Mobiles in-a-box : developing a toolkit with grassroots human rights advocates

The way information is created, accessed, reviewed, contested and used to drive social change has been changing rapidly over the past five years. The rise of Web 2.0 technology and the increasing popularity of user-level tools and services such as YouTube, Flickr and Blip.tv, alongside other non-commercial alternatives such the Witness Hub, EngageMedia and World Social Forum TV, have created greater opportunities for dynamic information sharing, content collaboration and self-publishing. The potential for these tools and services to contribute to human rights advocacy work has increased considerably as new ICT has become cheaper and more accessible to people living in marginalised communities, as well as progressively more interlaced: mobile phones feed into websites, websites become interactive radio stations, and the offline and online world increasingly interconnect. But just as emerging technology brings new opportunities, it also presents new challenges by introducing new methods for suppression, censorship and breaches of privacy. Evolving technology also creates a 'moving target', and the gap between people who have low-cost and high-quality broadband internet and multimedia mobile access in the global North with those who have expensive basic mobiles and infrequent or slow internet connectivity in the global South remains large.