SMS Uprising: Mobile Activism in Africa

I am urging everyone who reads this blog to check out the recently published book, SMS Uprising: Mobile Activism in Africa, published by Pambazuka Press in Africa and Europe.

It is a collection of essays on using the cell phone as a tool for political and social activism. The anthology contains an essay written by yours truly on the work of Fahamu, a UK and Kenya-based Pan-African NGO which pioneered the use of cell phone text messaging for an activist campaign to enact legislation for women's rights in 2004 among other high-profile campaigns which attracted international media attention at that time.

From the book description:

SMS Uprising provides a unique insight into how activists and social change advocates are addressing Africa's many challenges from within, and how they are using mobile telephone technologies to facilitate these changes.

This collection of essays by those engaged in using mobile phone technologies for social change provides an analysis of the socio-economic, political and media contexts faced by activists in Africa today. The essays address a broad range of issues including inequalities in access to technology based on gender, rural and urban usage, as well as offering practical examples of how activists are using mobile technology to organise and document their experiences. They provide an overview of the lessons learned in making effective use of mobile phone technologies without any of the romanticism so often associated with the use of new technologies for social change. The examples are shared in a way that makes them easy to replicate -– 'Try this idea in your campaign.' The intention is that the experiences described within the book will lead to greater reflection about the real potential and limitations of mobile technologies.

If you want to learn about innovative uses of cell phone technology, are curious about its applications in activist campaigns, and want to learn more how this technology is being applied in activism in developing countries then this book is for you. Buy the book and tell them you heard about it from this blog!

So You Want to be an Engaged Citizen

This compilation of resources combine my interests in new media technology and citizen-centered political advocacy. Reading about, exploring, and using these resources have been educational to me in learning how to be an effective advocate, how best to harness the latent power of ordinary citizens for social and political change, and what tools are available on the Internet to help an individual be an active, engaged citizen.

This list is not meant to be exhaustive. It is a compilation of what I think are the best resources available from reputable organizations which deal with issues and politicians in a non-partisan way and which seek to promote greater transparency from the government and elected officials.

Online Resources for Researching Information about the Government

Open Congress

OpenCongress brings together official government data with news coverage, blog posts, public comments, and more to give you the real story behind what's happening in Congress. Small groups of political insiders and lobbyists already know what's really going on in Congress. Now, everyone can be an insider.

Show Us the Data


Show Us the Data: Most Wanted Government Documents is collecting examples of government documents and data that are unclassified and should be easily available to the public online, but are not.

Open Secrets: Center for Responsive Politics

OpenSecrets.org is the nation’s premier independent website tracking the influence of money on U.S. politics, and how that money affects policy and citizens’ lives.

OpenCRS: Congressional Research Reports

Taxpayers spend over $100 million a year to fund the Congressional Research Service, a "think tank" that provides reports to members of Congress on a variety of topics relevant to current political events. Yet, these reports are not made available to the public in a way that they can be easily obtained. Open CRS provides citizens access to CRS Reports already in the public domain and encourages Congress to provide public access to all CRS Reports.

Online Resources On Elected Officials and for Contacting People in Government

The White House: Office of Public Engagement

The Office of Public Engagement creates and coordinates opportunities for direct dialogue between the Obama Administration and the American public, while bringing new voices to the table and ensuring that everyone can participate and inform the work of the President.

Project Vote Smart


Project Vote Smart provides detailed information – biographical information, campaign finances, interest groups ratings, issue positions, and public statements – on elected officials including the President, members of Congress, state officials and leadership in state legislatures.

GovLuv

GovLuv uses Twitter to connect you instantly with your representatives in government.

General Sources of Information that Relate to Citizen Advocacy

Sunlight Foundation Insanely Useful Web sites

The Sunlight Foundation was founded in 2006 with the non-partisan mission of using the revolutionary power of the Internet to make information about Congress and the federal government more meaningfully accessible to citizens.

Personal Democracy Forum

Blog focusing on the latest news and information on the intersection between technology and politics.

Book Recommendation

The Citizen's Guide to Lobbying Congress

Exactly what the title says it is. A handy, practical guide for citizens to lobby their Congressional representatives.

Interesting Political Articles: Organizing for America and Gerrymandering

Disorganized: What happened to Obama's massive network of grassroots activists?

from The New Republic

Last year, after winning the presidency, Obama decided to keep intact the backbone of his stunningly efficient, innovative campaign. Previous presidents had outsourced their activism to interest groups; Obama was going to create his own. OFA was supposed to be a new kind of permanent campaign: a grassroots network wielding some 13 million email addresses to mobilize former volunteers on behalf of the administration's agenda (and keep them engaged for 2012). "We've never had a political leader who has continued their organizing while in office like this at this scale," Tom Matzzie, former Washington director of MoveOn, told NPR in January.

As right-wing protesters dominated the news this summer, it would have seemed the perfect opportunity for Obama's much-touted organizers to drown out the conservatives with some coordinated agitation of their own. But they barely made a ripple. Where were they? And how could such a formidable grassroots operation--having just put Obama in office--fall quiet so quickly?

Full article at The New Republic

Redistricting and Gerrymandering: Can the Internet Help?

from the Personal Democracy Forum

Gerrymandering has long been one of the ugly little secrets of American politics, and absolutely one of the arenas where the role of technology has been to make politics worse, not better. Every ten years, after a new census is completed, state legislatures redraw district lines, using powerful computers that essentially enable them to pick their voters before the voters ever have a chance to pick them. Wonder why 94% to 98% of incumbent Members of the U.S. House of Representatives are have been re-elected every cycle since 1996? Or why so few House seats--generally only one-in-ten--are considered up for grabs each cycle? This has long been one of those problems mostly of interest to academics and good government groups, and while everyone wrings their hands about how the resulting lack of electoral competition is bad for democracy, fosters polarization and entrenches corruption, so far no one has figured out how to make ending gerrymandering into a more popular cause.

Enter RedistrictingtheNation.com, a new site built by Avencia, a firm that specializes in web-based geographic analysis, visualization and modeling applications. The site offers an intriguing way of breaking down the barrier to public engagement on this issue, and, if it manages to draw more support, could actually change the game by showing citizens how easy it is to draw fair political boundaries, and how corrupt the process is now.

Full article at the Personal Democracy Forum

The Internet Grassroots vs. the Machine

Here is an interesting article I read this week from the Personal Democracy Forum -- an online hub for news and insights regarding technology and its intersection with politics and democracy:

A striking fact about the current political environment is that despite the ground-breaking Democratic victory on November 4th - whose seeds were planted by progressive online activists - the new administration is dealing with an oddly familiar political brew: the "liberal media" mantra is rekindled, conservative talk radio (i.e. anti-liberal radio) is resurgent, Rush Limbaugh is more relevant than ever, Ann Coulter is once again doing the network rounds, and if online commentary over the past month is any indication, many progressives still feel disconnected from the levers of power.

The assumption that the new presidency would transform the political process, usher in an era of unprecedented citizen empowerment and decimate the old conventional wisdom-making machinery, has been undermined by the reality of entrenched power structures, deep-seated rivalries, die-hard habits and Beltway business as usual.

Read more at the Personal Democracy Forum.

I am currently reading the book "Taking on the System" by Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, the creator of the influential political blog the Daily Kos. I'll be writing a review when I am finished and publishing it here.

What strikes me about the Personal Democracy Forum posting and what I have been reading so far from the book is how all the giddiness about people-powered democracy primarily driven by the explosion of Internet technology and social media tools seems to be running into the brick wall of the reality of existing, entrenched power structures in politics and the media punditry.

The widespread expectation that the Internet was supposed to usher in an explosion of democracy via citizen-centered advocacy and participation in the democratic process seems to be much easier said than done.

I am not trying to be a wet blanket -- I am after all, a blogger and one of those who got on the "Internet as participatory democracy" train several years ago. But I am interested in how other people perceive the landscape of political participation in the Internet Age and how current challenges to democratic participation seems to look awfully like the challenges ordinary citizens faced BEFORE the Internet era.

President-Elect Obama Raised Half a BILLION Dollars Online

So says this story in the Washington Post.

The Clickocracy
Obama Raised Half a Billion Online
By Jose Antonio Vargas

Barack Obama raised half a billion dollars online in his 21-month campaign for the White House, dramatically ushering in a new digital era in presidential fundraising.

In an exclusive interview with The Post, members of the vaunted Triple O, Obama's online operation, broke down the numbers: 3 million donors made a total of 6.5 million donations online adding up to more than $500 million. Of those 6.5 million donations, 6 million were in increments of $100 or less. The average online donation was $80, and the average Obama donor gave more than once.

"You looked at the money being raised online in the same way that you looked at the crowds who came to the rallies," Joe Rospars, the 27-year-old director of Obama's new-media department, told The Post. "You were constantly surprised at the number of people who were coming out to see him," and, when it came to online donations, "people exceeded our expectations as to what they were willing to do."

Obama also raised millions from traditional campaign bundlers -- rich, well-connected fundraisers -- but the bulk of the more than $600 million that Obama raised throughout the campaign was through the Internet, aides said. (Some of those bundlers, of course, also arranged for donations to be made online, so there is some overlap.)

In September, his single biggest month of fundraising, Obama amassed more than 65 percent of his record-shattering haul -- $100 million of the $150 million -- from online donations, aides said. After Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin dismissed the value of community organizing in her acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention on Sept. 3 -- "I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities," she said to applause -- Obama raised $10 million within 24 hours.

Read the rest of the article at the link above. The article also contains information about how the Obama campaign used social networking in the campaign. How the revolutionary phonebanking program helped the campaign. I have said for awhile that the Obama Campaign would be one to be studied for years to come, and this article just makes one stand back and go: DAYUM.

Not bad for a ' Community Organizer'.

LOL

American Forum

I attended American Forum, a panel discussion at my alma mater, American University on Wednesday night. The theme for the night was “From Grassroots to Netroots: The Impact of the Internet and Other Media Technologies in Campaign ’08.” The panelists were:

• Cyrus Krohn: director, e-campaign division, Republican National Committee


• Josh McConaha, internet director, Democratic National Committee


• Jeannne Cummings, political reporter, Politico.com


• Dotty Lynch, political consultant, CBS News and AU professor


• Adam Greene, campaign director, MoveOn.org


• Moderator: Jane Hall, AU journalism professor

I was expecting a good, lively discussion and I was not disappointed. Much of the themes and ideas touched upon were items and news that have been well-publicized and known to regular readers of political blogs. Information such as: that the Democratic Party is much better in utilizing the Internet as an organizing tool than the Republicans; that Barack Obama is the candidate that is most effectively utilizing the Internet as an organizing and fundraising tool; that no one comes close to Obama’s effectiveness in the Internet both in the Republican or Democratic side; that there is no right or Republican equivalent to MoveOn and why that is so.

Interesting to me and a revelation was how the Obama campaign was able to mount such a formidable Internet-based campaign (by holding massive events and rallies, charging $5 per head to attend the event, and creating a mailing list of all attendees; attracting and raising money from small donors).

Adam Greene made a pointed observation that the Internet is creating a new set of winners and losers in politics. That ordinary people are no longer dependent on the DNC or the RNC for activism and political participation, and what we are witnessing with the advent of technology such as YouTube and 10Questions, is a new, people-powered politics. And that is a good thing.

Questions from the audience were also taken and there were some good ones. One audience member asked what the major parties were doing in terms of turning out the vote. Cyrus Krohn gave a cryptic answer which left me wanting to hear more. He said the RNC was experimenting with Internet-based techniques on getting out the vote which he cannot divulge. But that such techniques were instrumental in the recent election of Bobby Jindal in the Louisiana governor’s race.

Another audience member asked why Obama was doing so well with young people. Jeanne Cummings explained that he was a fresh face but also that he had an active campus outreach to college students—something Hillary Clinton is limited in doing so because of the presence of Secret Service agents whenever she is around.

Another provocative question asked is are we getting better politics out of this? The panel mostly gave positives such as more honesty and accountability among candidates and politicians. However, they also said that the increased scrutiny and accountability also breeds more partisanship and negative campaigning. The increased scrutiny also forces candidates to be more robotic and scripted and unwilling to deviate from “safe” formulas and being “on message” all the time. Toward the end, all panelists agreed that television is still the best medium to reach a mass number of people and is the most important news source for the majority of voters.

The last question posed to the panel was what is in store for the future? Cyrus Krohn said mobile phone technology and a convergence between television and computers. Josh McConaha said that people who use the technology, are ultimately the most important thing that will decide the future.

I found the American Forum to be a good introduction and discussion of the topic of how the Internet has influenced politics. It presented the surface of what exists out there in mainstream politics and resources available on Internet-based activism. All in all, however, I came out of the Forum telling myself that it was a very general discussion that is good for the average layperson who is probably not exposed to this information on a regular basis. To someone like me who is immersed in this world via my blogging activities, subscribing to technology and politics-related blogs in an RSS feed, and an active participant in the blogosphere, I came out of the forum wanting more.

Innovative efforts such as 10Questions were mentioned. But absent in the discussion were resources such as Personal Democracy Forum and MobileActive which are useful sources of information on the cutting edge of the use of technology in politics and culture. Also absent were the role of blogs and blogging in driving political discussion of certain issues.

The discussion also focused exclusively on what the Internet means for political participation along major party lines. I was disappointed with the absence of third-party, Independent, or reform voices and how as political outsiders they are making use of the Internet in their efforts and whether or not they are succeeding. American politics and democracy, in my mind, should be much bigger than the question of who will win in 2008 between the Democratic and Republican candidates. It should also include outsiders like third parties, independents and reform efforts—voices which serve as a potent critique of the limitations of the two-party system and who are trying to do something about it. I would have also liked a discussion about the impact of Internet technologies for ordinary people and its potential for realizing the promise of “we the people” democratic political participation.

Some resources if you are interested:

• FairVote


• CUIP


• Third Party Watch


• Ballot Access News


• 10Questions


• Smart Mobs


• Personal Democracy Forum


• MobileActive

This post is cross-posted in An Ordinary Person

Update on Myanmar/Burma Protests and Mobile Phones

Here is an interesting article from MobileActive on mobile phones and Internet technology as instrumental in the Burmese political protests:

The Democratic Voice of Burma has emerged as a major newssource for mobile and video footage from Burma. Other content from inside of Burma is sent by citizens to the BBC where there are some moving pctures, many taken by mobile and emailed or MMSed to the BBC. More footage taken by people in Burma was on the BBC newscast tonight and is here as well (Real Player required). We have little information about the prevalence of mobiles in the country and ability to MMS footage out of the country, but it appears that the Internet is only inconsistently filtered, allowing both pictures and video taken by mobiles and cameras to be sent and published around the world.

Full article here.