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Politics Online '09: How Mobile's Different Than Web

BY Nancy Scola | Tuesday, April 21 2009

Apologies for the light post this morning, but I'm at the Politics Online conference in downtown DC's cavernous Ronald Reagan building where a decent wireless hookup is harder to find than natural lighting. I've decamped to a nearby Starbucks. Even if the coffee always has that burnt flavor, at least they've got reliable wifi.

Anyway, this morning I moderated a panel on mobile activism called "Power in Your Pocket" with Mobile Commons' Jed Alpert, Credo's Adam Klaus, the Student PIRGs' Sajatha Jahagirdar, and the Obama campaign's Scott Goodstein. This is a collection of folks who know intimately the ins and outs of using cell phones to create political and social change. My panelists made a handful of points about how mobile is, in some ways, a very different medium than the web/Internet that most of us are more familiar with. I scribbled down notes on a few nuggets that I thought might be of particular interest:

  • Open Standards. There's a good chance that you're aware of the fact that the wireless neutrality principles that are much discussed concerning the Internet don't apply to the mobile space. But there is a fascinating discussion starting up about the mobile industry developing a set of open standards that would at least make it easier to program for phones. As things stand, mobile developers have to build unique applications for just about every phone they what their apps to work on.
  • Spam. As something of a counterpoint to that first bullet, one of the positive things about the fact that AT&T or Verizon controls the network we use for mobile, that tight reign means they can kill spam before it gets to us. Goodstein told of getting off of a plane in Latin America and being bombarded with cell phone spam.
  • Fundraising. Mobile fundraising has been stymied in recent years by the fact that service providers traditionally take a considerable chunk (the figure 50% was heard) of whatever is contributed. Alpert talked about the Mobile Giving Foundation, a promising program that brings that fee down to a few cents for non-profit organizations.
  • List Integrity. Once organizations go through the trouble of building mobile lists, list integrity tends to stay pretty high. Email addresses may come and go, but people tend to hang on to their mobile number, especially now with number portability.

(Photo credit: NCinDC)

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