An overview of social media – day 1 at SM4SC

An overview of Social Media was the main topic at for Day 1 of the Social Media for Social Change workshop.

Data Gathering in MobileActive08

Yesteday I volunteered to do mobile surveys using the application from Mobile Researcher. The whole experience was very positive  as the survey application was easy to use, intuitive and well designed (not to mention all the interesting people I met while conducting the survey).

In addition to Mobile Researcher there are actually a wide variety of data gathering software show cased in the conference. RapidSMS, FrontlineSMS, OpenROSA, Nokia Data Gathering Software to name of few. Check out also SMS Reception Center. Freeware, open source, propietary, SMS based, 3G, for all devices, for high end devices… Just pick your choice depending on your needs, capacity and resources.   

During several workshops there has been interesting discussions on how to actually use the acquired data/information/results in development and research projects. One the topics has been advocacy where e.g. visualisation of data (see e.g. Ushahidi or Hans Rosling in TED.com) can be very useful.