Robit: An Extensible Auction-based Market Platform for Challenged Environments Azarias Reda, Quang Duong, Timur Alperovich, Brian Noble, Yidnekachew Haile
There is a need for an efficient mechanism for trading services, goods, and that is somewhat independent on your personal relationship with an Internet kiosk or the mere accessibility to a kiosk.
Robit leverages on Sulula kiosks to provide the end user with valuable data that can be accessed via SMS. Simple SMS based operations are also possible to enable interactivity with the auction application. Voice is included too as a feature.
Robit does not provide a payment system and transactions happen offline.
Open Data Kit: Tools to Build Information Services for Developing Regions Carl Hartung, Yaw Anokwa, Waylon Brunette, Adam Lerer, Clint Tseng, Gaetano Borriello
Open Data Kit (ODK) is an open-source suite of tools that helps organizations author, field, and manage mobile data collection solutions. A good example on an intensive data collection procedure is a patient’s health record, but there are many others in transportation, weather reporting, etc.
Paper-based practice in low-income countries limits the scale, complexity and impact of interventions. Indeed, there is a lag between data being collected and actionable information. On the other hand, important features are lost when using basic technology.
ODK allows for an easy creation of forms by just dragging and dropping objects on the screen. At the Build stage, forms are stored as XForms, that describe the form logic and data schema.
The form can be used on an Adroid smartphone (can run too on JavaRosa) at the Collect stage to gather the desired data, including rich data like sound and video.
At Aggregate the codebase runs locally and in the cloud, can use information stored in XForms as a database, can store of forward data to external systems (e.g. Google Maps or OpenMRS).
Discussion.
Q: What about security and sensitive data? A: This is definitely a topic that is being addressed and that still needs some work to be done.
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Information and Communication Technologies and Development (2010)
MetaMouse: Improving Multi-user Sharing of Existing Educational Applications Kurtis Heimerl, Janani Vasudev, Kelly G. Buchanan, Tapan Parikh, Eric Brewer
We use to design for individual users, but in disadvantaged regions, most computers are shared by several students. This ends up with a single student e.g. controlling the mouse. And it you do not control/use the mouse, the problem is not only that you cannot participate, but that you end up not learning (and not only not learning how to use the mouse).
The solutions so far just allow for multiple mice to be used, but they have problems with most games and educational material.
MetaMouse uses multiple cursors controlled by multiple mice and based on the key idea of “location-voting”: it is assumed that users agree on a button / option on the screen if their cursors are in the same location, thus requiring all (consensus) or most (majority) users to agree.
An evaluation was made with three scenarios: single mouse, MetaMouse based on consensus, and MetaMouse based on majority. Findings show that the majority variant enables laggard students to participate much more than with the traditional mouse variant and a little bit more indeed than with consensus.
MetaMouse, though, created discussion from “come to this” to “why this”, thus making everyone more involved. On the other hand, MetaMouse actively encouraged students to teach their peers. There was less fighting, more participation or equality.
Discussion.
Q: What happened with gender dynamics after the experiment? A: There was no evaluation on that. Nevertheless, the experiment was participated by extremely dominant girls too, so levelling might have worked both ways.
Evaluating an Adaptive Multi-User Educational Tool for Low-Resource Environments Emma Brunskill, Sunil Garg, Clint Tseng, Joyojeet Pal, Leah Findlater
Help teachers provide quality education.
Work on interfaces & HCI proved that it could improve interactions using multiple inputs.
With MultiLearn System each students works on a different exercise using their own numeric keypad. Students compete to be the first to answer 12 questions correctly.
How to keep everyone engaged? How to prevent one student domination the session?
MultiLearn+ personalized the problem selection, including a dynamic selection of the problems according to the (right or wrong) answers provided by the student.
3 scenarios were then compared for analysis: control (group spelling computer game), MultiLearn (non-adaptive grup math game) and MultiLearn+ (adaptive grup math game).
The adaptive condition showed that game dominance was reduced. Reducing dominance is a side benefit of a feature designed to improve educational effectiveness. on the other hand, there was no significant effect of adaptivity or math software over control condition, though there was a good correlation on student performance. In summary, adaptive, multi-user software has potential to help improve education.
Collage: A Presentation Tool for School Teachers Saurabh Panjwani, Aakar Gupta, Navkar Samdaria, Edward Cutrell, Kentaro Toyama
ICTs alone cannot impact learning by much; engaging teachers is necessary. On the other hand, ICTs can help good teachers teach better. How can software be designed to facilitate classroom instruction via a digital projector? What’s a good presentation software for teachers?
PowerPoint and variants were never designed for teaching, but for general-purpose presentations (though it is used by +6M teachers worldwide). Document cameras are a digital substitute for overhead projectors (OHP), but they can not be programmed and they are quite costly.
Collage aims at being specifically designed for teaching in schools.
A first analysis of urban public and private schools in India showed that teachers used intensively paper and the blackboard, they had a strong desire to use PCs for teaching and, despite the desire,usage was low, especially because of lack of tools to prepare content.
Collage has few features, but it is very easy to use and even allows real time authoring. Indeed, textbook scans proved to be highly beneficial, especially because of a better recall of visual information.
Key takeaways:
Using paper in digital presentations is valuable. Both teachers and students seem to benefit.
Teachers like to author content in real time. Collage caters to this liking.
Deployment of Collage still a challenges. Content assembly takes time, and using it has the associated hardware cost of the PC and the projector.
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Information and Communication Technologies and Development (2010)
The focus on the ‘development’ part in ICTD: Need to distinguish research on ICT in developing countries and research on ICT for development. The ‘for development’ part is whehter ICT help, contribute or are explicitly aimed at achieving development.
Need to theorise the meaning of ‘development’: what is development? It is not only about basic needs, although they matter. And it is nor about about technology as a silver bullet: we tend to celebrate what’s new.
It is good to keep ICT4D multidisciplinary, in part because it forces us to define what we are doing, and define it in terms that are understandable for people of all disciplines. And this includes defining what we understand by development.
Multidisciplinarity is also about drawing theory from multiple disciplines, carry out joint research studies. One of the problems, though, is that publishing still is discipline-focused.
Above all, we need strategic development focus, policy-oriented research. Strategy should be the starting point, and then embed in it whatever technology is needed to make it possible. A strategic approach is broader, more comprehensive, and thus more likely to make a sustainable, bigger impact, a real change. Strategy, of course, must include the communities it is aimed to.
Strategic research is about building infrastructures (e.g. HISP on health), promoting social justice (e.g. SMS and mobile activsim), supporting economic activity for the poor (e.g. M-PESA), providing access to global markets and resources (e.g. Jordan’s approach to ICT-led development), new IT-enabled models (e.g. virtual economies), etc.
An aspect that deserves special attention is the gender issue. Though there is strong evidence that mobiles ’empower’ women in a number of ways (e.g. enabling economic activity), old male-dominated hierarchies persist and the use of mobiles for economic activity does not necessarily enhance women’s status in the community.
Discussion.
Q: designing for people with abilities is actually designing for everyone, not only disabled people but people with low literacy or cultural levels, etc. A: Agreed.
Ismael Peña-López: isn’t ICT-led development yet another iteration of what happened with oil in Arabic countries, or coffee in Latin America, where few get rich and multiplier effects upon the rest of the economi are very little? A: agreed. But, just because of that, and because many countries are notwithstanding promoting such policies, this is a topic that needs being researched in the field of ICT4D.
The Web is about people — enabled by technology —, that create networks by linking. Linking is a conscious act that can be analysed: the Web Science Trust is aimed at scientifically analysing how the Web is build, what are the consequences of this or that link, how are people related by means of linked content.
Getting the Internet is not only about getting connected, but about being potentially able to access all good things of life.
It is very important to get people do things locally. It is not about localizing foreign content, of importing services… it is about people doing things home, about people blogging, chatting, being themselves on the Net and doing things. Development starts with local capacity. It is about local ownership, low cost bandwidth and low bandwidth-demanding communications, about local content again and again.
If open data are good for developed countries, why is there no more people pushing for open data in developing countries? It is in developing countries, with usually lower quality democracies, where transparency and accountability are more required. And this includes several activities that developed countries’ governments and international organizations perform in developing countries too.
Open data is about:
Put the data on the website.
Data is structured and is machine readable.
Open format and metadata: XML, RDF.
Data is linkable, with a unique resource identifier.
Link your data to provide context.
Indeed, open standards are key not only for government data, but for many other data like education and all ICT-enabled learning, or all business solutions, especially in developing countries where costs of ownership and costs of technological change may be much higher than in more competitive economies.
We still think of mobile phones as mainly voice devices. Data (data plans) are an add-on, you have to ask for it and, of course, pay extra for it. Notwithstanding, having data on the phone is a huge leap forward. Being able to transmit data, easily, quickly, ubiquitously should be the norm, not the exception. And, in fact, this has become technically possible at derisory costs in comparison with the past. Freeing (actuallly) low bandwidth Internet access would trigger the demand without putting at stake the sustainability of the network or of the Internet Service Providers. Mobile data plans should be free for everyone.
And what is incredible in this field is how everything integrates. And when it comes to the Internet, all countries are developing countries.
Discussion.
Q: Major shift in the Web in the following years? A: Mobility and much more data. The Web as a platform will definitely beat desktop/laptop computing power.
Q: What are the limits of Open Government? Wikileaks? A: Open data is actually data that the government has decided to make public. Then, we have to differentiate between transparency and privacy and (required) secrecy or stealing data. How do we define those concepts and what are their boundaries that is a difficult to answer question. Probably there’s both the need for secrecy and the need for a whistleblower.
Salma Abbasi: who’s to decide what is or what is not to be disclosed on the Net? Who’s to rate the content on the Net? A: Everyone should be able to rate the content they find on the Net. On the other hand, you can hire someone/some service to do that for you. So the default should be “all available” and let each one decide what is for them or for their children.
Douglas Namale of Map Kibera asking question of Tim Berners-Lee on internet content & governance
Ugo Vallauri: What is the future of the mobile web, beyond what we just see now in most mobiles? Stéphane Boyera: We are seing, at the same time, a boost of a mobile Internet and a tethering of the Internet in mobile apps and mobile app stores (e.g. iPhone apps). Berners-Lee: the thing is that the backbone is not closed, tethering is not mandatory. Open standards will allow anyone, any device to use specific data or a specific application. So, we have to encourage an open mobile web.
Richard Heeks: openness, transparency and accountability… where is the responsibility to be put? Stéphane Boyera: we have to begin with openness first, open nets is the first step. This will disclose lots of possibilities for people to perform actions upon those open data. Tim Berners-Lee: The value of presenting data open itself is very high. And the possibility to mash them up is incredibly interesting.
Q: What is the future of the Web with concepts like the Internet of things, augmented reality, the semantic web, etc.? A: The future is linked data. It does not seem that it will happen outside of the web with new languages different from the markup languages (or their evolutions) that we have now. So the web may change radically, but the essence of linked data will remain.
Looking Beyond ‘Information Provision’: The Importance of Being a Kiosk Operator in the Sustainable Access in Rural India (SARI) Project, Tamil Nadu, India Janaki Srinivasan
How has changed the life of the women that operate information kiosks in India?
Information kiosks provide information on agriculture, prices, government services, etc. especially to reduce information asymmetry in the population.
Do info kiosks actually end up providing information to everybody in a community? (IIITB, 2005)
Does provision of information naturally improved socio-economic conditions? (Gopakumar, 2004)
Is information provision the main role player of info kiosks in practice?
This research puts the stress on the last point.
The project focuses on information asymmetry framed as the problem and information provision as the solution. In this framework, ICTs are the tools that enable the solution.
Kiosk operators have many duties and interactions that go beyond mere service provision: interact with other operators, with elected leaders, with residents, bureaucrats, domain experts, and with the Dhan for meetings and training sessions.
At the e-Government level, the kiosk has several objectives such as information provision (schemes, procedures, records) and improving state-vilage resident interactions (transparency, efficiency).
Outcomes for kiosk operators:
Seeing the state (and other domains) differently: awareness (schemes, procedures, techniques, who’s who), interaction (frequency, diversity, learning by doing, coping, dealing, negotiating).
Being seen by the village differently: status in the community (“girl with the computer”, “girl for certificates”).
Discussion
Q: So, the research showed that there were a lot of unpredicted consequences/outcomes for kiosk operators, but… what happened with the intended outcomes? A: We found that they were not in conflict and, actually, they were mutually reinforced.
The Social Meaning of ICTs: Patterns of Technology Adoption and Usage in Context Cynthia Putnam, Beth Kolko
3 rounds survey (2006, 2007, 2008) in four countries in Central Asia to compare Internet users in that region with US Internet users (using for those data from the Pew Internet Life survey).
Two methodology:
Technology acceptance model (TAM): external variables determine perceived userfulness and ease of use, that determine attitude, intentions and effective usage.
Diffusion of Innovations (DOI): characteristic of the technology, diffusion channels of how technology is communicated, time and social assistance. These issues define 5 characteristics of an innovation: relative advantage, complexity or ease of use, compatibility with existing values, trial-ability and observability.
Data (2008) showed that for Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan most of Internet users were innovators and early adopters, while in the US, at that time (PEW data for 2007) there already were many laggards now using the Internet.
Predictors were calculated with income and other variables and the resultant statistic proved to be a good predictor on who would be online in Kyrgyzstan or Kazakhstan at a specific time. Internet users share demographic similarities when compared to non-users. On the other hand, usage is also pretty similar between countries and within profiles.
Discussion
Jim Murphy states that there should be much more focus (work) on the context and in the framework where all this technology adoption if framed into.
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Information and Communication Technologies and Development (2010)
Mobile Divides: Gender, Socioeconomic Status, and Mobile Phone Use in Rwanda Joshua Blumenstock, Nathan Eagle
Rwanda: 10M people, 165th in GDP, huge growth in mobile phones in the past decade, now with 1.5M users.
Anonymous call detail records (CDR) were complemented with a structured phone survey.
Results show disparities in access. Phone users are very different from “normal” people. in general, they are the “better off” members of society: better educated, older, larger households, wealthy (roughly twice as wealthy in average).
There are also disparities in use: rich and poor use their phones very differently. Rich ones have been using it almost twice longer than poor one, larger average lenghts of call, rich people are more central to the network, more credit used per day, etc.
Men and women spend the same amount of time on phone per day, but women receive more calls, and each call lasts longer. Women are more likely to share their phone. Same with social networks, but women make more calls to family and fewer to friends or make less business-related calls. On the other hand, though daily mobile baking patterns are similar, men send more money during holidays.
Discussion
Q: Are findings consistent along time? A: There does not seem to be a huge change in major trends and characteristics. Though the research does not have panel data, in general terms the actual findings seem to apply in the past and, very likely, in the nearest future.
Research and Reality: Using Mobile Messages to Promote Maternal Health in Rural India
Divya Ramachandran, Vivek Goswami, John Canny
Global maternal mortality is still very high in many African and Asia countries, topping up to 0.5% in India. How can mobile phones and SMS contribute in reducing these figures?
Messages were designed with a persuasive structure to demystify some wrong believes and encourage pregnant women to follow healthy habits. Messages were accompanied with the personal assistance of a health worker.
Results show than, in comparison with a control group, text messages did have a somewhat positive impact in health workers’ work and in pregnant women. Health workers of the same caste as clients were significantly more persuasive (e.g. they succeeded in making their clients take their iron tablets).
Discussion.
[I would personally like to know whether the control group was a group with no supporting material or a group with alternate (e.g. brochures, television, etc.) support material? If there was not supporting material, why go SMS instead of simply paper? Was the impact, thus, the supporting material or technology? Or the intensive participation/involvement of the researchers in the field?]
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Information and Communication Technologies and Development (2010)
