TXTmob was initially intended as a tool for activists to share information and coordinate actions during political protests—particularly for the sorts of decentralized “convergences” that characterize modern anti-globalization demonstrations. The goal of the project was to provide communications infrastructures that support a broad range of activists’ needs and enable fluid, spontaneous actions. In practice, TXTmob has been used in a variety of ways during recent protests, orchestrating “flashmob”-type actions (in which thousands of protesters converge on a location with very little notice), reporting on police movements, and exchanging messages of solidarity between activists in the street and their supporters around the world. During the RNC, Indymedia reporters and legal observers relied heavily on TXTmob for up-to-the-minute information about the action in the streets.

TXTmob is now evolving to support other kinds of grassroots activities. It was employed by getout-the-vote organizers during the recent US presidential election, and has been adopted by a number of local organizations across the US who are interested in text messaging as a means to communicate with their members and constituents. As we approach the open-source release of the TXTmob source code (made possible with help from our friends at openflows.org), we anticipate future development to focus on integration with open-source content management systems (CMS). TXTmob was developed by the Institute for Applied Autonomy (an anonymous collective of activists, artists, and technologists) in collaboration with activist groups organizing protests at the US Democratic and Republican National Conventions in the summer of 2004. It was subsequently used by activists during the Ukraine’s Orange Revolution and during the 2005 inauguration of George W. Bush. TXTmob is currently maintained by Tad Hirsch, a researcher at MIT’s Media Lab. Nearly 11,000 registered users people currently use TXTmob for a variety of purposes ranging from politics to poetry to party planning.