Mobile Voter was founded on the premise that Internet technology can be used to facilitate the process of civic participation. Our projects rely heavily on mobile phones as the principal method of engagement. In the hands, pockets, and purses of a majority of the world's population, we believe that these mobile devices hold a tremendous transformative power.

In 2008, we're going boldly into the future of volunteerism! Have you ever spent 20 minutes waiting for your train with nothing to do? Or unexpectedly had the afternoon off? Have you also wished that you could give back to your community without simply sending a check or going through a laborious membership signup process? What if you could, spontaneously, volunteer your labor or expertise? Our “Volunteer Now!” project intends to enable this kind of on-the-spot volunteerism by connecting you, via your mobile phone, to volunteer opportunities in your immediate vicinity – or to organizations that can use your expertise over the phone.

A scenario: You’ve just missed your airplane and have 4 hours to kill at the Philadelphia airport. You click the “Volunteer Now!” button on your mobile phone. It asks you how much time you have. You answer “4 hours” and it returns a list of relevant matches. It knows that you are a business executive with a specialty in contract negotiation, so the first match is from “Pit Bull Rescue,” which needs someone to review a contract for a new kennel facility. Your profile history also shows that you sometimes enjoy good old hammer-swinging physical labor. The second match is from “Wister Middle School,” which is 2 miles from the airport and is having a volunteer cleanup day today.

You decide that it’s too much effort to figure out how to get to the school, so you select “Pitt Bull Rescue” instead. Next, you see the organization’s profile screen which gives you some background information and comments from past volunteers. Several prior volunteers rated the organization very highly, so you choose it.

Immediately, the contract is sent to your mobile device. You review it, make notes, and write a short comment that says that everything seems to be in order. You click send and grab a beer. Later, Pitt Bull Rescue calls you to thank you for your volunteer effort and tells you that they’ve decided to go ahead with the new kennel facility. They send you a photo of a dog that was rescued today.

Imagine other examples:

• You’re a Chinese/English speaker and help a recent Chinese immigrant navigate their hospital’s Interactive Voice Menu in a three-way call.
• You copyedit a nonprofit’s brochure.
• You talk a computer novice through the process of using the Windows Start Menu.
• You identify Martian craters on your phone's web browser via the NASA clickworker program.

Projects like SETI@Home have showed that massive computational problems can be solved when a distributed group of people donate their computers’ spare CPUs to crunch data. This project will explore the possibility that this same theory can be applied to spare human “CPUs.” We believe that it will reveal a massive untapped capacity to do good by merging human location data with volunteer opportunity data.

We'll be submitting this app to the Google Android competition and have already submitted it to the NetSquared Mashup Challenge (VOTE FOR US @ Netsquared...please).

Check out these mockup screenshots of the Android application!

With support from the Pew Charitable Trusts, the George Washington Graduate School of Political Management, Young Voter Strategies, and the MacArthur Foundation, Mobile Voter's TXTVOTER '06 campaign sought to register 55,000 young voters in advance of the 2006 election.

The multi-pronged campaign leveraged the ubiquity of mobile phones, a unique peer-to-peer registration model, and the power of existing grassroots organizations. We worked with over 200 groups to register and mobilize their constituencies. We also partnered with Working Assets to implement an online voter registration tool called GoVote.org.

At final tally, over 70,000 people used our voter registration tools and services. We estimate that 47,600 of these people will end up on the voter rolls (historically, for various reasons, 32% of people who use web-based voter registration tools do not complete the process). Our results show that our web-based voter registration tools were more effective than our text-based tools in reaching and registering voters.

GOTV Text Messaging Research Experiment
TxtVoter '06 Web Site [archived site]
GoVote.org Web Site [working on getting up an archive]
Young Voter Strategies Grant Award Announcement

Our first city-wide campaign launched in '05 in conjunction with the Chinese American Voter Education Committee (CAVEC). Jointly, we conducted a campaign to register voters in San Francisco via billboards and flyers at restaurants. The press announcement from October '05 gives more information and photos.

In 2004, we coded, experimented, formulated, and re-formulated our mix of software and services until we had a workable beta offering. Text messaging was in its infancy in the U.S. and we weren't sure just what would work. In advance of the '04 election, we partnered with Kid Beyond, an incredibly charismatic performer, to promote our voter registration service. At several of his concerts, Kid Beyond stopped the show and announced the text-in number. The responses were promising. About 16% of each of his audiences responded to the call to action.