Background: Reliable access to basic services can improve a community's resilience to HIV/AIDS. Accordingly, work is being done to upgrade the physical infrastructure in affected areas, often employing a strategy of decentralised service provision. Spatial characteristics are one of the major determinants in implementing services, even in the smaller municipal areas, and good quality spatial information is needed to inform decision making processes. However, limited funds, technical infrastructure and human resource capacity result in little or no access to spatial information for crucial infrastructure development decisions at local level.

We have good evidence-not least from widespread adoption-that mobile communications can improve the lives of the poor. Building on this success, interventions using mobile technology to tackle development problems have become common in ICT4D. The short message service (SMS), which works on even basic phones, is a popular platform for mobiles for development (m4d) apps and services. This paper documents the historical origins and technical characteristics of SMS as a platform for m4d interventions, demonstrating how inherent technological rigidities in the platform combine with creative adaptation, appropriation and re-use to produce a particular set of affordances and constraints. I argue that optimism about the potential for new technologies to contribute to development should be tempered by awareness that the developing world is seldom the intended audience of technology development. Approaches from the social construction of technology-infrastructure studies and platform studiescontribute to a holistic and historicized understanding of the role of technology in the information and communication technology ecosystem.

This paper uses Callon, et al.’s (2009) hybrid forums model to analyze the development of a campaign of resistance against SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act. Despite broad Congressional support, the bill was defeated by the collective efforts of Internet users, online communities, Web companies and digital rights advocacy groups. Using data from the social news Web site Reddit, I describe the introduction of uncertainty into the narrow economic risk frame favored by proponents of SOPA, and the deployment of a programme of collective evidence–building that Callon, et al. describe as “research in the wild”. The article concludes with a discussion on the implications of Internet activism for the democratic process.

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