Beam me up, Scotty!

We can think of the model of mobile-enabled micro-actions for social impact like this:

• taking resources (e.g. money, information, knowledge)
• breaking them up into bite size chunks (micro-actions)
• transmitting them to participants, who
• reassemble at their end to acquire resources (money, information, knowledge).

This could be a nifty way to short-circuit some top-down, blueprint-based development programmes, in which you never really know where the resources will end up. Instead, the transfer of resources is initiated and controlled by recipients, wherever they may be – using a tool they can carry in their hand.

This reminds me of Star Trek. The Enterprise could send an expensive spacecraft down to deliver a key resource to Kirk, Bones, Spock (and this week's new face who's going to die halfway through the episode). But this resource-carrying vehicle is also resource-hungry, and it might get blocked, intercepted, captured or diverted. Even if it does arrive, it might be too late or in the wrong place as the recipients have had to move.

In fact, filming of the first Star Trek episodes was delayed by problems building the shuttlecraft models. Teleportation was only devised as a less expensive, immediately available alternative to get going with.

Even when the models were available for later episodes, Scotty would often just beam down the exact weapon, medicine, information or other resource that Kirk has asked for via his hand-held 'communicator'. Once you have that sort of immediacy, why go back to doing it the old, ineffective way?

By applying this metaphor to international development, we can easily see what a powerful invention mobile phone based aid could be. Our equivalent of Scotty takes the exact resources needed – as defined by the recipients – converts them into a transferable micro-format, and teleports them directly to the exact target as requested via the device held in their hands. The format is usually information or money to build the person's own internal resourcefulness or acquire access to an external resource and help them prevail in difficult circumstances.