The Open Mobile Consortium's (OMC) is a new global development community that promise to help organizations working towards the social good to better collaborate and share mobile phone-based technologies. Founding OMC members include Millennium Villages Project, Cell Life, Dimagi, D-Tree, InSTEDD, MobileActive, TextToChange, UNICEF and Ushahidi.

The idea is to leverage mobile technology to better serve the health, humanitarian and development needs of the "bottom billion," the poorest and most disenfranchised people of the world. So, in Africa for example—where there are a over 280 million cell phone subscribers—mobile technology can provide data on food prices to farmers, patient information to remote medical clinics, and help track supplies and logistics.

OMC's taking a different approach to humanitarian and development work, according consortium chairman Robert Kirkpatrick.

"Typically, organizations must compete for funding grants, which frequently leads to 'silo' mentality and hesitation to fully share key technologies," said Kirkpatrick in a statement. "By contrast, we are agreeing to work together to share source code, standards, protocols, approaches and lessons learned. We're even sharing development plans and testing each others' software."

Below are a some mobile tools for collaboration and sharing that the OMC already brought together:

CommCare, a mobile-phone based application that allows community health workers to provide better, more efficient care and improve coordination of community health programs;

Mobilisr, an open source enterprise class mobile messaging platform for NGOs around the world;

Mesh4X, a platform for seamless cross-organizational information sharing between mobile devices, databases, desktop applications, and websites;

RapidSMS, an open source platform allowing for any mobile phone to use SMS to collect data, used in Malawi, Ethiopia and Nigeria to collect information and provide rapid feedback to field workers;

GeoChat, a flexible open source group communications tool that enables mobile field communications and situational awareness during emergencies;

Ushahidi, a web-based platform that any person or organization can use to set up their own way to collect and visualize information.

You can learn more about ther OMC here.