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As part of my 2009 Society for New Communications Research Fellowship, I gave a talk titled ‘SMS as a Social Networking Platform’ at the 2009 NewComm Forum in San Francisco on April 29.

I started off by saying that one of the most important lessons my research on social media in the emerging BRIC countries has taught me is that marketers, and entrepreneurs, can learn a lot from digital activists, especially about engaging people who aren’t going to spend much, or anything at all, at little or no cost.

Then, I used several examples to illustrate my three big ideas.

1) The $50 mobile phone will continue to be the default computing device for billions of users in Asia and Africa.

2) SMS (not WAP, GPRS or 3G) will be the primary technology for web access for these users.

3) The ecosystem to create a social networking platform entirely on SMS is slowly emerging.

I recently wrote an Op-Ed in Indian business daily Live Mint on why BJP’s digital election campaign wasn’t a #fail.

I have praised BJP’s election campaign before and even argued against dismissing BJP’s campaign as flawed, just because it failed. I have also written about why praising BJP’s election campaign isn’t the same as endorsing it’s ideology.

Here’s the full text of the article –

BJP Wide Web: A Success

BJP supporters dominated online conversations about the elections in the Indian blogosphere and on social networking sites such as Facebook, Orkut and Twitter

Gaurav Mishra

It is tempting to see the Congress’ victory this election as a validation of the tried and tested methods of political campaigning. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ran an aggressive digital media campaign and focused on reaching out to the urban first-time voter, but failed. The Congress ran a traditional campaign, focused on movie songs, local rallies and the charisma of the Nehru-Gandhi family, and succeeded.

However, I would caution against reading too much into this coincidence and mistaking it for causality. It’s not the BJP’s campaign but its Hindutva ideology that has failed the party. The BJP has lost in spite of its brilliant campaign, not because of it.

DigiActive co-founder Mary Joyce and I are delighted to announce our new co-authored blog Netfluence.org, which is an investigation into whether and how networked technologies influence political power structures.

The debate on whether internet and mobile technologies are transforming traditional power structures is dominated by three divergent narratives.

According to the first, utopian, narrative, internet and mobile technologies enable individuals to publish and distribute content, self-organize into communities of interest and participate in collective action. As a result, they can create new types of media outlets, build new types of civil society organizations, and monitor, protest against and even bring down governments. Even though these new degrees of freedom are far from universal, they are fundamentally changing political power structures. The future has already arrived, this narrative insists, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.

According to the second, status quo, narrative, power structures are ingrained into our society’s institutions, and internet and mobile technologies don’t really change these institutions, or create new ones. The case studies compiled by the utopians constitute anecdotal evidence, at best, and the influence of networked technologies will always be limited because of issues related to access or ability. So, internet and mobile technologies are a minor influence on political power structures, at best.

I gave a talk at NetSquared DC on Tuesday where I talked about social media and digital activism in India, digital initiatives during the 2009 Indian elections, and Vote Report India. I talked about our experience in using Ushahidi for election monitoring and our plans to integrate Swift into Ushahidi. I talked about how eMoksha is trying to become the Sunlight Foundation of India. Finally, I used my 4Cs Social Media Framework to analyze our successes and failures with Vote Report India and even plugged our Vote Report India Version 2.0 application at the NetSquared Microsoft Mobile Challenge for Development.

Here are the slides (PPTX/ PDF/ SlideShare) –

Here is the video of the talk (Vimeo) –

Thank you to Matt and Gabriela for giving me the opportunity to talk to the great NetSquared DC community.

Vote Report India was featured today in Cadalyst Magazine story on Ushahidi.

Here is the full text of the story –

Indian Citizens Serve as Election Monitors
Open-source technologies empower a geopolitical movement driven by the people.
May 19, 2009
By: Kenneth Wong

In late April, ordinary Indian citizens — the tiffin wallahs, the programmers, and the civil servants — began casting their votes in the general election for the Lok Sabha, the lower house of Parliament. But in the land of ancient gods and hereditary castes, the modern political process is fraught with mishaps.

On May 5, because of complaints of rigging, the Election Commission ordered repolling at three locations in the state of Uttar Pradesh. On May 6, supporters of a local candidate in Jaipur were reported to be offering opium to the villagers, justifying the practice as “the strengthening of bond.” Elsewhere, reports of distributing homemade alcohol to voters (presumably as bribes) emerged. In some locations, voters reported their names were either missing or duplicated.

I was interviewed recently by Homeland Security Today for a article on the use of social media and mobile technologies in crisis situations.

I talked about how technology is agnostic and can be used by both good guys and bad guys. We specifically talked about how both victims and terrorists were using mobile phones during the Mumbai terrorist attack.

I also pointed out that, often, the difference between the good guys (activists) and the bad guys (troublemakers) isn’t obvious. So, governments should assume that terrorists and dissidents will use these technologies, but refrain from trying to control, block or monitor these technologies too broadly.

Here is the full text of the article –

Social Media Opens Communications for Terrorists, Victims
by Mickey McCarter
Wednesday, 20 May 2009

Experts relate how terrorists, victims have been using Twitter and text messaging in crisis situations
The general public has very recently embraced the use of new social media applications like Twitter. Oprah Winfrey, for example, turned her fanbase onto the Web site last month. Traditional newspapers have lit up with stories about how blogs and tweets are changing the world.

I had mentioned yesterday that we will soon relaunch Vote Report India as a platform to crowd-source the performance monitoring of our elected members of parliament.

We have submitted Vote Report India to the Netsquared Microsoft Mobile Challenge for Development. The winners win up to $15000 and an opportunity to be showcased at the N2Y4 Mobile Conference.

I would urge you to take out five minutes from your time to have a look at the Vote Report India application and leave a positive comment that can help us win.

Here is a short summary of our Netsquared Microsoft Mobile Challenge for Development application –

WHAT: Vote Report India is a collaborative platform to enable Indian citizens to track election irregularities and monitor the performance of elected officials at national, state and local levels.

Users contribute direct SMS, email, Twitter and web reports and the Ushahidi-based platform aggregates them on an interactive map, and distributes them via RSS and email/ SMS alerts.

WHO: Vote Report India is a non-partisan all-volunteer collaboration between software developers, designers, academics, and other professionals to bring transparency to the Indian political process.

The 2009 Indian Lok Sabha elections have come to an end and so has version 1.0 of Vote Report India.

We have had our successes and failures and I have talked about some of them before.

I think we did a lot of things well –

- We were able to get the website up within a week, thank to some great work by the Ushahidi and eMoksha teams.

- We were able to build a number of important relationship, with civil society organizations (like Jaago Re/ One Billion Voters, National Network for India,  Liberty Institute, Citizens for Justice and Peace, and Women’s Political Forum), traditional media organizations (like Al Jazeera) and new media organizations (like Global Voices, Indipepal, Desipundit, BlogAdda, NGO Post and Digital Democracy). In fact, our partnerships page looks like a literal who’s who of the important players working on the Indian elections.

- We were able to generate a lot of buzz for Vote Report India, on blogs, on Twitter, and in mainstream media within a very short time.

- We have been able to build a vibrant Vote Report India community that has been active in supporting us on both the technical and outreach side.

An article I had submitted sometime back appeared in Hindustan Times today. It’s a reflection on whether digital initiatives by civil society organizations have worked in the 2009 Indian elections.

Here is the full text of the article –

E-lection fever

The successful online poll initiatives and blogs may help India 2014 do a US 2008

Gaurav Mishra

One of the ironies of Indian politics is that while the urban middle class complains about corrupt politicians, it neither steps out to contest elections or even cast its vote.

Mumbaikars proved this right on April 30, when the city registered its lowest voter turnout since 1977 despite the hullabaloo the elite had created post-26/11. Since then, the content and the tone of conversations of the Indian online community have changed. Well to-do youngsters, who earlier shied away from political debates, now seem to thrive on it.

For the first time in India, online voter-registration campaigns and initiatives have channelled the zeitgeist into constructive conversations and created an online space for civic engagement. It’s because of this groundswell that unlikely candidates like author Shashi Tharoor and danseuse Mallika Sarabhai have stepped out to contest the elections.Even political parties, which often speak to the lowest common denominator, upped the ante and reached out to millions of first time voters through blogs and social networking websites.

I’ll be giving a talk on Vote Report India at NetSquared DC on Tuesday, May 19th.

Vote Report India is a collaborative citizen-driven election monitoring platform for the 2009 Indian Lok Sabha elections, built on the Ushahidi platform. I’ll talk about the story behind the project, reflect on how well the project has worked, and share some thoughts on the future of the project.

I’ll also talk about how political parties, civil society organizations and corporates are using digital media in the 2009 Indian Lok Sabha elections.

When: Tuesday, May 19, 2009 7:00 PM

Where: Affinity Lab, 2451 18th St, NW 2nd Floor, Washington DC 20009

The NetSquared DC events are free and great food, wine and conversations are (usually) guaranteed. You can RSVP for the event here.

Cross-posted at Vote Report India.