about vozmob

Mobile Voices (vozmob) is a platform for immigrant workers in Los Angeles to create stories about their lives and communities directly from cell phones. Vozmob helps people with limited computer access gain greater participation in the digital public sphere.

The project is a collaboration between the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California (ASC) and the Institute of Popular Education of Southern California (IDEPSCA), a nonprofit organization whose mission is to to create a more humane and democratic society by responding to the needs and problems of disenfranchised people through leadership development and educational programs based on Popular Education methodology.

We have a weekly workshop at IDEPSCA where the popular communication team meets to analyze stories, develop shared knowledge, design the system, and create training materials. The popular communication team is composed of day laborers and a household worker who have been volunteering for IDEPSCA for many years and who take their role of writing their own history very seriously. We also meet each week at USC to develop research and writing about the project. Our content management system is a customized version of Drupal, the popular free and open source software.

Vozmob has received support from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), the Annenberg Program on Online Communities (APOC), the Nokia Research Center, and the MacArthur Foundation.

For more information, contact us!