You may have heard that enterprising farmers in East Africa use their mobile phones to set optimal prices as they bring their produce to market; or how fishermen in southern India swap information on where their catch is least available up and down the coast and where they should go to sell it. The social cause space is coming around too, it seems, developing ways to use mobile phones that add up to something more than a two or three-way conversation; these innovations are beginning to add up to real "social capital," notes the Chronicle of Philanthropy blog. The same way that mobile phones are changing the way markets work in developing countries, they have the potential to create social value writ large as a platform for advocates.

"It's about people, community-based groups basically, better leveraging their social capital to do good," says Jeremy Liu, executive director of the Asian Community Development Corporation, in Boston, which has created a service called Speakeasy that enables people with knowledge of a foreign language and a cellphone to become part of a network of volunteer translators. "People talk too much about social capital these days, and it's all in the abstract," he says. "This makes it very concrete."

The Chronicle post mentions "Katrin Verclas, co-founder of MobileActive.org, a network for organizations that use cellphones for activism." At the Skoll Forum for Social Entrepreneurship last week, I had the chance to hear Verclas pitch an idea to create a clearinghouse for new mobile applications. MobileActive would serve as a platform for entrepreneurs -- social and otherwise -- to put out calls to mobile software developers who could take contracts to develop mini-applications that would be useful for specific purposes -- an impromptu event to highlight human trafficking, say. Sort of an open-source, project-based way of building software specifically for advocates and entrepreneurs, who may need something a bit different. Keep an eye on MobileActive -- you may want to do some downloading (or commissioning) soon.