The mobile phone storytelling platform Vojo, which was developed by the Civic Media Lab, may be familiar to many folks from the PartNews community. It was developed after another mobile phone story telling platform VozMob achieved such success that it could not serve the needs of the various interested parties and as a result Vojo was generated. Unlike VozMob, which was developed with a specific community in mind, Vojo is intended to be a flexible platform that can be utilized by any organization to match their activist and storytelling needs.

The platform is great for organizations looking to collect stories from a lot of participants. It is easy to engage with as a user or organizer and allows people with no training on the specifics of the technology to share their stories for a specific cause or issue. Furthermore participants do not need to have a smartphone which makes the platform highly accessibly to a variety of different communities.

To use Vojo an organization would set up a profile and then be provided with a phone number. They share that phone number with their participants who then either 1) call in to leave a voicemail with their story or 2) send a text message with their story. Additionally Vojo has the ability to geolocate the information sent by the participant so that the organization can map the stories as well.

Setting up an account is very easy and can be done in less than 10 minutes. After the account is set up all stories that come in to that organizations phone number are aggregated in one page and can be downloaded to be edited or uploaded to another site.

You can find examples of what different organizations have done with Vojo at the website.