Communities use mobile phones to webcast their daily experience
From Shareideas
Through http://www.zexe.net, different misrepresented or underprivileged communities are sharing their views and daily experience using mobile phones.
Story
Since 2004, http://www.zexe.net has hosted different projects which involve specific communities actively sharing their views and daily experiences by publishing multimedia content (image, sound, video and text) on the World Wide Web directly from mobile phones.
The communities that have been involved in these projects are, in some cases, misrepresented by the media. Taxi drivers in Mexico City, for example, have been repeatedly criminalized by accusing them of robberies or the hijacking of taxi users. This generalized view has severely damaged their reputation, and is unjustified in many cases. Other groups suffer from discrimination, such as the Gypsy community in Lleida, Spain, while the people on wheelchairs in Barcelona have to live their daily life facing many different types of urban barriers, including inconsiderate citizens. Through zexe.net, these communities have found a medium in which they can speak their minds, give their opinions and views about their problems, and share their everyday experiences.
The unfiltered publication of multimedia contents directly from their mobile phones to the Web has given the participants of these projects a possibility for immediacy and creativity. Through weekly face-to-face meetings, the participants discuss about the topics they want to talk about and organize strategies for publication. In Barcelona, the participants orgainzed trips to different areas of the city in which accessibility was less than optimal. In this way, they were able to locate more than 3.500 obstacles to their limited mobility. A map of these obstacles was printed and handed out to the public and the local authorities. zexe.net has always seeked to have a big impact on digital and non-digital local media, in order to maximize the communicative potential of each initiative.
Participants can also edit and organize the contents by using a web based editing interface. In more recent projects, like the one involving motorcycle messengers in Sao Paulo, the participants can also add tags to their "slices" of daily experience, thus providing an emergent vocabulary of the things which are important for them. Unfortunately, the word "accident" is a tag that appears prominently.
How it was done
A smartphone is given to each of the participants, along with training on mobile and Internet skills. The multimedia contents are sent as MMS messages to zexe.net via email. There, PHP scripts organize the contents, which are stored on a MySQL database. Everything can be viewed on a web browser.
Regular face-to-face meetings have been crucial in these projects to reinforce the sense of community, to reach consensus about decisions on content and publishing and, in general, to get in contact with people that share similar problems. Even if the number of participants on each project is not very large (from 10 to 40), the presence of coordinators and facilitators is also very important.
