Citizen Media

Mobile Security for Journalist - The Essential SaferMobile Survival Guide

The new Mobile Security Survival Guide for Journalists from SaferMobile helps you better understand the risks inherent in the use of mobile technology. It also discusses tactics you can use to protect yourself.

As someone working with sensitive information, mobile communications are inherently insecure and expose journalists and citizen reporters working in sensitive environments to risks that are not easy to detect or overcome. This guide is designed to help you navigate these challenges.

We outline the risks and offer tips to help mitigate them. SaferMobile's primary goal is to help you make better decisions about using your mobile phone as a journalist, rights defender, or activist. SaferMobile is a project of MobileActive.org.

The Mobile Security Survival Guide is written with the workflow of a journalist in mind and covers Mobile Network Basics, Prepping for Assignment, Reporting with your Phone, Filing the Story, and considering for Social Media use on your phone. Check it out.

There is much more at SaferMobile - resources, apps, and training materials to make you and your mobile communications more secure.

04.27.12 KatrinVerclas Citizen Media

uReport: Citizen Feedback via SMS in Uganda

For aid organizations, knowing what local communities and beneficiaries want and need is the key to running successful, sustainable programs. In Uganda, UNICEF is using mobile phones and broadcast media to get direct feedback from Ugandans on everything from medication access to water sanitation. The project, called uReport, allows users to sign up via a toll-free shortcode for regular SMS-based polls and messages. Citizen responses are used both in weekly radio talk shows to create discussion on community issues, and shared among UNICEF and other aid organizations to provide a better picture of how services work across Uganda.

Sean Blaschke, a Technology for Development specialist at UNICEF Uganda, explains that uReport gathers information from participants and informs citizens of their rights and available services. Recent polls have included questions about school dropouts, water point availability, mosquito net usage, and youth employment, all collected via SMS polls.

The use of SMS makes the program available to all literate mobile users regardless of handset; says Blaschke,

08.28.11 AnneryanHeatwole Advocacy Citizen Media Democratic Participation

Mapping SMS Incident Reports: A Review of Ushahidi and Managing News

In this how-to, we test out two systems for SMS incident mapping. Incident mapping is a simple but powerful concept that does what it says - using SMS to report a given incidence and mapping the data geographically.

It has been used in various scenarios ranging from reports from natural disasters to tracking violent crime, citizen reporting in elections.

Ushahidi, a platform for map and time-based visualizations of text reports, has been used most prominently in crisis mapping. The first instance of Ushahidi tracked the post-election violence in Kenya in 2007, closely followed by an instance covering outbreaks of xenophobic violence in South Africa in early 2008. Following the Haiti earthquake in early 2010, an Ushahidi deployment at Tufts University provided a platform for aggregating, translating and disseminating incident reports and requests for assistance. Ushahidi is an open-source PHP/Javascript platform.