A few other holidays have come and gone and I’m only now getting around to writing about Thanksgiving. But better now than never.

In November I was in Cape Town on a research trip with Charlotte Lapsansky and we had the chance to visit the Department of Computer Science at the University of Cape Town. We met with Jonathan Donner, a researcher in the Technology for Emerging Markets Group at Microsoft Research India, currently based in South Africa. Jonathan has done a lot of ethnographic research on information & communication technology (ICT) use–mobile phones in particular–in developing country contexts. He has observed a “Bluetooth phenomenon” in Khayelitsha, one of South Afriaca’s largest townships that is home to over two million people. People of all ages are sharing music and photos through their phones via Bluetooth.

A collaborator of Jonathan’s and professor at UCT, Gary Marsden, introduced us to several of his MA and PhD students who are developing innovative uses of ICTs, also using Bluetooth. Working in a country with approximately 10% of the population using the Internet, they are focusing primarily on developing the potential of mobile phones to meet the communication needs of marginalized and under-resourced communities. (There are of course communities in U.S. that face similar economic, political and social constraints to internet access and digital participation.)

Of relevance to Mobile Voices and others working with digital storytelling tools is a project that Thomas Reitmaier is working on as his masters thesis to create a mobile-based digital storytelling software for oral and sometimes illiterate users. The software functions have visual icons for each command (instead of text), and stories can be pieced together from photographs and audio recordings taken on the phones. The software allows you to edit the story in the phone using a carousel layout. They started the project in collaboration with Nicola Bidwell who spent 3-4 months in the Eastern Cape of South Africa doing an ethnographic study to assess the needs of oral users and inform the design. Here is a video about it.

This is an intriguing project because it allows for easier editing within the phone, it can–at least in theory–run on any phone that has photo and audio recording capabilities, and most notably, does so with a respect for different forms and levels of literacy. But there are also a few drawbacks. Most significantly, perhaps, is whether this project will be fully developed and sustainable since it is a student project with minimal funding. So far it has been piloted with communities in Kenya and is currently being evaluated in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, but whether and how it will be distributed remains uncertain.

Another project that Gary is overseeing, supported by Microsoft Research, is the development of a “Big Board” that uses Bluetooth technology to cut out the costs to end users of sharing information with an unlimited number of people via mobile phones (see http://people.cs.uct.ac.za/~gaz/proj/bb.html). The Big Board is a large poster or TV screen with icons to represent information on various topics; the user can take a picture of the icon on their phone and send it via Bluetooth to the server (a Microsoft based mobile phone or computer) that will then send the relevant information to your phone (again via Bluetooth) in the form of an SMS. At the low-budget end, organizations or communities could use a paper poster as the Big Board, and the system could be programmed to recognize the icons on the poster and send the user the relevant information. A nearby cell phone acting as the server could be the information hub. This could be an interesting way of using mobile phones to inexpensively share information and organize communities, if community members know how to use Bluetooth and are trained to use the Big Board. At the higher-end, using a flat screen TV as the Big Board could allow for more interactive use and more easily updated content.

We have explored Bluetooth as a tool for the Mobile Voices project, and some of the workers who are helping develop the system have been using Bluetooth to transfer their photographs from their phones to computers. However, given resource constraints and IDEPSCA’s interest in being able to send information (e.g. action alerts) out to their dispersed network of workers and organizers using our system, we were unable to limit our system design to Bluetooth technology. Unfortunately, this means we remain dependent on cell phone service providers to send stories via SMS and MMS. The cost of doing so is one of the challenges and limitations of our system, which is why the work being done at UCT was particularly interesting to me.

In addition, it seems that some of the challenges facing the developers at UCT are ones that we wrestle with in Mobile Voices; e.g. how to bridge the academic-community divide, how to ensure that ideas are developed collaboratively with the direct involvement of the community/users, and how to make them sustainable. It has also been interesting to learn more about the interface of corporations like Nokia and Microsoft with research on ICT use in the ‘Global South’, where different communication contexts, needs and creativity are driving different kinds of appropriation and innovation–and attracting the attention of corporations in search of new ideas and emerging markets. But that is a topic for another post.

(Also posted here: http://www.hastac.org/blogs/melissa-brough/bluetooth-big-boards-digital-storytelling)

[Nota: Espero que traducir esto a espanol pronto!]

One central motivation pushing current vozmob users to write their stories, they tell us, is their desire to change the image of day laborers, and of immigrants in general. This was starkly brought home when, during one of the vozmob Tuesday night workshops, they googled “day laborer” and discovered that the first search result was a hate site listed with the following description: “Day Laborers: Some of the most violent murderers, rapists, and child molesters, are illegal aliens who work as day laborers.” By publishing true stories about their daily lives, vozmober@s dream they might some day knock down that top search result.

Are we having any effect, by that standard? There are signs that we might. For example, following vozmob’s coverage of the household workers national conference last November in Oakland, CA, a google search for “trabajadoras de casa” done on January 26 2010 returns vozmob in 6th position (that’s on the French google.fr site. On the U.S. google.com, vozmob is the 8th result). When searching for “jornalero”, vozmob is now the 33rd result. And searching for “day laborer”, vozmob now comes up #188 – still too far down the list to make a dent in the top rank of hateful daylaborers.org, but visible nonetheless.

As we prepare to re-design the vozmob.net site, broaden the participant base, and publicize the site more widely in the coming months, this seems a good time to start tracking our search rank more systematically. Using rank checker, a firefox extension, I have set up a weekly rank search on google, yahoo, and live for the following keywords (suggestions for additions are welcome):

• jornalero
• jornaleros
• day laborer
• day laborers
• trabajadoras de casa
• household workers
• immigration
• inmigracion

Below are today’s results. Let’s see how this evolves.

Keyword	Google position	URL	Yahoo position	URL	Live position	URL
jornalero	33	vozmob.net/en/node/6074	7	http://vozmob.net/es/node/6074	78	http://vozmob.net/es/node/4885
jornaleros	73	vozmob.net/es/node/6114	55	http://vozmob.net/en/node/5961	-
day laborer	188	vozmob.net/es/aggregator/sources/3	-		-
day laborers	-		116	http://vozmob.net/es/aggregator/sources/3	-
trabajadoras de casa	8	vozmob.net/es/node/5428	14	http://vozmob.net/household	36	http://vozmob.net/es/node/5426
household workers	-		-		-
immigration	-		-		-
inmigracion	-		-		-

We recently completed several new features over at VozMob (http://vozmob.net). As you know if you’re following this blog, VozMob stands for mobile voices / voces moviles, and on the technical side it’s Drupal based mobile blogging that lets users post text, photo, video, and audio via sms, mms, and phone calls (no data plan or app download needed). You can find our full release of v0.2 on github: http://code.vozmob.net.

New features that are tested and now live:

User Friendly SMS/MMS Registration. That means on first post, a user receives an sms asking if they want to register an account, if they say yes, they get an account and a default password. Code is here. (If you want to see the issue tracker: http://dev.vozmob.net/issues/138).

New MMS Filters: Sprint MMS (issue tracker), Virgin Mobile (issue tracker). We need these because the phone providers add a bunch of crap (ads, etc) to sms and mms messages. These filters remove the crap. The code for all the filters is here.

Send MMS to phones (issue tracker: http://dev.vozmob.net/issues/show/17)

Rotate pictures: because lots of people take mobile phone pictures sideways

Our roadmap is here: http://dev.vozmob.net/projects/vozmob/wiki/Roadmap

We are trying to properly release everything to modules on DO (that’s Drupal.org) as quickly as we can but as you know that involves tracking down various module maintainers

Enjoy!
sc

“Design” is not simply about coming up with ideas but, often more importantly, picking among ideas and deciding which ones to implement. Because development resources are finite, priorities need to be set, choices need to be made.

In our thinking about participatory design, we have so far mostly discussed participation in the generation of ideas. It would be interesting to examine as well how we handle participation in the choices among those ideas, how we generate and share information about the costs of various alternatives.

One interesting source of data on these costs is redmine, the system we use to track system development. Because our programmers keep track of the time they spend on developing features and fixing bugs (that is the basis upon which they get paid), we have good data on how much we are spending on individual features. With a bit of cleanup and categorization, this data could give use a fairly accurate picture of the relative costs of various vozmob design features.

Assessment of our participatory design process should include checking whether users are aware of these relative costs, so we can gauge the extent to which they have participated meaningfully in making choices among the related features. A next step would be to figure out better ways to communicate these relative costs (including cost estimates for future features) so that vozmob users can more fully participate in design choices going forward.

Ultimately, we’re hoping that projects like ours can help bridge conversations across communities that seldom talk together (but often do scream at each other). We believe that a useful starting point is for people to tell their own stories, so that others can begin to understand who they are rather than simply judge them by how they are portrayed. Thus the vozmob platform, making it possible for immigrant workers in L.A. to tell their stories in their own words, pictures, sounds and videos, using a readily available tool – the mobile phone in their pocket. That storytelling is of course immensely worthwhile in itself, as storytellers develop self and collective awareness, and build literacy skills. But for it to have a real impact beyond their community, the stories need to be accessible to people who don’t understand Spanish. This is not only a translation issue – we can learn to tell stories with pictures and sounds and video, as several stories on vozmob have done quite effectively, or with maps, and we’re interested in exploring those possibilities. But in many cases, translation becomes crucial – translation of text (SMS, MMS’s text fields, or text entered into the vozmob blog from a computer), but also translation of speech (story told into a phone, speeches or interviews recorded with a phone), soundtracks from videos, or texts that appear in photos. I mention all these different modes because each poses distinct challenges, each is amenable to different technical solutions, and to different translation processes. Here is a (non-exhaustive) list of things we’ve tried, thought about, or would like to explore:

- Text: our CMS currently allows any registered blogger to translate any blog post and its title, as written text. That can serve as well to transcribe speech, soundtracks or text on images, and to translate those transcriptions. So far, we’re relying on volunteers to do this (see examples at http://vozmob.net/translated or http://vozmob.net/traducido), and we have no ‘quality control’ process – no good way to note whether a translator/translation is good or not, to provide feedback, suggestions or edits to translators in a systematic way. We’ve talked about teaming up with a Spanish language class or with an ESL class offered by IDEPSCA, and about crowd-sourcing translations, which could be improved collectively on a wiki blog node. Any pointer to groups that do this well would be appreciated. We’re interested in both tools and process.

- Sounds: All we’ve done so far is the occasional transcription/translation into text mentioned above. An obvious improvement would be subtitles, in the original language and/or translated. We’re aware of sites like dotsub, Suggestions about doing something like that would be welcome as well (any dotsub-like plugin we could use with Drupal?). Also, we haven’t yet talked about dubbing, but that might be an interesting avenue to explore, especially since we soon will be able to send content back to phones on which reading text or subtitles may not be easy.

- Content management / context: Drupal’s own interface is mostly translated in Spanish (less thoroughly so in Portuguese or French). We’ve set up our site so that administrators can contribute translations back to the drupal mother ship when they run into something that’s missing. We’ve also used a somewhat haphazard approach to bilingual tags – e.g. we have used both ‘mujeres’ (http://vozmob.net/mujeres) and ‘women’ (http://vozmob.net/taxonomy/term/75) as tags, not really consistently. There is probably a drupal way to connect them… we should look into it.

- Machine translation and Text-to-speech is something we haven’t really looked into yet, except for occasionally generating first drafts of translations using google’s translate tool (with mixed success, partly because the original Spanish text often includes colloquial expressions, mis-spellings, etc).

I’m probably forgetting some aspects and will let others chime in. But generally, we’re interested in thinking through good ways to conduct these bilingual (or multilingual) multimedia conversations, we’d like to be in touch with others who are wrestling with this and who have found approaches that work, pointers to useful tools, etc. And of course, we always welcome volunteer translators – all they need to do is sign up on the site and get going.

(related post: http://vozmob.wordpress.com/2008/12/08/translating-vozmob-content/)

On Tuesday July 28th Amanda, Charlotte and I led a Vozmob workshop at the 8th OURMedia conference in Rionegro, Colombia. We had the opportunity to work and share ideas with several practitioners of various projects using communication for social change, including Sebastian Gerlic (from a project using mobile phones with indigenous communities in Brazil: http://www.indiosonline.org.br/), Wilna Quarmyne (Ghana Community Radio Network: see http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ghana_Community_Radio_Network), and Alejandra Castaña, a scholar and media producer trying to find ways to improve the function of community media and public broadcasting in Colombia. After learning how to use the vozmob system, the group brainstormed some possible uses of the tools based on participants’ own work, and some of the questions and potential challenges they envisioned.

We really would have liked to have members of the popular communication team (PCT) here with us representing the project, and look forward to discussing the outcomes of the workshop as a group when we return. Here is a summary of the suggestions, ideas and questions that emerged from the workshop discussion:

Potential uses of the vozmob tools:
- Uses for radio practitioners
- research & documentation
- Portfolios of work (i.e. pictures of completed work, portfolio of stories or other creative work, etc)
- GPS – as a way to place stories in geographic space to document what is going on in the area or to associate stories with particular spaces
- Send out content for community building & access to online information
- Contributing content – increasing participation
- Educational tool
- Sharing ideas
- Storyboarding/pre-production of videos
- Alerts
- Peer-to-peer sharing
- Production & distribution of ongoing story series (‘soapies’)
- Increase discussion around other media programs

Challenges/questions:
- facilitation/training; how much is needed to enable use of the tools?
- some groups are reluctant to adopt or work with new information & communication technologies (ICTs) – e.g. cultural concerns, cultural resistance, conceptions of the internet, phones, etc
- editorial process? i.e. hate messages, or ‘quality control’ for donors
- time & resource limitations
- how to measure change/impact

Amanda, Holly and attended the 2nd Digital Media and Learning Competition event in Chicago last month. This year they opened the competition to international projects. (Check out our blog post about one such project, M-Ubunto, at dml.vozmob.net.) Over the course of the day’s events, MacArthur Foundation President Jonathon Fanton and his colleagues raised the question of the ‘participation gap’—versus simply the ‘digital divide’—which is certainly a topic of concern to the Mobile Voices project. (What ‘participation’ actually entails – what counts as digital participation, and its value – would be an interesting discussion to have in more depth with other MacArthur awardees.)
Connie Yowell, Director of Education, talked about MacArthur’s focus on learning (i.e. the process) rather than the traditional focus on expert-determined educational curriculum; the learning process is what can and should be participatory. (This reminded me of some of our discussions of Freire’s critique of the ‘banking system’ of education.) MacAthur has a strong interest in research and practice that can drive innovative program design and policy; such research is being collected on the website www.futuresoflearning.org, created by MacArthur awardee Mimi Ito and David Theogoldberg.
Ito and Howard Rheingold spoke on a panel on “Digital Youth and Participatory Learning” responding in real time to questions and ideas twittered by the audience. Check out our moblog posts on this on the dml.vozmob.net page. Other interesting work from last year’s winners was also featured; check out Black Cloud (http://studio.berkeley.edu/bc/; http://www.dmlcompetition.net/1/winnerDetail.php?x=bc).
In a break-out session with other 2009 awardees (Global Challenge, Mumbai WAVE, M-Ubunto, and Tecno.Tzotzil) we discussed questions around the inclusion of underserved communities in digital learning: the challenges, technologies and methods of assessment. (This latter topic was discussed primarily in terms of qualitative methods.) How can we encourage and support participation? What is the value of the resulting content to various audiences? Holly raised a key question about privilege and the role of power dynamics in projects working with underserved communities. For example, one might question why, if the emphasis is on horizontal learning instead of expert knowledge, was there a privileged position given to the Principal Investigators for each project?
The MacArthur social networking site for 2009 DML winners will soon be up and running – we should contribute to this once every 4-6 weeks. (They gave us a flip camera to use for this purpose.) There will be both private and public functions on the site, to enable collaboration among awardees. Hopefully some interesting conversations and collaborations will transpire.

On May 5, 2009, we presented vozmob at USC’s “Teaching With Technology” conference. After a quick overview of the project, Madelou described the project from the PCT’s point of view and presented one of her stories. The panel continued with Bill Celis and Brian Frank presenting Intersections, another ASC project with which we are starting to collaborate.

The TWT09 panels covered a lot of ground, but one strong theme running through the morning’s three panels was ’storytelling’. The morning’s first presentation showed how USC French language classes use the testimonies by holocaust survivors collected by the Shoah Foundation. Colin Keaveney emphasized the value of emotional engagement with the stories as part of language acquisition. Tara McPherson described Vectors and the multimedia telling of academic research stories it allows.

Multimedia literacy, at its heart, is about storytelling: cultivating the skills required to tell a compelling story, acquiring the ability to understand and interpret the stories told. While this is nothing new, digital technology multiplies the ways in which stories can be told, and what can happen to the stories after they are told. We ought to explore this more carefully as part of vozmob.

A big thank you to all those who helped spread the word about VozMob, voted for us in the N2Y4 Mobile Challenge, and pushed our application into the Featured Projects list. We’ll see you in San Jose!

Our users’ mode of digital storytelling has so far turned out to be via MMS, even though we didn’t start with that assumption. But based on that, much of our development is now finding workarounds to do things with mms that aren’t based on the phone service providers’ narrow imaginations about the possible use cases. For example, we have to strip out all kinds of junk that the service providers add to mms in order to publish them as stories on our site. And we are trying to figure out the best way to send mms to phones, but we are pretty much limited to either 1. using the providers’ email to mms gateways, which don’t allow very much control for how the messages actually get to the phones (for example, how to send a multislide mms with 5 pictures, 5 titles, and 5 associated audio files via email using the gateways?) Option 2 is using a computer to phone bridge and actually sending the mms from the phone, which might be better but probably won’t scale very well.

Lets look at the options providers have for composing and sending mms. For example Verizon says:

There are six ways for a consumer to send an MMS message:

* Verizon Wireless phone to any Verizon Wireless phone

* Verizon Wireless phone to wireless phones from other select service providers view provider list

* Phone to any valid E-Mail Address

* E-Mail to Phone using Mobile Number @vzwpix.com

* Phone to the on-line multimedia library – Picture & Video Messaging portal

* On-line multimedia composer (Picture & Video Messaging portal) to any Verizon Wireless phone

(This is from http://www.vzwdevelopers.com/aims/public/MmsLanding.jsp. You can see the last option, the online mms composer, here: http://picture.vzw.com/pub/composer/guestCreate.do?sortField=-creationDate&category=Free+Media%2CImages.)

Maybe we can hack the ‘multimedia composer’ functions and use them to send mms directly from our site. But what we REALLY want is a way to write a Drupal module that can interact directly with Verizon’s mms gateway!

In effect, what we want is to build our own ‘multimedia composer’ that can send mms, but via any provider. What we need is open APIs for all the providers’ MMS gateways.

This would be great for their business anyway! It looks like they are hoping to make customers buy images and sounds via their own ‘composer’ portal, but I can’t imagine that they wouldn’t benefit more just by sticking to their main business model – selling phone service – and letting hundreds of developers build ‘mms composer’ portals and applications. It would increase the volume of mms and the proportion of customers who pay for mms packages and plans. Maybe these open APIs already exist? Maybe no one ever asked for them? Anyway, would love to hear some thoughts and comments on this possibiliy.