his organization, Mobile Commons, and the many mobile advocacy campaigns they’ve implemented, including fighting for their own right to broadcast Pro-Choice SMS messages on the Verizon Wireless network. The second speaker, Tonyo Cruz, spoke to us in the midst of the Philippines cleanup from a large storm and flooding in which mobile phones were used to coordinate rescue and raise money. Tonyo’s perspective on the use of mobile in a more social, distributed, “peer to peer” manner, was an excellent contrast to the more centralized broadcast and web-based models that Ben described in the US.

Ben Stein – MobileCommons – http://www.mobilecommons.com
Mobile Commons’ customers are some of the leading cause-related organizations in the world. They use our web-based application to create mobile programs based around text messaging, voice calls, and web-based interactive components. With those tools, they raise money, build their lists, add interactivity to live events, get more support from the web, and make it easier for their ideas to spread.

Our second guest of the evening was Tonyo Cruz of TXTPower- Mobileactivist, writer and journalist Philippines – Since 2001, Tonyo has helped convene TXTPower, the leading mobile activist group in the Philippines and helped initiate its many high profile campaigns.

• Readings:
  • “Of Secret Codes, Abbreviations, and Knowledge Lost and Gained” http://blog.thehenryford.org/2009/05/27/of-secret-codes-abbreviations-and-knowledge-lost-and-gained/
  • RNC 2004 in 160 Characters – http://www.scribd.com/doc/5403691/RNC04-in-160-Character-Bytes
  • TXTmob: Text Messaging For Protest Swarms http://web.media.mit.edu/~tad/pub/txtmob_chi05.pdf
  • MobileActive: Mobile Apps for Data Collection: http://mobileactive.org/wiki/Mobile_Applications_for_Data_Collection
• Tasks
  • Listen to an online police or fire scanner stream for two hours and document what you hear. Specifically listen for codes, protocol and other methods of communicating complex information. Blog your report and post the link as a comment to this blog.
    Online scanner links: http://melsgarage.com/, http://www.police-scanner.info/live-police-scanners.htm, http://www.scannermaster.com/Online_Scanners_s/197.htm
  • Invent your own spoken, typed or visual image code, along with a reason for its use, that could be communicated through a mobile device using texting, image sharing, bluetooth or any other aspect of the mobile device. Document this code, post it to your blog, and share a sample of it via 41411/ITP2800, on Twitter #itp2800 or another mobile medium of your choice.
  • Come up with a list of at least three real world organizations, communities or specific people that will benefit or may want to collaborate with you on your proposed cause. IDENTIFY a contact point within at least one of these groups and call or email them to begin a conversation about your idea. If they don’t respond immediately that is fine, but you must take the first step in communicating what you plan to do

I announced my work in porting the Tor Project to Android. Tor is an “onion router” web proxy that allows web surfers in places like Iran and China get free, anonymous access to the web. Having secure, anonymous browsing that can route around censorship is a critical component of my Guardian secure smartphone project.

The story of Alan Turing and his impact on computing came up briefly and I just wanted to make sure everyone knew the amazing yet tragic story of his life. Just recently, an online, crowd-sourced petition effort pressured the British Government to issue a formal apology for causing his suicide, and countless others who were persecuted for their sexuality.

At some point in class, I drew a diagram that I quite enjoyed sharing, and will attempt to recreate here, since I unfortunately didn’t get a photo or capture it using the smart board. The drawing below is an attempt to demonstrate the various layers of network communication layers, both the physical medium and the amount of government/state and corporate control at each layer. Ultimately, the best opportunities for using networks with less control lie at the LAN layer and the Global layer…. though there are opportunities and technologies at all layers.

I also realized that I hadn’t given the class a background on myself, and decided to share a talk I had recently given at Parsons on my life and work. The presentation tells my story through the various computing hardware and devices I’ve owned, used, hacked and programmed in my life. Notice that the devices get smaller, more powerful and more connected over time. The slides are posted below, and then a video from the talk I gave at Parsons is below that.

the audio starts after a minute or so…

Finally, we reviewed week 2 homework, specifically “mobile videos shot under duress” and the first draft of proposals for the cause they’d like to work on and the technology they plan to use.

You can search #itp2800 on Twitter and ITP2800 on Delicious to see links to some of the homework.

That’s all for week 3…. leave a comment here if you have any questions or feedback.

• Watch the videos linked to here: http://delicious.com/nathanialfreitas/itp2800+week2
• Continue reading/finish “Little Brother” http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/
• Take pictures or video using a camera phone or Flip-style device of something controversial or in a place where you might be seen as a threat to the subject of the video or photo. The goal is to feel/experience the state of using mobile technology under duress. Post videos to a public website and share the link via textmarks ITP2800 or twitter #itp2800
• Write a one page proposal for developing a mobile technology solution for a specific cause

The slides begin with a review of a breakdown of the class title “Social Activism using Mobile Technology” that the class went through in week one. Out of that, I came up with some slightly silly, but potentially introspective, alternate titles for the course:

• People Organizing Portable Robots
• Social Justice Protest. Invsibiel + Frustrating.
• Casual Talking Grassroots Gadget (Not Naturally Evolved)
• Shared Experiences. Mobilized Magic. Organically Evolved.

Some brainstorming on the service value grid I shared…. the class brought up the idea that synchronous request/response service might provide a different experience than asynchronous messaging application. Larger questions about how and when to make value judgements about mobile services which interrupt, distract and complicate our lives was also brought up.

Week 1 homework results – students were asked to come up with their own TextMarks keywords and Twitter hashtags to promote a cause, idea or movement.

The tags/textmarks were: Sgsyn, Desair, IWantData, IWantHealthcare, SavePhillyLibraries, DaveBMiller, Represent, SiOnTheWeb, Mediate, Jeeee, IHeartPV, SecretPublicSpace, Rendezvous, WhatsThatBug, Rainforest, FirstJob, ITP101, GivKwik, PopulationPlanning, NoSmoke

The goal was to consider how to create a memorable tag that is also short. Positive feedback was given on tags that were intriguing, calling the user to take action to find out more. Some of the tags were actually put into use, gaining hundreds of re-tweets in just a few weeks. Another student created posters with mobile barcode images to promote their tag.

The overall topic of this week was “Simplicity is Powerful”, and so we did a whiteboard analysis of the “Flip cam”, cheap video cameras that have proliferated the market, and their usefulness in the service of social activism:

Flip Video Cameras are simple… but powerful.

- Cheap < $100 in some cases
- Durable
- Great battery life (electricity is a common foe)
- Push-button "fisher price"
- double as hard drive storage
- Unambiguous about what it is far
- Ambiguous in that it might look like a cellphone or iPod
- low profile
- has a screen for display
- has a video output jack
- has a tripod connector (gorilla grip clamps work too!)
- Can't remove storage (this is a plus and minus)
- Easy to carry
- quick to use, boot, load, very responsive UI
- standard, global usability, globally available
- standards based plugs, video (usb, rca 1/8 inch)

While it is easy to dream up complex, James Bond-esque technology solutions, often it is the more MacGuyver-esque "off the shelf" approach of combining cheap, easy to use things, that can make a greater impact.

Unfortunately, the video capture of the event failed, but you can view clips from a previous event with Mark and Emily – “Subversive Tech and Burma’s Struggle for Democracy”, a talk held in Brooklyn, NY in June 2009, involved a presentation by Digital Democracy on the use of technology inside and along Burma’s borders, footage from the Sept 2007 Saffron Revolution, where mobile phones and the internet allowed protesters to coordinate and publicize the largest protests seen in a generation, and a Q&A with “Stanley”, a Burmese computer programmer and chairperson of the All Burma IT Students Union.

Subversive Tech & Burma’s Struggle for Democracy (Part 2) from Not An Alternative on Vimeo.

That’s it for week 2… see you next time!

These images were created using the smart digital whiteboard in the classroom, which allows me to project powerpoint slides and then mark up on top of them. We collectively deconstructed the title of the course “Social Activism using Mobile Technology” with some great results.
Disclaimer: my penmanship is generally better than this, but this was a rapid fire brainstorm and the smartboard pens take a bit getting used to!

SOCIAL: People, Groups, Communicating/Community, Interaction, Casual Talking, Context+Culture, Hierarchy/Roles/Privileges, Social Justice, Shared Experiences, Socializing, Social Psychology

ACTIVISM: A Cause for ACtion, Change/Revolution, Movement/Moment, Activated, Mobilized, Organizing, Violient/Non-Violent, Action/Reaction, Strong Opinion, Resistance, Non-Passive, Participation, Protest, Direct Action, THE MAN, Leaders/Followers, Crowd Sourcing, Grassroots/Astroturfing

MOBILE: Portable, Gadget, Dispatchable, Anytime/Anywhere, Networked (People), The Network, On the Move, Personal, Social!, Remote Data, Telecommunications, Tele-vision, Tele-operation, Handy, action, Invisible, Magic, Cloud, Action!, Wireless

TECHNOLOGY: Not Nature, Not Naturally Evolved, Human Made, Stronger, Empowering, Security, FRUSTRATING, delicate, tool, unpredictable, elusive, disruptive, mediator, organically evolved, addictive, expensive->cheaper->smaller->faster, dangerous, privately owned vs. open-source, INFO, DATA, Sensors, Tricorder, Innovation, ROBOTS, SKYNET!

Here’s the raw audio of the first hour of class (syllabus review, grading, basic concepts… real exciting stuff!):

Here are the slides:

Homework
* SMS Mailing List: text ITP2800 to 41411
* Get your own Textmarks.com keyword and make it do something
* Create a hashtag on Twitter and see how many mentions you can get
* Find a mobile app (iPhone, Android, Blackberry or other) that you think is a good representation of Social Activism and post a public review of it
* Research a cause to affiliate with

Social Activism using Mobile Technology – ITP 2800 – Week 1 by Nathan Freitas is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at openideals.com.