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By the Liberian Times

For the first time, constituents in Liberia’s 73 electoral districts will now benefit from a new information-on-demand service about the work of their Representatives and Senators in the National Legislature.

Written by Ben Colmery on the IJNet blog

AlJazeera, Listening Post

A look at how, even in the digital age, the best way for Zimbabweans to get the news is to pick up the phone.

Last week the Freedom Fone team completed a training hosted by the DW Akademie. The training focused on how to script, record and edit good quality audio for a variety of appropriate formats including: Vox Pops, news stories and explanation pieces. All files need to be audible and clear to callers using mobile phones.

The Freedom Fone code base is 1000 days old! To celebrate IT46 have prepared a 2 minute video of the code base and its development using the awsome gource visualization project. Here is the video.

Techzim writes:

The Kubatana initiated open source project, Freedom Fone, won an award for Innovation in Media technology at a ceremony organized by the Index on Censorship. The award category recognized Kubatana for innovation and original use of new technology to circumvent censorship and foster debate, argument or dissent. The category is supported by popular web giant, Google.

African economies are among the fastest-growing in the world. Today, the continent is poised to transform the global economic landscape.

View this interestesting infographic from IBM: https://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/global/share/19jan2012/mobile_africa/

By Amy Saunderson-Meyer - Media Shift Idea Lab

by Sabina Panth - Communication for Governance & Accountability Program (CommGAP) blog

http://blogs.worldbank.org/publicsphere/node/5675

By Ian Pringle, COL Education Specialist, Media

Written by Jonathan Marks on the Critical Distance Weblog

By Ken Banks in National Geographic News Watch

Innovator, anthropologist and National Geographic Emerging Explorer, Ken Banks shares exciting stories in Digital Diversity about how appropriate technologies and mobile phones are being used throughout the world to improve, enrich, and empower billions of lives.

Think! believe that ICT and digital technologies can contribute to solving a number of social, environmental and economic issues. They have added Freedom Fone to their "Quality of Life" category, read more here.

On the 11th of December 2010 Butterfly Works met with Social Media experts and Oxfam Novib partners from several countries for an inspirational co-creation day in Den Hague. The aim was to create a framework for an ongoing Social Media and Mobile technologies for civil society training curriculum which shall respond to the diverse situations and needs of Oxfam Novib’s partner organizations and other NGO’s working around the world.

By Mindy McAdams

While I was attending the annual Online News Association conference a week ago, one of several great panels I sat in on was titled “From Earthquakes to Coups: Tools for Crisis Reporting.” I’ve been interested in crisis mapping and other crowdsourced efforts during disasters ever since I learned how valuable these were after the earthquake in Haiti earlier this year.

By Vactor News - The Trusted Source for Emerging Tech

Depending on who you ask, journalism is dead or dying. And no matter who you ask, the Internet is the only thing to blame. Now, one of the Web giants at least partly responsible for the downfall of print media is looking to make amends.

By Daniel West for Demos

By Melissa Loudon - for Mobile Active

Written by David Sims, TMCnet Contributing Editor

Richard Heeks has entered the ITU data on mobile phone penetration for all countries from 1998-2008 into a Google Docs spreadsheet, and then added the Motion Chart visualiser. Makes for very interesting viewing. Read the article

Peer News -- a project aimed at creating the kind of local journalism that brings accountability and value to a community. Read the article

Instead of cracking open a book, try sitting back with a short story on your phone. CellStories, which launched in September, offers a new short (1500-2500 words) story every weekday to readers on mobile phones. Read the article

It is posited that, despite the mainstream opinion that technology is gender neutral, cultural values and practices have more tended to exclude women from access to and power over different technologies. Read the article

Radio is often considered to be a one-way medium, but the African Farm Radio Research Initiative is investigating ways of combining radio and ICTs to gather content and to share information among farming communities throughout rural Africa. Read the article

By Mobile Active