Announcement

The MobiChange founding team combines a rare set of skill and experiences: (1) expertise in the emerging markets in Asia and Africa, (2) understanding of the emerging mobile social networking space, and (3) experience in using mobile and social media applications to engage non-profits and grassroots communities.

Ken Banks runs kiwanja.net, an organisation that helps grassroots non-profits around the world figure out how to use mobile technology in their social change work. Ken's FrontlineSMS project has previously received grants from William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, MacArthur Foundation and the Open Society Institute. For more, see www.kiwanja.net.

Dina Mehta is a partner at Mosoci (research for web 2.0 strategy) and Explore Research & Consultancy (qualitative market research). Dina has contributed to building several communities on the internet, such as Worldchanging, Tsunami Help, KatrinaHelp, Asia Quake Help, SkypeJournal and Global Voices Online. For more, see www.dinamehta.com.

Will White is the lead developer for the SMS Framework in Drupal. He also works with Development Seed where he build social applications.

Gaurav Mishra is the 2008-09 Yahoo! Fellow in International Values and Communications Technology at Georgetown University where he will be teaching a graduate course on the use of social media in business, government and development in Spring 2009. Gaurav has extensive previous experience in the Indian consumer market. For more, see www.gauravonomics.com.

Even as the ubiquitous use of mobile phones bridges the digital divide between the developed and developed countries, another digital divide — digital divide 2.0 — is opening up between the haves and have-nots. Digital divide 2.0 is not about access to communications devices; it is about the ability to leverage the power of group-forming social technologies to collaborate with others, self-organize into grassroots communities and create crowd-sourced content that is relevant for these communities.

Most of the present mobile social networks are aimed at high-end users with feature-rich, location-aware smartphones and are inaccessible to most mobile users in emerging countries, in terms of both affordability and usability. A mobile social networking platform for emerging Asia and Africa needs to be designed to be accessed almost exclusively by $50 mobile phones via intuitive, lowest common denominator, multi-lingual voice and text message based menus.

MobiChange will be the first social networking experience for millions of mobile phone users who have limited ease with English and use a $50 mobile phone as their only computing device. It will allow them to do some of the things we take for granted on social networks — meeting new people with common interests, benefiting from new opportunities for learning and earning, even sharing their own knowledge and skills with others.

Its open-source code base will be developed on the basis of extensive ethnographic research amongst mobile phone users and non-profits in developing Asia and Africa to ensure that its multi-lingual voice and text message based user interface is intuitive even for first time mobile users and its functionality addresses real problems in their everyday lives.

MobiChange will be an open-source, multi-lingual mobile social networking platform, accessible by voice and SMS, designed to support local communities and help mobilize social change.

MobiChange will be the first social networking experience for millions of mobile phone users who have limited ease with English and use a $50 mobile phone as their only computing device. It will allow them to do some of the things we take for granted on social networks — meeting new people with common interests, benefiting from new opportunities for learning and earning, even sharing their own knowledge and skills with others.

MobiChange will work in close collaboration with grassroots NGOs and NPOs to customize its open source code base and use it as a powerful development tool in the areas of education, activism, and micro-enterprise.