This past weekend, some of the same innovators who attended IPDI's Mobile Handbook launch event, joined activists, practitioners and hackers from around the world in Toronto for MobileActive; a three-day event that promised to build an emerging social network and explore strategies and tactics for the use of cell phones as an organizing tool. Representatives from the UK, Africa, Asia, North America, South America and the Caribbean converged together for the first time to develop usable guidance for practitioners, donors and campaigners who could not attend, as well as brainstorm guidelines to help civil society activists capitalize on the global wireless phone infrastructure for advocacy communications and organizing. While the Politics-to-Go event was a great wake up call for American politicos to start paying attention to mobile technology, MobileActive offered a unique opportunity not usually seized upon during the birth of a new techno-political movement.

The discussions that transpired during the recent MobileActive event were so electrically charged that it was difficult to know which ideas to focus upon. People were sharing their stories and experiences while coming up with new ideas all at the same time. Topics ranged from philosophical musings about the methodologies of viral communication to hypothetical ways one might be able to turn one's roll-over minutes into donate-able cash and/or minutes for an NGO.

Of course there was also a lot of geek-talk, most of which revolved around an open source telephony PBX called Asterisk. Tad Hirsch, the developer of the SMS messaging service Txt-Mob, is using the Asterisk technology for a project called “Speakeasy,” an integrated Internet and telephone service that connects new immigrants to the United States to a network of volunteers for “just-in-time civic engagement.”

When it comes to new integrations with technology and politics there is a buzz in the air and it is coming from people’s pockets. Among two of the first-ever North American conferences on the integration of the mobile medium with politics took place back to back this September. Last Tuesday (Sept 13th) the Institute of Politics Democracy and the Internet (IPDI) launched their Politics-to-Go Handbook: A Guide to Using Mobile Technology in Politics with a four-hour event that featured a dual panel discussion with mobile industry luminaries from both the commercial and public arena.

The event also featured practical examples by maintaining a mobile website (from which people could register) and a moblog (which allowed people to take pictures at the event with their camera phones and immediately post them to a blog via MMS or Email).

Last weekend, a petition signed and formulated over SMS and Email was presented to over 40 representatives from the African Union Commission, African governments and the African women’s movement, which convened in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia for the Conference On The Protocol On the Rights of Women. The petition was in support of a campaign that urges African governments to ratify the African Union’s Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa.

The petition has over 3,615 signatures, 468 of which where submitted using SMS. 15 countries need to ratify the treaty in order for it to take effect. To date only 13 have signed.

The organization behind the SMS petition is Fahamu (which means understanding or consciousness Swahili), an English & South African based organization that promotes the use of information communication technology to support the struggle for social justice in Africa. I had the pleasure of meeting with three representatives of Fahamu while at the MobileActive convergence in Toronto, one of which was the groups director Firoze Manji.

Mobile Voter, the newly formed non-profit dedicated to providing voter registration information via mobile technology, launched their first campaign SFvote yesterday. In collaboration with the Chinese American Voter Education Committee (CAVEC) SFvote hopes to register voters using a text-messaging service developed by Mobile Voter founders Ben Rigby and Bart Cheever

SFvote is Mobile Voters first attempt at answering this need for ease when it comes to voter registration and information.. It is also the first entirely text based voter registration campaign in the United States. By simply texting the word "ivote" to the number 80837, San Francisco mobile phone users can request registration forms and other voter information. For example, after sending the text message to the short code the cell phone user will receive a text-message reply from Mobile Voter providing the user with relevant options. One of these options requests additional information via text-message for the purposes of sending out a pre-filled out registration form to the users home.

Last weekend, Cnet News ran a special on the new political implications of ringtones. The possible politics of ring-tones is one of the many discussions that developed out of the MobileActive conference that took place last month in Toronto where representatives from the Philippine group Txtpower shared the way they used ring-tones to severely criticize President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. A conversation that took place between Arroyo and former Commission on Elections commissioner Virgillo Garcilliano (a.k.a. Garci) before the elections were made public was recorded and converted into a ringtone by TxtPower. The “Hello Garci” ring-tone features music and the voice of Arroyo saying, “Hello? Hello? Hello, Garci?... So, will I lead by more than one million?” Although possession of the audio file was declared illegal under a wire-tapping law, it spread quickly throughout the country, where SMS is a major form of communication, and the ability to share ringtones over SMS is also widely available. While the Filipino story was already a couple of months old when demonstrated at the Toronto conference, it was the first time many of us, especially from North America, were able to play with and see the technology of homemade ringtones first hand. It also afforded us the first opportunity to consider the implications of homemade ringtones for U.S politics. We also spent some time trying to find an easy way to get the ringtones downloaded fom the txtpower website onto our phones.

To prevent repetative posting I want to alert you all to an interview I gave for the blog at Mobile Voter. In it you will find lots of information on my thoughts pertaining to the future integration of mobile technology and politics, including a very deep philosophical conversation on the differences between "mobile" and "PC internet" and why it matters politically.

Here is a snippet:

"Incorporating mobile technology into a political campaign has got to move beyond the same old e-mail / database way of doing things. It has to incorporate the already established networks that mobile users already take part in which includes the social spaces and conversations of everyday life."

Check out the interview here

A couple of days ago both Greenpeace Argentina and the Wichi people claimed victory in their campaign to save the Pizarro Reserve (a nature reserve in the northwest Argentine province of Salta) from being auctioned off to agribusiness's. The conflict broke out in February 2004, when the government of Salta introduced a bill to auction off part of the 25,000-hectare Pizarro reserve, which is home to 3,00 peasant farmers and the Wichi people. The victory comes after 20 months of protesting and direct action, a substantial amount of which harnessed the communicative real-time mobilization power of SMS technology.

Greenpeace Argentina provided the indigenous Wichi people with mobile phones. They taught them how to to text for help whenever they noticed developers beginning to clear and destroy land. "One of the problems we detected is that there are no landlines to stay in contact if landowners are trying to destroy homes and forest.," said Oscar Soria, Communications Director of Greenpeace Argentina. "We gave mobile phones to different leaders in the communities and are using them to get messages from people." At times, Greenpeace would even provide car battery charges for areas where the electricity needed to power cell-phones did and does not exist.

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Greenpeace Argentina has done it again. After 15 months of hard work, using mobiles for pressing local legislators with calls and text messages, the City Parliament of Buenos Aires will implement a Zero Waste policy that will, by 2010, reduce urban waste sent to landfills by 50%, 75% by 2015 and 100% by 2020. Those involved in the campaign are shouting "Victoria!" The city, with a population of 3 million, produces between 4 to 5 thousand tons of waste daily, all of which goes to landfills situated in the suburban areas. The law also bans the incineration of urban waste and includes a recycling program in which "cartoneros" (unemployed people that making a living by digging through the trash for recyclable items) will be employed to manage the process. When the legislation comes into effect, the city of Buenos Aires will become the most populated city in the world to implement a Zero Waste policy.