The Urban Labs introduces its first short code to students organizing a Stop TheViolence Talent Show for their community.

In the recent past there have been many examples of the mobilizing and organizing potential of networking platforms. One example, the Easter Sunday flash mobbing in Times Square, left me a little dumbfounded. The notion that a couple of hundred of young black men were going to 42nd street because their networks on twitter suggested it as an activity for Easter Sunday, was intriguing and while I can not condone the violence that occurred, the turn out impressed me. I created The Urban Labs because I want to see this type of organizing outcome coming from social justice organizations, not just gangs in these communities.

The Urban Labs was created to explore organizing tools being offered by technology. We have started working in New York City with The Institute for Juvenile Justice Reform and Alternatives (IJJRA),to test using SMS technology to harness the power of the networks in an organizations sphere of influence. We decided our first test would be having high school students use sms to organize a "Stop The Violence" Talent Show for their community.

Over the past month Urban Labs founding board members Chuck Baker founder of FileBlaze, Rick Borovoy C4FCM scientist at MIT and some great programmers from txtshot have been working with us to create a short code program that will allow each student to track their outreach and will allow IJJRA to send alerts, quizzes and surveys to the database built by the students. Yesterday I went to IJJRA and met with their students from West Brooklyn High School to unveil the first rendition of our SMS deck and get them to use it together.

The recent mobbing in Times Square gave us a great context to talk networks and technology. We asked the students “what would you mob for… “ We started by asking a series of what if’s regarding a text message. The outcomes were quite surprising. Highlighting why networks are important, all of them said that it who sent the text was the number one reason of why they would or would not show up.

When asked if they would show up for a free ipod touch, one student said “ It depended who sent it, I would probably think it was a scheme for something… nothings free.” They also said that they would not show up somewhere if Nike promised to give a dollar to Haiti for every person who shows up. One student, Jon, summed it up this way “Nike has a lot of money, they should just write a check.” Even summer jobs didn’t get all the kids to show…

While this turned into an interesting focus group including popular cultural trends (sorry Jay Z, they wouldn’t show up for a free autograph CD from you). There was one text message that they ALL would show up for, which is a great lesson about motivation. All of them agreed they would show up if it meant closing a prison.

We then introduced them to their short code and we together to create a campaign to test. They first decided that the keyword would be “Power” and then the students all texted Power to 70376. The response they got back was one we created together, “State your name” (don’t ask how we came up with that and why, just know that trust and cynicism is a huge issue). Once these kids saw the response in their phones, the connection was made, their eyes lit up and Corey said “Yo… this is what Hot 97 does! We can do what Hot 97 does.”


Next week this class begins to organize for their talent show. They will be using the SMS code by setting up weekly surveys about juvenile justice and violence in their community. This will allow them to build their organizing chops and learn the power of a good list. I will close here with a concluding quote from one of our students; “This is the way to do it, I don’t want to have to pass out pamphlets, no one reads them anyway…”