Participation through mobile phones
Johan Hellström, Anna Karefelt · 2012
In this paper, we study the case of the Ugandan election 2011 and the non-governmental organization DEMGroup, who set up two SMS-enabled election monitoring platforms: 1) UgandaWatch, an open crowdsourcing platform for citizen election monitoring via SMS, and 2) a systematical election observation, deploying 6'000 trained observers for bounded crowdsourcing. By reaching out to the potential and the actual users of these two crowdsourcing initiatives, we examine the nature of the opportunities and challenges when using mobile phones for participation. In doing so, we will draw on theories of incentives for participation and crowdsourcing.