DigiActive.org

Tactic: Mapping Xenophobic Attacks in South Africa

Description: United for Africa is a South African web site that records reports of violence sent by SMS and e-mail on a Google Earth map. It provides living testimony to the atrocities committed during the xenophobic riots of May 2008 in South Africa. United for Africa is build upon the engine of Kenyan riot-tracking site Ushahidi.

Organizer: Quirk, a web marketing agency in Cape Town is leading this charge. Quirk will act as administrators on this build, and the Ushahidi team will step away from it as soon as the build is done.

Purpose of Action: To create a visual map of human rights abuses.

Organizing Tools: SMS, Google Earth, web site

Outcome: The xenophobic riots in South Africa are still continuing.

Ease of Replication: It is rather difficult to replicate the Ushahidi map, but their authors offer help to interested activists. United for Africa is actually the second rip-off build upon the Ushahidi engine after Sokwanele from Zimbabwe. The initiators of Ushahidi are developing their project as a free and open source tool for crowdsourcing crisis information and then visualizing that on a map. They hope that they will soon be able to provide this tool for any national or international conflict. To reach that goal they are still seeking for more developers.

via White African

Campaign: “What would you like a free Zimbabwe to look like?”

Description of Campaign: The outcome of the recent presidential election has still not been announced and while President Robert Mugabe is campaigning in expectation of a run-off election, opposition candidate Morgan Tsvangirai is asking for international assistance in pressuring Mugabe to step down (source: AP). In this time of political uncertainty, civil society community site Kubatana.net is running a e-mail and SMS campaign to engage ordinary Zimbabweans in their country’s political future.

Digital Activism Tools: e-mail, blog, FrontlineSMS, mobile phones

How These Tools Are Being Used: Kubatana sent out a text message to their mobile contact list:

Kubatana! No senate results as at 5.20 pm. What changes do YOU want in a free Zim? Lets inspire each other. Want to know what others say? SMS us your email addr

They then collected responses via e-mail and FrontlineSMS, a text-messaging hub for grassroots NGOs. The collected responses which were then distributed via an electronic newsletter and on the Kubatana Community Blog. After the election, Kubatana hopes to produce a booklet with a page on some of these ideas and some editorial commentary on the campaign, as well as a cartoon or even a set of postcards carrying the most “unique, original and practical ideas”.

examples of the campaign’s SMS responses after the jump…

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Tool: SMS

Tool Description: SMS (short message service) is the technical name for text messaging - notes sent between mobile phone users. Think of it as e-mail for mobile phones.

Activist Application: There are so many activist applications for SMS that we’ve put most of them after the jump. Here they are in brief: organize a protest in minutes, evade censorship by using SMS for communication that you cannot speak or e-mail (only true is some countries), election monitoring, activist security (”If I don’t text you every 2 hours, it means something is wrong), citizen journalism, and more to come….

Ease of Use: Easy. All mobile phones now have SMS built in. Just choose a phone number to send the message to, type the message, and press send. Pricing varies by country and carrier.

thousands of phones, thousands of uses for activists

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Tool: Twitter

Tool Description: Twitter is social network where people update their friends about their actions in real-time via SMS. People can read your SMS posts online.
Activist Application: Kenyan blogger AfroMusing used her Twitter channel to send news updates on the unstable situation in the country following the recent elections. The Twitter channel KenyaNews has been set up specifically to update people on the latest news out of Kenya.
Ease of Use: Easy. Just sign up for a Twitter account here and inform your friends of your Twitter channel.

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Tactic: SMS/Map Mashup Protects Human Rights in Kenya

Description: Ushahidi.com is a Kenyan web site that records reports of violence sent by SMS and e-mail on a Google Earth map. It provides living testimony to the atrocities committed following the recent presidential elections in that country. (”Ushahidi” means “testimony” in Kiswahili.)

Organizer: The idea for the Ushahidi web site was created by the bloggers behind KenyanPundit.com, WhiteAfrican.com, MentalAcrobatics.com, AfroMusing.com, and Skunkworks and was built by developer David Kobia.

Purpose of Action: To create a visual map of human rights abuses.

Organizing Tools: SMS, Google Earth, web site

Outcome: A political resolution to the election crisis has not yet been reached.

Ease of Replication: Replicating the Ushahidi map is rather difficult, as it is actually a mash-up of SMS messages and a Google map. You will need a developer friend to make it. However, other digital map applications, like Frappr, are quite easy to use.

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Tactic: Pakistanis Use SMS and E-mail to Mobilize

Although President Musharraf ended the state of emergency on December 15, this video is still worth a look. It recounts how Pakistani’s used SMS and e-mail to organize protests against the state of emergency, which was declared November 3rd.

Here’s a key quote from Semar Benala, a protester: “Actually, we do this through e-mail, through SMS’s, because even all the television channels have been shut down, but because we want to bring about change we are, like, trying out other mediums of communication.”

click the image to be taken to the Daily Motion site.