This past weekend over 2,500 people gathered in Boston to talk media reform, net neutrality, and the future of journalism at the National Conference for Media Reform, hosted by our friends (and clients) at Free Press.

Sessions ranged in subject from pop culture to internet law, and from hands-on how-to’s, like how to build your own wireless mesh network, to in-depth discussions of the implications of Wikileaks.

There’s never a way to see and hear everything going on at a conference like this, but what NCMR did better than any conference I’ve been to was encourage and value the use of Twitter. The way that session leaders integrated questions from Twitter users, and how the #NCMR11 hashtag allowed you to follow along with other concurrent sessions, really opened up the interactivity of the conference. In one session panelists took a question from an activist in Tunisia, following along via Twitter. Social media was fulfilling its promise of not just being something that happens on the internet, but something that translates effectively into the real world.

One of the best sessions I attended also highlighted the way that technology engenders real-world action. Bright and early on Friday morning I joined a bunch of other tech and politics junkies to learn about mobile technologies and their impact on community organizing. The panel consisted of folks from Free Press, Mobile Commons (one of the largest mobile organizing platforms), the National Democratic Institute (which works to promote democracy in the developing world), and Immigration Reform FOR America (who recently built the largest bilingual mobile organizing list in the country). A few of the great takeaways from the session included:

• By 2014 more people are expected to access the internet from a mobile device (phone, tablet, etc.) than a traditional computer.
• Mobile access in the developing world is growing at an especially fast rate: there were an estimated 5 billion mobile phones in the world in 2010.
• Mobile data, particularly text messaging/sms, has the potential to reach far more people than the traditional internet, and is a critical access point for people in the developing world and immigrant communities in the United States.

Mobile technology is adaptable to almost any kind of campaign or communications strategy. It has been used successfully by immigrants’ rights groups to organize in favor of the DREAM act, in post-conflict zones to monitor violence and maintain free and fair elections, and in countries like Argentina and Brazil to promote citizen participation in the legislative process. WNYC, the public radio station in New York City, created a mobile system for residents to send real-time information about street plowing and clean-up during the city’s giant blizzard in December, 2010. Planned Parenthood has developed an integrated text/live chat system for patients to contact health professionals and Planned Parenthood staff.

Mobile is being used in new and inventive ways to engage citizens around the world, and its potential has barely been scratched. But there are barriers to mobile access that could, and do, block many from fully integrating with campaigns. Free Press’ Josh Levy laid out the implications that barriers like data plan tiers and caps, limited bandwidth, exorbitant prices, and mega mergers, like the recently-announced AT&T/T-Mobile merger, have on political engagement through mobile technology. The slides from his talk can be seen here. Mobile communication is also completely insecure, as has been seen during the uprisings in the Arab world, and fear of governmental tracking or interception will inevitably block engagement by dissidents or people with reason to fear their own state.

For our work here at EchoDitto, the future of mobile communications means a whole new and expanding platform on which to bring people together, to organize digitally in ways that can immediately and concretely impact the real world. Mobile campaigns are all about direct action - whether text messages that connect constituents directly to their elected officials’ phone lines, or videos of voter intimidation sent directly from a mobile phone to an overseeing body.

Check out the links below for some interesting mobile tools, reports, and campaigns:

• smsadvocacy.com - a report by Immigration Reform FOR America, Fission Strategies, and Mobile Commons on their highly successful mobile campaign.
• Mobile Commons - integrated platform for mobile communications campaigns.
• Ushahidi - open-source mobile and web-based crowdsourcing platform
• FreedomFone - interactive, two-way audio information sharing over mobile networks.
• FrontlineSMS - allows mass communications (like on an email list) via text messaging.
• The Guardian Project - open source software for android smartphones that provides a layer of security for mobile data transmissions.
• Two interesting studies on mobile phone penetration globally, and in Africa in particular. (Thanks to Katherine Maher from NDI for these links!)
• #18 Days in Egypt - a collaborative documentary film project sourcing videos of the Egyptian revolutions through Twitter. A great example of citizen journalism through mobile platforms.

In a totally related side-note, Free Press’ mobile NCMR site was a huge hit. The interface was intuitive, content easy to find and read on a phone, and it had great integration with the website and social media.

Nice job to the Free Pressers who designed it! And thanks to everyone there for a great conference.