FEATURED TOOL
Live reporting and managing your contacts
FrontlineSMS allows large numbers of people to communicate without an internet connection. Advocates can use FrontlineSMS to send messages from their laptops over mobile phone networks, which are received as text messages. It can be used for both one-way and two-way communication. Advocates have used FrontlineSMS for human rights monitoring, organising protests, conducting public surveys, and emergency alerts. An active online community provides various support to first-time users.
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TIPS
KEN BANKS OF FRONTLINESMS, ON COLLABORATION:
"Using technologies, you can combine the collective voice of people. You can aggregate information from live reporting with news coming in from the mainstream. Bringing that all together you get a much bigger picture of what is happening on the ground."
DINA MEHTA, TECHNOLOGY RESEARCHER, ON THE POWER OF COMMUNITY:
"We have communities that we have developed over time in several spaces on the web – on blogs, Facebook, Twitter. What these tools allow you to do is network with all of your online communities, to operate as hubs of connected people. So when something happens and you need to respond, it's about the spontaneous mobilisation of a community that already exists online, through the multiple nodes and hubs that you have created as you leave your footprints on the web."
SAMI GHARBIA, OF GLOBAL VOICES, ON LIVE REPORTING ARRESTS:
"Activists are using Twitter to alert their fellow bloggers and activists about the case of arrests of bloggers. We've seen the case of a US journalist who was witnessing a demonstration in Mahala city in Egypt during the 6th April strike. When he was arrested he just sent a message to Twitter with the text "arrested" and that alerted his friends, his relatives, and even the US embassy to intervene and get him released from prison."
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