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before and after their workday to document their labor. In this stage, the research team will focus onparticipatory design methods, producing a paper that reviews participatory design literature anddocuments our experience in this case. At this point we will also be conducting a baseline study ofcommunication practices among day laborers.2. Deployment (September-December 2008): Once the system is working, the initial designparticipants will train others at each of IDEPSCA's six centers, who will in turn train 5 to 10 moreparticipants each, thereby building the Mobile Voices community. By the end of this stage, there will be30-60 people publishing stories directly from their phones to the Mobile Voices platform, producing aregular stream of fresh content and meeting periodically to make editorial decisions, plan outreach, andconduct training. In this stage, the researchers will examine whether mobile storytelling serves to buildand strengthen community, producing a case study on the potential of affordable mobile phones to aiddigital inclusion. At this time the project team will also be developing written and visual trainingmaterials for use in the trainings and for translation and packaging in the Mobile Voices toolkit.3. Diffusion (January-June 2009): In the third stage, the Mobile Voices project will expand toother immigrant communities in LA, as participation and training are opened to additional communitybased organizations that focus on low-wage immigrant workers. The project will gain increased visibilityas we transfer the Mobile Voices platform to other contexts. We will also work with the ethnic andmainstream media to feature stories on the project, and we will tap into a number of resources available atthe Annenberg School in our efforts to connect with media outlets. Our mobile storytelling platform willsupport a variety of community building applications, from storytelling that helps make marginalizedpeople visible, to community journalism, to practical ways of increasing job opportunities (i.e. a mobilelabor market, described below). In this stage, research will focus on issues that arise in the attempt todeploy our platform and trainings across a variety of community building projects. We will conduct aparticipatory project evaluation, as well as a study of day laborer communication practices to compare tothe baseline study. We will also finalize the toolkit at the end of this stage.Further Applications and Outreach: In addition to the participatory design case study, the4

baseline study, and the 1-year project evaluation study, deliverables will include the Mobile Voicescontent management system, mobile handset application, and a toolkit for use by community-basedorganizations that want to participate in Mobile Voices or set up their own innovative mobile phonebased participatory journalism project. The toolkit will be available under a creative commons license,both as a booklet with CD and for free download as a disk image and .pdf. It will include an overview ofmobile journalism and advocacy applications, a map of available mobile service providers, a checklist ofmobile applications according to ease of use, cost, privacy, licensing, scalability, and other requirements,a tutorial for installation and customization of the Mobile Voices CMS and handset applications, and apopular education style training manual for community-based organizations. We hope to use this toolkitto provide trainings to a number of additional community-based organizations in LA, including theGarment Worker Center, Koreatown Immigrant Worker Alliance, Pilipino Worker Center, and SouthAsia Network. Ideally these and additional groups will join the Mobile Voices project, moving us closerto the goal of a citywide, mobile, multiethnic, immigrant communication network. We also envision theMobile Voices materials being useful in a wide range of contexts, including developing country locationswhere mobile phones anre the primary means of communication.Work already completed: The Mobile Voices project has already begun. We have conductedsurveys with 43 day laborers at IDEPSCA day laborer centers across the city. We asked laborers abouttheir experiences with mobile phones, what they most often use their phones for, and if they would beinterested in participating in a mobile phone project. For example, we learned that almost 80% currentlyown mobile phones and most use their phones primarily for work purposes. A majority of workersexpressed interest in receiving messages from IDEPSCA on their mobile phones (including jobs, eventannouncements, health information, and news), as long as they would not be charged for the messages.This exploratory data will help us determine what types of phones day laborers have the most experiencewith, which service providers they have had difficulties with, and how to best develop a project that willfacilitate their storytelling participation while still meeting essential communication needs.In addition, we have already worked with engineering students at USC to develop two prototype5

java-based mobile phone applications that will serve as a starting point for participatory design workshopswith workers. The first application implements a straightforward blogging platform on mobile phones,and the second supports a ‘mobile job market’ in which workers’ skills and availability are matched tocontractors’ needs. We have also begun work on the Content Management System, a customized build ofthe popular open-source CMS Drupal. We coordinate and document our development efforts openlythrough the Indymedia Documentation Project at THESES & RESEARCH QUESTIONSThe research component of Mobile Voices is designed to test three core hypotheses, eachassociated with a set of research questions.H.1: Participatory design yields successful appropriation of mobile media and generatesapplications that better serve the user communityWhile several Mobile Voices features are available in various ready-made commercialapplications, our working hypothesis is that it is worth engaging in a participatory process with those whowill use the application and study what constitutes successful appropriation of mobile telephony for socialchange. We believe this process to be productive for several reasons. First, we expect the collaborativeinteraction between users and designers to result in a better articulation of the needs of immigrants,allowing us to craft the application’s architecture to respond to these unique needs (for example, to buildin strong privacy protection). Second, we expect the participatory process to be an empowering one forparticipants, building capacity and improving technical and media literacy. And third, we expectparticipatory design to lead to greater use and deeper engagement with storytelling practices.H.2: Storytelling is an effective practice for community buildingOur ultimate goal is to understand whether accessible ICT tools such as mobile phones allow agroup of users to build stronger community ties and to improve their lives. Our hypothesis is that activeparticipation in the storytelling process is a particularly effective way to do that. The literature oncommunity storytelling and media effects shows that the way in which a community is portrayed in the6

media influences internal and external perceptions and in turn affects levels of civic engagement (Kim etal., 2006, Matei et al., 2005). When the link between residents and traditional media is fairly weak (as isthe case with immigrant day laborers), a direct storytelling contribution cultivated within the communitycan provide different perspectives and disseminate information about vital community resources.Storytelling opportunities provided by Mobile Voices will help groups of immigrants better articulatetheir concerns, and, as a result, be better positioned to develop strategies for action. In addition, beyondthe benefits within the community, we anticipate that stories emerging from Mobile Voices will be pickedup by blogs and mass media, promoting greater awareness and more open dialogue in the public sphere.H.3: Mobile phones and open-source content management platforms are effective generictools for digital inclusionMobile Voices intends to develop a storytelling platform that combines affordable mobile phonesand a Free, Open-Source Software (F/OSS) content management system. This will allow us to studywhether and how a F/OSS platform for mobile content publishing and networking can provide aneffective tool for community building, participatory journalism, and for bridging the 'participatory divide'.Our assumption in doing so is that mobile phones can serve as an entry point for people who have no orlimited access to computers. We expect that the collective assembly of stories built around the mediamaterials collected with mobile phones will facilitate greater computer literacy, and the platform will bedesigned with this in mind. An additional hypothesis is that designing digital tools that are generic andopen-source will facilitate their use and adaptation in a variety of community contexts.RESEARCH METHODSMobile Voices research involves multiple methods to analyze and assess the various dimensionsof the project. A key characteristic of our project and research methodology is that action and research aretightly integrated and will be conducted jointly by IDEPSCA and USC researchers. IDEPSCA staff andday laborers will be trained to participate in the evaluation (outcome mapping, carrying out surveys, focusgroup discussions, etc) and will therefore be directly involved not only in the project’s design and7

implementation, but also its assessment.1. Usage Surveys. We have begun to conduct a detailed baseline survey to understand phone usagepatterns among day laborers. We plan to conduct periodic follow up surveys to assess changes inusage patterns and evaluate the project’s impact on phone usage.2. Participatory design. We will conduct workshops and focus group discussions involving daylaborers, researchers, and designers to set the application parameters and define the platform’sarchitecture. Software engineers will build prototypes on the basis of these conversations, to berefined through follow- up sessions. Researchers will observe the process to assess its success andsuggest improvements. We have already held one such session and now have two initialprototype handset applications.3. Participatory journalism. We will conduct regular multimedia storytelling workshops with daylaborers, during which we will jointly review the multimedia materials they capture, organizethese materials, and publish stories on-line and through IDEPSCA’s newsletter, and strategizearound subsequent reporting activities. Researchers will be participant observers during thesemeetings, to document and evaluate the process and its impact. Another impact of the project willbe the extent to which participants' voices are amplified by established media outlets. To assessthese outcomes, we will monitor independent, ethnic, and mainstream media for stories seeded byMobile Voices and for coverage of our project. Traffic to the Mobile Voices website will also bemonitored and analyzed.4. Outcome mapping and change assessment. At key stages in the project, we will conductOutcome Mapping / Most Significant Change exercises involving all key stakeholders (daylaborers, IDEPSCA staff, and researchers). These sessions will serve to develop meaningfulindicators that will be used to measure the project’s outcomes and impact.5. Replicability and sustainability. We will track adoption of the mobile tools by otherorganizations/groups in LA and elsewhere, and contact them to assess its adaptability to diversecontexts as well as the sustainability of the tool and practices built around it.8

RESEARCH RELEVANCEFrom a practical standpoint, Mobile Voices will contribute to a better understanding of thepotential of low-cost mobile phone technologies for digital inclusion. This project gives voice to lowincome immigrants, whose viewpoints are often absent from mainstream media coverage and onlinediscussion forums. This is significant at four levels: immigrants are empowered by an increased ability totell their stories; community organizations gain better ways to communicate internally with members andexternally with stakeholders; novel participatory approaches are cultivated; and the broader LAcommunity and mainstream media benefit through better representation of diverse viewpoints.Many other projects provide disenfranchised communities with computers to help them tell theirstories. Mobile Voices is different because it starts with the mobile phones that immigrants are alreadyfamiliar with and teaches them to use all the phones' features to produce stories. Some projects use mobilephones, but prefer high-end, expensive devices, and impose ready-made applications for their target users.By contrast, Mobile Voices will explore the use of low-cost pre-paid phones such as Motorola's i855e:under 100, it comes with camera, voice recorder, mp3 support, GPS, and unlimited data service for 10/month. Motorola has fully opened the phone's Java interface, enabling us to work with users todesign multimedia, integrated, open applications that fit their needs.From a theoretical standpoint, the Mobile Voices project contributes primarily to threeestablished research areas, and explores the linkages among them: Information and CommunicationTechnology for Development (ICT4D), Communication for Social Change (CFSC), and ParticipatoryDesign and Research. ICT4D research has traditionally focused on information transmission and itseffects (Heeks, 2007), technology adoption (Donner, 2003), and more recently, user-driven innovationand appropriation (Bar et al., 2007). Recent work has increasingly acknowledged the unpredictability ofICT impact due to the uncontrollable variety of factors that influence human interaction with technologyand the resulting social change. Critics of traditional ICT4D evaluation approaches also argue that the “C”in ICT4D is often underemphasized or undervalued and that the communication process, as well as otherkinds of capacity building, cannot be fully measured or appreciated using solely quantitative, expert-9

driven methods (Ramírez, 2007; Gumucio-Dagron & Tufte, 2006). Furthermore, research on mobilephone use among low-income populations in the developing world has found that the social benefits ofmobile telephony are frequently viewed by users as more important than the economic benefits (Donner,2005; Horst & Miller, 2006); studies in a variety of contexts have found correlations between mobilephone use and enhanced social capital (Ling, 2004; Sugiyama & Katz, 2003).At the other end of the spectrum, communication for social change, community organizing, andadult education projects have favored a more community-driven, horizontal, and cyclical learningapproach to program design and evaluation. The increasingly popular and varied range of participatoryresearch methods (including evaluation) try to rectify the inherent power imbalance of top-down, expertdriven initiatives. They view community participation as enhancing project relevance and sustainabilitywhile also building the capacity of the community to identify and solve problems.Community-based participatory research can take a ‘hybrid’ approach to design and evaluativeresearch methods, incorporating elements of both ICT4D and CFSC, combining ‘expert’ and ‘local’knowledge, quantitative and qualitative methods, and varying degrees of participation. Building on thestrengths of ICT4D and participatory, Freirian-inspired methodologies, Ricardo Ramírez (2007) hassuggested taking a systems thinking approach, “based on sociotechnical systems, stakeholderengagement, an acknowledgement of the multiple dimensions at play, and the growing evidence ofunpredictability of ICTs.” He suggests several possibilities including identifying indicators through adialogue among all direct stakeholders, outcome mapping (Earl et al. 2001), and “most significantchange” methodology (Dart & Davies, 2003).The Mobile Voices project stands to make a valuable contribution to participatory research aswell as practice with a systematic, self-critical approach that casts a wide enough net to captureunexpected outcomes, whether positive or negative. In these ways the collaboration will not only lead tothe production of innovative technology for community organizing and individual empowerment, but willproduce cutting-edge research on participatory technology design, implementation and evaluation.10

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fbar@usc.edu Collaborative Grants in Media and Communications 2008 Reveived: Annenberg Program for Online Communities, 4,000 seed grant SSRC, 3,000 carry over from Small Collaborative Grant Annenberg Research Network on International Communication, [ 5,000, in kind] Letter(s) of Support from Partner Organization(s) Organization Address