Today's speakers at O'Reilly eTel had a solid do-gooder streak. Tad Hirsch from MIT's Media Lab is wholly invested into the intersection of art, activism, and technology. He's currently using open source telephony to promote community development:
Cell phones are more popular devices than PCs are in immigrant communities. There are many barriers to technology access that must be addressed: awareness, language, trust, and culture. It's not enough in this world to know that a technology exists; you must also believe that you are allowed to use it. If you can get past these cultural hurdles to a technology, then you still need to learn how to use it.
Hirsch spoke of a variety of cretive approaches to community development. For example, he's connected volunteers to service clients with an asterisk-enabled, distributed phone book. Volunteers can easily receive calls at home, making it easier to drive participation. The combination of Asterisk + Apache + MySQL can also enable ad-hoc conference calls, which not only extends the network, but also allows nonprofits to provide better services. e.g., improve communication by pulling in an interpreter in real-time when required for client services.
Blaine Cook and Rabble Henshaw-Plath from Odeo are helping to drive activism by enabling voice via emerging telephony. During the Republican National Convention, they set up an Asterisk server that provided a solid platform for advocacy:
- Text-to-speech processing for mobile RSS updates from Indymedia
- Event calendars using TTS and RSS
- Live radio call-in
- Streaming MP3 radio stations
Total cost? $7.00. (Undoubtedly, not including the value of their own time and expertise.)
As the 2004 election came around, Cook and Henshaw-Plath made an ambitious attack on mass messaging:
- Goal: get SMS messaging to 20,000 volunteers
- Hack: set up Java applets inside browsers to support P2P SMS
- Accomplished: messaging for 2,000 volunteers, with volunteers sending out info on polling locations in order to get out the vote on election day
Total cost on this one? $1500 for VoIP message delivery, including 15 servers. (While this doesn't include time costs, at least the SMS delivery was actually free.)
In both of these anecdotes, these two hackers proved that open source (in this case, Asterisk) is empowering - providing that an organization has the technical sophistication to take advantage of the reduced cost of market entry. We all still need to work on a solution for that need.
Tags: christine herron spacejockeys space jockeys christine.net technology open source telephony o'reilly etel advocacy asterisk hack nptech
