Janet Haven

While my adopted home town of Budapest lies buried in snow, I'm spending the next week at the original homestead in Seal Beach, California -- deep in the heart of what I am told is now referred to nationwide as "the O.C." ("Orange County", for those not in the know: it's a TV show).

This week is following on the heels of a week spent in San Francisco with the Information Program sub-board and staff, during which we criss-crossed the Bay Area several times to attend a series of meetings with companies, foundations, and organizations. Ethan Zuckerman has written long accounts of two of them, one a meeting with Brewster Kahle and Rick Prelinger of the Internet Archive, and the other a dinner we were lucky enough to have with dissident Iranian journalist and blogger Omid Memarian.

I also had a chance to sit down with Ben Rigby of MobileVoter, a San Francisco-based organization whos tagline says it all: "Voter Registration and Mobilisation via Text Messaging!" MobileVoter is doing some very innovative projects with mobile phones in the United States; one of the things they've looked at which I think is most intereseting is the use of the mobile phone in a social context, i.e., where users are in physical proximity to each other -- for instance, at rock concerts. They see the mobile phone as a way to capture the excitement and buzz of a live event -- at the moment its occurring, rather than counting on users to remember later on to log onto a website.

Ben is one of the leaders of the MobileActive movement, a group jumpstarted by an international meeting of activists and developers interested in the use of mobile phones held last September in Toronto. The meeting was organized by Green Media Toolshed and Aspiration Tech. Currently, the group maintains an active blog, trades project ideas, and forms partnerships around those projects.

I'll be writing more about mobile phones in the coming months, as this is a crucially important area for the developing and transitional countries that OSI works in. In the US, mobile phones are ubiquitous and highly personalized -- hence offering a different and more direct path to users than internet for advocates trying to get their messages across -- mobile phones in the developing world are useful for a different reason: often, they offer the only communications path in or out of a community. Further, with the help of tools like DialoguePalette, a soon-to-be released do-it-yourself Asterisk tool, voice navigation of information sources will be relatively simple; in regions where literacy is low, the ability to connect people with information via voice has become increasingly important, and increasingly viable.