Social Media Helps Global Development

Social media can actually be useful for more than sharing pictures of your lunch! There is a whole collection of apps and web services that can be used to help development efforts around the world. They provide the ability to track how projects are coming along and their current status to being able to connect farmers to more information and their own local social networks.

My favourite service is one that allows people to report corruption:

I Paid a Bribe is an anticorruption movement that harnesses the power of collective voices. Protected by anonymity, users are encouraged to report on corrupt acts, through a website, email or SMS. The reports are mapped on the site and used to inform campaigns for better governance. The movement is active in India, Greece, Kenya, Pakistan and Zimbabwe, after its founder, Tawanda Kembo, was pressured to pay a bribe by a corrupt police officer, and will be coming soon to the Philippines and Mongolia.

See more examples at The Guardian.

Commit2Act a New Mobile App to Better the World

TakingITGlobal has released a new digital tool to make the world a better place through direct action. It’s a mobile app for iOS (Windows phones soon available) that has a gamification approach to encourage people to participate in good activities.

Small actions can have a big impact! Join other people like you in taking action for a better world, by signing on to commitments that align with the issues that matter to you. Keep track of your progress and get inspired by a community of youth changemakers.

This App allows you to compete with and encourage your friends, and engage with others around the world. Amplify your world-changing behaviours and connect with others like you through TIGCommit.

Check out the Commit2Act site!

Use Your Smartphone to Advance Science

Smartphones aren’t just for games and checking your email anymore! Today, these mobile devices can be used to better the world around us by helping scientists understand more about it. Thanks to the distribution of mobiles research can be crowd-sourced to provide information that would otherwise go unnoticed.

Below is one of ten ways that you can use your phone to make the world a little better:

5. Inventory your Local Wildlife
The goal of Project NOAH (Networked Organisms and Habitats) is pretty ambitious: “build the go-to platform for documenting all the world’s organisms.” Their app has two modes. “Spottings” lets you take photos of plants and animals you see, categorize and describe them and then submit the data for viewing on NOAH’s website and use by researchers for population and distribution studies.

Don’t know what you’re looking at? Check a box when you submit your photo and other users and scientists can help you identify the species. You can also use the location-based field guides to see other users’ Spottings near your location and learn more about your local wildlife. “Field Missions” let you help out with crowdsourced data collection for specific studies that labs have submitted to NOAH. You might be asked to photograph invasive beetles near your home, or log GPS coordinates when migrating flocks of birds pass over you, and if discovering wildlife and helping scientists isn’t enough motivation, completing missions also earns you cool badges in the app. Project NOAH is available for free for iOS and Android devices

Read the full text here.

Mobile Devices for Development

The use of mobiles in development is nothing new; however, it’s always good to remind ourselves how useful this technology can be. Mashable has a list of five reasons mobile devices are good for international development (and in developed nations too).

4.
Preserving the Rainforest
Brazil’s Surui tribe, a group native to the Amazon Rainforest, has been subject to the devestating effects of logging on its ancestral lands. Google helped the Surui devise a solution, through the use of Android phones, to monitor one of the land’s most valuable resources, its carbon stock.

Carbon offsets are sold to companies to counterbalance the negative toll their manufacturing, transportation or electricity are having on the globe.

While it may seem antithetical to use smartphones to help preserve the tribe’s traditional culture and lands, the Surui’s leader, Chief Almir, believes technology is a tool with great power to do good. As a testament to his work with Google, he hopes to open a center for technology and culture on the tribe’s ancestral lands.

Read more.

Stop Junk Mail by Taking Photos

Nobody likes getting dead trees in their mailbox – particularly when those dead trees are useless adverts for products nobody wants (or even needs). Luck for us PaperKarma has created an app for your mobile that allows you to unsubscribe from junk mail lists by simply taking a photo! For now, it looks like it’s only usable in the USA.

PaperKarma works on magazines, catalogs, coupons, fliers, credit card offers, and even the Yellow Pages. To sign up for the service, you need to hand over a bit of your own information, including your address and email. Once you do, all you need to do is snap a picture of the junk mail in your mailbox and PaperKarma unsubscribes you from the list. The nice thing is that you can pick and choose what you unsubscribe from. If you like getting a particular catalog, you can keep it on your list.

PaperKarma’s site
From LifeHacker.

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