sex::tech

If you’re wondering where activism is headed and how people are using new media to organize, look no further than the global youth movement. On Thursday, October 15 and Friday, October 16th the Alliance of Youth Movements Summit is taking place in Mexico City. According to the announcement on their website: “The event will convene individuals, government officials, academics, and private and public sector leaders from around the world to explore ways to advance grassroots movements seeking positive social change through 21st century technology and tools.”

This of course means that in addition to having a live event, the Summit will be webcasting live starting first thing on the morning of October 15th, and there are plenty of opportunities for online interaction throughout the summit.

Hopefully the conversations at the event will have some depth to them – there needs to be more of an evolution of conversation about social media and activism. The How To Create a Grassroots Movement Using Social-Networking Sites video that is posted as a resource on the site is cleverly put together but lacks depth and detail. A suggestion like: “send your message out to your network” is pretty common sense and doesn’t dig into the deeper issues of building valuable and engaged networks.

That said, I’m eager to check out the conversations at the Alliance of Youth Movement Summit. I bet the youth activists will bring really interesting ideas to the table.

See also:
The statement put together at the Bali Youth Force and the Ning-based website used to coordinate among youth during ICAAP.

My blog posts about the 2009 Sex:Tech – Focus on Youth conference.

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You’re looking at the 100th post here on Akimbo – something of which we at the International Women’s Health Coalition are very proud. We’re so proud of this that we bought our blog a celebratory cake! Of course the blog, being a blog, couldn’t eat the cake itself, so the staff had to step in and make sure it got eaten (it did).

Here are our ten most favorite posts so far, in no particular order:
Female Condoms: Demand and Distribution, with our first video to get more than 10,000 views on YouTube. Post and video are by Audacia Ray, featuring IWHC staff Kate Bourne and Jen Wilen.

Internet vs. SMS: Geography, Access, and Strategies for Health Promotion, a slightly tech geeky post by Audacia Ray, inspired by the Sex::Tech conference.

Technically these are three different posts, but all part of the same series written about the Pope’s visit to Cameroun by partners and staff who were there. Damaris Mounlom, a Coordinator at Femmes, Santé, et Développement en Afrique Sub-Saharienne (FESADE) in Cameroun, wrote From Cameroun to the Pope: Reality Check Please, while Jen Wilen followed up with The Pope in Cameroun: Reactions from the Front and The Pope Spends His Last Day in Cameroun.

Susanna Smith reflected on her participation in Hampshire College’s annual Civil Liberties and Public Policy conference in a post called Lessons from Hampshire College: Young People as Equals.

After the same conference, Chelsea Ricker wrote the post Keeping the T in LGBTQQI.

Susanna Smith blogged about how the dollar figures for the United Nations Population Fund compare to the budget for defense in Show Us the Money for Women’s Health and Lives

Well-respected journalist and friend to the Coalition Mercedes Sayagues paid homage to HIV activist Lynde Francis’ passing in the post Honoring Lynde Francis—Zimbabwean HIV Activist

Kelly Castagnaro looked at the trouble in Iran with human rights defenders being intimidated and jailed in Pushing Back, Moving Forward: The Struggle for Gender Equality in Iran

Lori Adelman reported back on her experience listening to a conversation at the United Nations between former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. M. Joycelyn Elders and Dr. Padmini Murthy of the International Medical Women’s Association in her post A Matter of Attitude and Articulation: Panelists at the UN Highlight Common Ground in Ongoing Fight for Women’s Domestic and Global Health

Chelsea Ricker offered up a great analysis in her post A Closer Look at the UN Guidelines for Universal Access for MSM and Transgender People

And yes, that is a red velvet cake with cream cheese icing. It was delicious.

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At Sex::Tech last week, I attended two different panels that included discussions about research and work on SMS (short message service, or text messaging) and sexual health services. Texting isn’t something I know a whole lot about from the programmatic and research standpoint. I’m an avid user of text messaging on the personal level but I don’t use it to interact with organizations or services (ok, that’s not totally true, I do subscribe to texts from Umbrella Today). Though this could be partly due to my ignorance of awesome text services, it also probably has to do with the fact that SMS just isn’t being utilized in a widespread way in the United States like it is in other places.

In Africa in particular, the rate of mobile phone usage has grown much more quickly than it has in other places (via Jonathan Hutson’s twitter, @jhutsontweet). Dutch non-profit Text To Change had a presence at Sex::Tech, and their developer Hajo van Beijma, had a lot to say about a sexual health campaign they’re working on in Uganda.

When users opt in to the service, Text To Change sends out a series of questions quizzing the recipient on his or her knowledge of HIV transmission and prevention. The service offers incentives like free mobile minutes to users who answer questions correctly. The service also provides the addresses of nearby health clinics where HIV testing is available.

This is not to say that health service organizations in the United States haven’t come up with similar ideas. Real Talk DC, which also had staff presenting at Sex::Tech, is a good example of a very similar service that is based in the Washington DC metro area.

If you click through to the Text To Change and Real Talk DC websites, you’ll see that the Text For Change site is a lot simpler and less polished. This is due to the fact that high speed internet which can utilize even the little bit of Flash on the Real Talk DC website is not as accessible in Africa as it is in the United States. Mobile phones, however, are everywhere. I would hazard a guess that most visitors to the Text To Change site are not from the population that the service is geared toward, but rather potential funders and other interested parties from Europe and the United States.

One of the questions that this brings up is: what should the efforts toward greater access to technology and health services look like? The digital divide is powerful: as more and more people have access to broadband in the global north, the global south lags behind in access. But if people in the global south are enthusiastically embracing mobile technologies and in some respects skipping over the unwieldy personal computer phase of things, maybe we need to rethink the notion of this divide. The fact remains that some people have access to new technologies and others do not (this difference shouldn’t be glossed over), but access to technology is not the great equalizer. I’m a total tech geek and fangirl of shiny new gadgets and applications, but I don’t think that access to the internet is the solution to all of the world’s ills. Giving people the opportunity to use technologies in the ways they prefer while listening to what they want and need, in online technology as well as reproductive and sexual health technologies, is a much better solution than installing broadband connections everywhere.

Download Hajo’s Sex::Tech powerpoint presentation on Text To Change here. You have to scroll down a bit to find it – he was on a panel called “Can You Hear Me Now? International Mobile Innovations.”

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Today, more than 1000 bloggers are participating in Ada Lovelace Day by blogging about a woman in technology who they admire. Ada Lovelace was one of the world’s first computer programmers.

Over the last two days I’ve been in San Francisco at the Sex::Tech – Focus on Youth conference, which is organized by the Internet Sexuality Information Service (ISIS). This is a really terrific conference that focuses on sexuality education and social media and had a lot of folks from sexual health non-profits in attendance.

There are lots of women I could recognize in this post, but I’m choosing to focus on Deb Levine, who is the executive director of ISIS and has spent a good chunk of her career working with online technologies that make communication about sexual health issues and access to information within the reach of a few clicks.

Deb is one of the founders of Columbia University’s Health Q&A Internet Service Go Ask Alice, the author of The Joy of Cybersex, and teaches a class called “Sexuality and the Internet” at San Francisco State University.

We started talking a few years ago, and when my book Naked on the Internet I did a guest spot in her SFSU class – via Skype. I’ve always been very impressed with Deb’s knowledge and her interesting fusion of sexual health, education, and technology. The projects Deb works on position technology as a tool, a means to an end and not an end in and of itself, which is tough to do because so much of this tech is still shiny and awesome and new.

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This is a liveblog of a session from the Sex::Tech – Focus on Youth conference, held in San Francisco on March 22 & 23, 2009.

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This is a liveblog of a session from the Sex::Tech – Focus on Youth conference, held in San Francisco on March 22 & 23, 2009.

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I’ve been spending Sunday and Monday in San Francisco at the second annual Sex::Tech – Focus on Youth conference, which attracts non-profit, advocacy, youth rights, reproductive health and tech folks from all over the place.

This year I gave a talk about the online work that IWHC is doing and supporting to foster sexuality rights and reproductive health for people offline (IRL = in real life). I spoke about IWHC’s new media projects: videos, our Flickr account, our Facebook causes page, and this here blog. When it came time to talk about what some of our partners are up to internationally, I let our partners speak for themselves. At the beginning of March, when the Commission on the Status of Women was happening at the United Nations in NYC, I was able to grab some video interview time with Ishita Sharma and Ishita Chaudhry of the YP Foundation from India and Bafana Kumalo of Sonke Gender Justice from South Africa.

Here is what they had to say about their utilization of the Internet and the challenges they face:

After my part of the talk, Leandro Vieira dos Santos of Reprolatina in Brazil spoke about the incredible growth of their website since its launch. He did really well despite some anxieties about his English – most of the questions in the Q & A period were for him. Later we had an interesting conversation about online trends: these days, it isn’t enough to have a great, thorough, and informative website as a kind of destination. Youth especially are spending more of their time on Myspace, Facebook, and YouTube than they spend actually browsing out in the wilds of the web. So, like in harm reduction, it’s important to meet people where they’re at. For those of us who’ve worked really hard to create amazing websites, this might mean letting go a bit and engaging in different spaces. But resistance is futile – the social web, a web full of profiles and applications, isn’t going anywhere. Well, at least it isn’t going anywhere until something shiny and new replaces it. In the meantime, moving beyond home pages and into other spaces is key.

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This is a liveblog of a session from the Sex::Tech – Focus on Youth conference, held in San Francisco on March 22 & 23, 2009 – plus a video of the first of the three speakers.

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This is a liveblog of a session from the Sex::Tech – Focus on Youth conference, held in San Francisco on March 22 & 23, 2009.

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