Mobile Tech and the 'Great Experiment of Democracy'

We often talk about how technology can be used against our best interests. Think NSA spying or drones peering into people's backyards. There is a well-established "Big Brother" or "Nanny State" aspect to the perils of modern technology though there is another side to the story as well. We rarely come across them but there are ways new technologies are being hacked to fight back against "Big Brother" and make sure the crowds, by which I mean the voiceless, are heard loud and clear.

Technologists are driving innovation in our world today yet they can do nothing without ideas, content, and passion of those "teeming masses yearning to breathe free."

Forget everything you ever learned about how to target consumers based on their race, age, and location; the days of demographics are over. Now psychographics of people constantly in motion, always connected, and regularly broadcasting are more important.

Today innovation is about finding audiences with content and messaging that directly relates to their real lives. Corporations have to understand this as they create better gadgets, products, and services; startups have to appreciate this as they tinker with the latest app that matches supply and demand; and governments must listen to the crowd or, in some places, the crowd will force them to listen.

To understand the crowd you have to take your head out of the cloud. It is less about clicks and more about how clicks lead to action. The best examples are when passions turn from digital to analog in real-time to benefit activism.

A great instance of this comes out of Mashable's Social Good Summit. Co-sponsored by the United Nations Foundation, Ericsson, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the conference featured some of the savviest technologists and entrepreneurs all leveraging their efforts for social change and anchoring their ideas in the technology of today and the possibility that future technology holds solutions to problems like poverty, obesity, and hunger.

The Rules website notes that "the richest 300 people on earth have as much wealth as the poorest three billion." That's not by accident, but because those in power write the rules. The platform has figured out a way to capture the latent energy of the crowd and drive change. Executive Director Alnoor Ladha said technology is only 10 percent of successful social change, what really matters is successful local organizing and telling stories.

In particular, he said, are stories that expose the underpinnings and assumptions around what he calls our "political mythologies"—stories, he insists, that explain not that things are bad but why they are bad. In my parlance: don't focus on the rotten fruit from the tree but the roots of the tree. Technology, then, is a catalyst and an amplification device for these stories to help us understand how the world really works and how people can change things for the better.

Ladha shared this conclusion a year after launching one of the most successful mobile organizing tools the world has ever seen: Crowdring.

Crowdring turns a missed call into a signature for any cause. These missed calls, also known as "beeps," "flashes," or "fishing," are intentionally dropped phone calls logged by the recipient for which neither the caller nor the recipient pays any charges. Common in emerging economies where calling rates can be costly, they send simple signals and messages, such as "I'm thinking of you" or "I'm ready to be picked up" and thus avoid fees for SMS or talk time.

A year after Crowdring's launch, it was used to kill a "poor people tax" in Kenya. Short for Value Added Tax, VAT was essentially a tax on basics like flour and corn. "We brought together a coalition," Ladha says, "the first thing we did was rename the tax," instead calling it the Unga tax, a term for maize in Kenya, one that made sense to them.

In just two weeks Kenyans from all ranks of society used the Crowdring platform, alongside traditional campaign tools, to spread the message that the VAT tax was really an anti-poor tax. Shortly after, a majority of Kenyans reported the Unga tax was one of the top three issues they cared about. The tax was defeated resoundingly.

What does this tell us? Without "the people" or "the crowd," mobile technology means nothing. The technology should be used as a people-centric tool to maximize social good, justice, and equality.

It also tells us we have only scratched the surface of sourcing the crowd for good, and mobile technology might be part of, as Ladha said, "a great experiment in global democracy."