Protest tech: TXTmob

What is this?

TX mob is a cell phone based text-message broadcast system developed by John Henry, at the Institute for Applied Autonomy in 2004. Its usage begun during DNC protests in Boston and it came to be widely used by protestors during the RNC protests namely to inform, organize and coordinate activities in real time.

To understand how this system played an important role in these decentralized protests, following are some of the archived messages sent to people who participated in the protests or were interested in knowing about the minute to minute happenings of the protests:

15:51:05 Sun, Aug 29 Morgan "Over 1000 protesters have gathered in Central Park, seems calm at this time."

16:00:30 Sun, Aug 29 Morgan "Police are not allowing bicycles to ride on the streets in the Times Square area."

16:11:56 Sun, Aug 29 Morgan "Update: police have closed 6 Ave and all streets west of 6ave from 34 St to 59 St to bicycles"

To enhance this system John Henry involved a student from MIT, Tad Hirsch. The system has now evolved into a message broadcasting system for groups that are organized around a range of different topics. Even companies have adopted it to broadcast messages to their group of employees.

How does it work?

Anybody who wants to use the service first registers online with details like name, phone number, the carrier and so on. To avoid spammers a security feature is added that sends a “secret code” to the phone number registered. This code has to be used when one logs into his/her account on the website for the very first time. Once the code has been verified, the user then can join a particular group of interest or create a new group and broadcast messages to the other members via the mobile phone or by just entering the message in the group message list. To send the message from the phone, the message needs to be addressed as GROUP_NAME@txtmob.com.

The groups are of: Public, Private and Secret types and can be moderated through the website that has well defined administrative options.

Why this interested me!

The history of how it was founded and then used initially is something that caught my attention. I liked the idea of how technology was put to use in organizing and helping in protest related activities, in a way contributing to building the voice of the public. Its usage worked out to be an advantage for most people who took part in the protests.

Resources:

http://www.txtmob.com/

http://www.appliedautonomy.com/txtmob.html

http://web.media.mit.edu/~tad/pub/txtmob_chi05.pdf