UNESCO (that’s the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization to you, buddy) is launching the first phase in a program to use mobile media to assist developing nations. The Organisation seems to think that the mobile initiatives that have been popping up in developing nations over the past while are something truly worth investing in.
First off, UNESCO will be collecting info from successful projects that have already already explored this area, like the Grameen Foundations community knowledge workers. The next step, sometime in 2010, will be to create local centers that can generate regular, relevant content. These Community Multimedia Centres (CMC) will be staffed by people UNESCO has trained to be fluent with mobile technology, who can create textual, audio and video content.
From the release:
“The second phase of the project is expected to start in 2010 and will build the capacities of community media and CMC to:
* best exploit the opportunities offered by mobile radio and TV as demonstrated in good practices from other initiatives;
* produce mobile-adapted content, e.g. educational games, breaking news and development videos;
* produce voice-based wikis or repositories for the use of spoken content on mobiles (instead of video- or text-based content);
* develop systems to diffuse content on mobile devices, for example by means of: directs downloads, streaming, RSS, video-on-demand, and live radio and video mobile broadcast.”
What we think?
Looking at the developing world really shows the true strengths of mobile devices. As the most inexpensive broadcast receiver possible, it’s potential as a news and educational service are pretty much unbeatable. While fancier, flashier uses of mobile devices will be taken care of by app developers, content producers and advertisers in Europe and America, it’s the support of bodies like the UN that will push it’s dissemination to every corner of the world. Interestingly, almost all of the campaigns of this kind we’ve seen so far have been solely text-based… UNESCO is one of the first to bring the full range of mobile multimedia into play.
