Through its involvement in global processes aiming to leverage ICTs for achieving development goals IISD has noted a lack of interaction between stakeholders of the global connectivity system primarily concerned with the economic development potential of ICTs, and sustainable development stakeholders focused on grassroots social development and environmental issues (http://www.iisd.org/infosoc/issd/).

For me MobileActive08 has been a real-time demonstration of what is possible when the ICT experts and grassroots social development communities effectively work together. The collaborative sessions of the first two days of the conference brought together many beginner users of mobile tools from the NGO community, experienced designers and “hackers” of these technologies. How they met on common ground was the power of this conference for many participants.

I was fortunate to have organized a workshop exploring state of the art mobile applications in the field of environmental sustainability where such dialogue flourished. Hernán Nadal of Greenpeace Argentina shared his experiences using SMS for organizing their campaign to change forestry laws. The details he shared regarding his experiences with service providers and how their pricing models, biased towards cooperate use, pose particular challenges for NGOs attempting to scale their use of SMS services was of particular interest for many participants.

Barry Coetzee shared a homegrown strategy for delivering a bulk SMS capability equivalent to such corporate services that iVeri Payment Technologies developed for their NGO partner the Southern African Sustainable Seafood Initiative (SASSI). It is these kind of partnerships and sharing of best practices between NGO project staff and technology experts that is really going to move forward the effective use of the institutions and ICT tools for achieving sustainable development objectives.

I have been fortunate to have witnessed firsthand countless examples at MobileActive08 of how this happening in the emerging field of mobile applications for social change.