One tool that came up during our Sex Worker training in Phnom Penh (thanks to Melissa Gira http://www.sexerati.com, who has been working with us on the project) is Twitter. Bettysnake got on Twitter after some exposure to Melissa as well.

After Mellisa's introduction to the use of twitter, I read a blog entry by my good friend Arif Mamdani about the potential for using twitter in organizing/activism at http://www.progressivetech.org/blog/arif/archives/2007/03/19/twitter-am-i-the-only-one-who-sees-some-real-potential-here/ . I decided to start using it myself. Mostly we have just been using it for personal updates and Bettysnake, Spaceboy, and I have been using it to post update each other about personal stuff. When I'm on Broadband, I'm getting my twitter alerts via Instant Messanger, but right now I'm in Rural Maine and can only connect to the Internet via Cell-phone, I'm getting my twitters via SMS.

Arif and I had a brief email exchange last week about twitter. It got me to thinking more about it. Arif had a response that got me thinking maybe we should start thinking about using it more internally with Tactical Tech:

"Organizational - help a distributed team stay in touch with each other -like you'd post to twitter what you're working on throughout the day so that folks kind of have a sense of what the team's doing."

The thing that had spurned our discussion last week was the fact that Global Voices now has a twitter feed. I turned it on for a day but found it completely useless, so I turned it off. Arif commented on it in our exchange:

"Twitter is all about a highly personal connection. Where global voices misses the mark is that they're using twitter as a place to publish links to articles - it looks just like what you'd see in an rss reader because that's basically what they're doing. More interesting would be if each issue they tracked became a persona that people would form a relationship with. OR - Global voices
staff would post short thoughtful reactions to the articles they link to so rather than a "new article about blah blah blah here: http://...." it would have some personal reflection included with the link."

As a result of our exchange partially happening via twitter, spaceboy sent me an IM with the following suggestion:

"ballot fraud reporting (perfect application for twitter) was done with mobiles and radio before, this would be a good abck up, esp if theres a locataional tag that comes with, then it can be space/time mapped"

Here's my additions to the exchange:

under Network Collaboration - Not so sure if twitter would serve any purpose other than if there's an event that members of the network are at and then they can keep the other members of the network up to date about whats going on at the event in real time. But still thinking that email and blog posts would just be as effective.

On the Constituency Engagement piece - most activist organizations around the golobe do their engagement with constituents via cell phone. So twitter is great in that respect and that folks could just set up a "friend" profile for the campaign and then just send out updates to the constituents about what's happening and where to show up, etc. Of course this assumes a literate constituency.

I'm also wondering if it has any potentials for documenting Human Rights Abuses. We are looking at how cell phones can be used in recording abuses. So things like shozu to upload photos quickly to flickr. Essentially anything where the phone can be used to record something and then getting that info off the phone quickly. Ultimately having some sort of twitter to DB connectivity would be essential.

If anyone is interested in joining me in my twitter experiment - You can see my twitter feed at http://twitter.com/fabrider.