RLabs

The use of Facebook for social encouragement in a Community in Tension

Web 2.0 services are continuing to serve the online communities by enhancing interactions and communication among these communities. From MySpace to Facebook, the online communities are able to communicate effectively and efficiently. The world is getting smaller because a friend is just a click away on the internet. Web 2.0 services have created a virtual world that brings people closer through the formation of networks. Web 2.0 services have addressed several shortcomings that traditionally were difficult such as time constraints, geographical borders and communication costs. This paper explores the use of Facebook among people from a community affected with gangsterism and drugs. According to Maslow’s theories of human needs, social needs are said to influence human behaviour. This paper investigated the use of Facebook to enhance effective communication and interaction among ex-gang members, ex-drug addicts and other citizens in a Community in Tension. The purpose is to prevent the growth and spread of gangsterism and the use of drugs among South African communities. You can read the full paper presented at the World Wide Web Conference last year here.

Digital Citizen Indaba 4.0

Today is the start of the fourth Digital Citizen Indaba (DCI) which is part of the Highway Africa Conference. It is hosted at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa. DCI is an annual event that brings together bloggers, online and mobile journalists, citizen reporters, new media practitioners, online industry experts and civil society representatives. This year I will be hosting a workshop titled "Digital Voices to Reconstruct Communities" and a few of the slides can be viewed below:

Digital Voices To Reconstruct Communities

View more presentations from Marlon Parker.

Blogging as a change agent to empower citizens

As I am getting ready to attend the World Wide Web Conference in Port Elizabeth this week I was reminded of a paper we presented at the same conference in Cape Town last year titled "Blogging as a change agent to empower citizens in communities with tension". Below is a short abstract from the paper:

"The power of the Internet as a facility is that it has allowed many people worldwide to use it without feeling the real bite of the term ‘cost’. It comprises of numerous technologies that create an interesting question: How far has the information technology world come in terms of development? The introduction of a Web 2.0 technology known as weblogs or blogging has fast become a popular choice of application used on the Internet. Blogging prove to have both major advantages and disadvantages when used in the business environment. Not much research has been conducted on the personal impact blogging has on individuals. An issue that this paper addresses is in determining how helpful blogging can be when used by a group of individuals that are in the phase of drug rehabilitation. Ex-drug addicts and gang members from the Cape Flats in Cape Town were used as a case to investigate how much of an impact blogging had on them on a personal level, in their everyday lives and others that surround them. Blogging could be an alternative assisting or possibly empowering individuals in communities with tension allowing them to express themselves and see the world from a new perspective."

Source: Proceedings of the 10th Annual Conference on World Wide Web Applications 3-5 September 2008, Cape Town, South Africa

BBC Interview - Drug Advice Support

Tuesday afternoon (25 August 2009) we had the privilege to share our experiences on how we using mobile phones to support people impacted by the problem of drugs. I had an interview on the BBC World Service and you can listen to it online. The interview about Drug Advice Support (DAS) starts at 42:32 (See image for guidance) on the BBC iPlayer.

Launch National AIDS Helpline Mobile Instant Messaging service

Today will be the launch of our hard labour over the past few weeks providing National AIDS Helpline with the technology to offer mobile counselling service to thousands accross South Africa. Why this is such wodnerful opportunity? Interesting facts about South Africa:

1. Highest number of HIV+ people in the world
2. Most unequal countries in the world
3. Best technical infrastructure in Africa, especially cellphones

"Massive potential to use cellphones to provide communication & info services to millions infected or affected by HIV"


We salute the world's first HIV/AIDS Mobile Counsellors as we looking forward seeing how communities will be reconstructed through the use of technology.

National AIDS Helpline counsellors are available Mondays to Thursdays 3-5pm. Add the contact redchatzone@gmail.com (Jabber) or redchatzone (Google Talk) and nickname: Red Chat Zone.

National AIDS Help Line on MXit

Today we started a world's first by offering training to the National AIDS Help Line using our Advice Support technology to offer counselling via Mobile Instant Messaging (MIM). This Pilot is managed by Cell-Life, supported by HIV organisation Right To Care and PEPFAR which will allow for this service to be fully funded for the duration of the Pilot. What this mean for the National AIDS Helpline is that it would be now the only organisation in the world to offer counselling with regard to HIV/AIDS using Mobile Instant Messaging using the technology (see image below)that was developed by a community on the Cape Flats in the Athlone Living Lab.

The first day went well as we introduced the future mobile counselors to "The Art of Mobile Counselling" and "Mobile Phones for Social Good". The training is being done by myself and Craig Ross, member of the Reconstructed Team, and will keep you updated on the progress of the week. Also look out for a post on the "Art of Mobile Counselling". To add the National AIDS Help Line on MXit you do the following:

1) Add Contacts
2) Got to Jabber or Google Talk option
3) ID: redchatzone@gmail.com (Jabber) or redchatzone (Google Talk) and Nickname: Red Chat Zone
4) Accept Contact

This service will be live Mondays to Thursdays between 3pm and 5pm.

Community Gaming for Community Empowerment

As we prepare for our next journey in using technology (computer and online gaming) as a way to make a difference in the lives of citizens in Communities in Tension (CiT). Below of some of the Reconstructed guys getting some practice with the Wii and XBox.

Social and Community Informatics and Social Theories of Networks

Athlone is situated on the Cape Flats of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa, which is plagued with violence, drugs and gansterism. The society is described by Parker (2008) as a community in tension. The Athlone Living Lab project includes a community based non-governmental organisation Impact Direct Ministries (IDM). IDM opted to use technology to offer additional support and advice to people affected by substance abuse; HIV, and general social problems. Its services are available to all members of the community.

The Community in Tension Project fits into the emerging Community Informatics field for the following reasons:
• It is using wireless and community based technology from a local centre; This decreases installation and running costs
• It is there for a socially excluded group, who have no resources of their own
• The Mxit language used is cheaper to use than other texting formats
• The group manage the project – questions come in and are answered by the peers.
The Athlone Lab projects strengths and weaknesses are as demonstrated by the Schuurman analysis .The partnership model for the Athlone lab is the community, academia, industry and government. (See Figure 5). The difference of the Athlone project to other living labs is that the community; Athlone; leads the project and are not reliant on funds from other partners: (although funds have to be raised in other ways). The choice of technology was by the community, as was the choice of partners. The future social transformation of a community in tension is led by the community.

You can read more about the Athlone Living Lab and Social and Community Informatics in a technical report here.

Living Labs for Social and User-driven Open Innovation

This is the presentation for this evening's NetSquared NetTuesday Meetup.

NetSquared - for Social and User-driven Open Innovation

View more presentations from Marlon Parker.

Mobile phones and the elderly

Yesterday morning we had an exciting time with our Seniors Mobile Session (SMS). It was interesting to see the eagerness on the seniors that visit the Impact Centre who want to know more about mobile phones and technology. The SMS workshops is to support the elderly in the local community to maximise the use of their mobile phones. Being able to do basic functions on their mobile phones (sending texts, checking voicemail etc.) the elderly will be able to engage on these platforms with the younger generations as well as peers and it also seems as if there is an increased interest to learn about the use of mobile phones to access the web.

Below are some videos of the SMS group sharing what they expect from these workshops

A Community Driven ICT Development Approach to Empower a Community in Tension (CiT)

We've (Wesley Nitsckie and I) just received confirmation that our paper have been accepted for a conference later this year titled "A Community Driven ICT Development Approach to Empower a Community in Tension (CiT)". This paper highlights a new Agile Development approach that could support ICT for Development projects that requires real time solutions for real time problems. The Drug Advice Support initiative is used as a case study and lessons learnt from this development experience could be of value to other social entrepreneurs or social innovation developers. The abstract for the IDIA Conference is below:

Abstract

"The development of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) solutions for community empowerment has seen an increased interest from various stakeholders. Such solutions present challenges specifically in the area of identifying the appropriate ICT community development approaches.
This paper suggests a community-driven approach for the development of an ICT solution to support a Community in Tension (CiT) due to the scourge of drug abuse amongst its citizens. The CiT used skills and resources available in the community as part of its development approach. The result of this collaboration was the Drug Advice Support (DAS) system which uses mobile and web technologies. DAS was co-created by the community who needed the system to aid them with the social issues they are facing due to the substance abuse problem. It concludes by indicating how the community-driven systems development approach could be used to aid other communities who require localised solutions."

Reconstructing Communities Using Mobile Phones

Today I had the privilege to present at the UCT Graduate School of Business Mobile Marketing Course. This course is managed by no one other than Dave Duarte, one of the greatest minds in South Africa. The talk was titled "Reconstructing Communities Using Mobile Phones" with a focus on how mobile phones are integrated into daily lives to bring about a change in local communities. The presentation can be viewed below:

Reconstructing Communities using Mobile Devices

View more presentations from Marlon Parker.

Social Media and Teens

After spending 4 weeks in the UK and connecting with a large number of young people it was interesting to hear some of their comments about Social Media. Speaking to approximately just over 100 teenagers during my stay I wanted to know what are their social media tool of choice, what they think of micro-blogging like Twitter and what are the Instant Messenger that they use most of the time.

All the youth (aged 13 - 26) indicated that they are using FaceBook and that it is their social network of choice. Only 5% of the youth have a Twitter account and some of them thinking that Twitter is for "famous people". Only two of the 5% were using it often and almost 10% did not know about Twitter. The Instant Messenger of Choice was MSN and very few of them used Mobile Instant Messengers.



It would be interesting to see how Teens in South Africa and those in the UK are adopting Social Media. We are currently running a Social Media with Teens programme as part of the Athlone Living Lab project and it seems as if from the offset it has been received positively by our teens in Cape Town, South Africa.

Athlone Living Lab: Community Innovation Space

The Athlone Living Lab Space are being upgraded and will be ready by next week. The space will be used for the Advice Support Services, training and development space for social and services innovation. Thanks to the Reconstructed Team for all the hard work in getting the space ready.

Reconstructing Community Spaces: Athlone Living Lab

Reconstructing Community Spaces "Athlone Living Lab"

View more OpenOffice presentations from Marlon Parker.

The above presentation was presented at the SAFIPA conference earlier this month at a Living Labs session.

Twitter School

Today the Reconstructed Trainers had a session with the Mom 2.0 ladies teaching them mroe about the micro-blogging tool Twitter. The ladies really impressed me how they embraced the technology and by the end of the day they already had more than 500 tweets amongst them combined. Not bad for a first day of Twitter School.


Be sure to find out more about these women who are using twitter as a way to reach out to other women and mothers in need. This is a first for these women who a few months ago had never even touched a computer but today they are using Social Media for Social Change.

Drug Advice Support Featured in Business Times

With the Drug Advice Support (DAS) service growing and so much more people to reach we once again featured in a prominent South African News Paper The Business Times yesterday. The article titled "MXit put to some good use" written by Toby ShapShak can be read below:

MXIT, the cellphone instant messaging service best known for chatting teenagers, is now being used to help drug users on the Cape Flats kick their habit.
In the service, based in Bridgetown in Athlone, former drug users who counsel tik addicts use the messaging service as a primary method of support.
The project, which has been running for about a year, is the brainchild of a remarkable young man, Marlon Parker.
Parker, now an information technology lecturer at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology where he’s doing his PhD, grew up on the Cape Flats and directly experienced the consequences of drug abuse when his brother was jailed for dealing tik, a highly-addictive methamphetamine drug.
Drug users can “chat” with the services’ counsellors when they feel the urge to use, says Parker. It is the first step in a rehabilitation programme run with nongovernmental organisation Impact Direct. Read more

Mom 2.0 reaching new heights

Today we've had another exciting session with the mothers who were impressing us with the various means of using social media for social good. The session being managed by the reconstructed team are a real inspiration to many out there how communities could work together to combat various social issues causing tension. The current technologies the mothers are engaging are social networking (facebook) and blogging (Mom 2.0). They will very soon be introduced to micro-blogging technology Twitter.

Drug Advice Support (DAS): Why we do what we do

Wherever we go to share the story of Drug Advice Support people always ask why are we doing what we are doing and what is our payment. People are amazed that this is a community initiative that has been running since 2008 and touching the lives of thousands of people. Just reading the messages below encourages us to persevere and not give up knowing we are seeing more lives being reconstructed.

[2009-05-28 17:49:17] User: Hi dare n hey i wnt 2 thank u abt ur wrds nw im proud of wht i am n al the suicidal thoughts r gone keep up da gud wrk.

[2009-06-01 17:23:32] User: Just thought i'd let you guys know i've been clean for a month now - thanx for the help!

With thousands of people having their lives transformed through such a noble service we know that we cant stop what we are doing but only look for ways to improve what we've started.

Firstly, a special thank you to all the men and women who are sacrificing their lives for the sake of others. To the people from the community who support this initiative sharing their resources (plate of food, a note of thanks, hot cup of tea/coffee for advisors and people at Impact centre) your contributions are priceless, Impact Direct Ministries for allowing us to utilise your space and resources, to the team of developers who along with the community are breaking new ground as we journey together you are changing many lives, to DELL South Africa Development Fund for their generous sponsorship your donation is priceless.