Email of the day: Mobile phones and civil society

Katrin Verclas from mobileactive.org responds to my post, which pointed to an op-ed arguing that the potential to use mobile phones as a development tool was being ignored in favour of initiatives involving cheap lap-tops:

We at MobileActive.org have been tracking the use of mobile phones in civil society for some time now, and we disagree.  There is enormous interest and a lot of pilot projects exploring the use of mobiles within a civil society context...We are about to release a comprehensive wiki with detailed data on what is happening around the world in mobiles in health, economic development, humanitarian relief, advocacy, conversation, and citizen participation — and of course, for practitioners to add their stories and data. We also just completed a survey that was sent out to 25,000 NGOs about their mobile use and have some interesting data that will be released in February...There is a mobile revolution and civil society is rapidly waking up to it.