Facilitating Change

Joe Sullivan and I were talking this week about project communications. How can research teams communicate better? More engaged, more transparent? He told me about a project François Bar is working on: MobileVoices — a platform where immigrant workers in Los Angeles can use their mobile phones to share stories about their lives and communities. The idea is that this is a first step to greater participation in the public sphere.

Apparently François worked with a bunch of Drupal hackers and social scientists and day laborers to create the site and make it work with cheap phones. Together, they’ve created an great web presence. People text in their stories. The research team shares their results via social media. They made all their decisions transparent. As Joe said: “It’s complete, cool, and credible. All the bits from everyone involved start to accumulate online into a rich picture.”

I found a NetSquared intervew with François about the project. Some excerpts:

When people talk about “the great democratization of public discourse” via blogging and so on, it is often forgotten that many people don’t have access to an advanced phone, or even to a computer or connection to the Internet…. The workers we’re working with have cheap phones and [those phones] are often prepaid… One of the big driving principals of the project was for us to take a look at these factors and then do as much as we could with as little as possible.

We have been experimenting with doing what we’re trying to do safely, anonymously, and cheaply. Also, the advantage of using prepaid phones is that day laborers occasionally lose their phones. Since prepaid phones are almost disposable, if it is lost, it isn’t the end of the world.

What is also very interesting is to look at cell phones as gateway technologies. The laborers will take pictures and record sounds and then they will come to computers in our labs because they are interested in looking at the pictures, reprocessing them, and remixing them. They make movies with the sounds they recorded and the pictures they have taken. First they take the pictures and they record the sound and then they want to come and use the computer to manipulate them.

And I went to look at the project site. I found this:

We have a weekly workshop at IDEPSCA where the popular communication team meets to analyze stories, develop shared knowledge, design the system, and create training materials. The popular communication team is composed of day laborers and a domestic worker who have been volunteering for IDEPSCA for many years and who take their role of writing their own history very seriously. We also meet each week at USC to develop research and writing about the project.

I feel so happy when I learn about projects like this.