2012

Marshini Chetty, Richard Banks, A.J. Bernheim Brush, Jonathan Donner, and Rebecca Grinter, "You're Capped!" Understanding the Effects of Bandwidth Caps on Broadband Use in the Home, in CHI 2012, ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, May 2012

Bandwidth caps, a limit on the amount of data users can upload and download in a month, are common globally for both home and mobile Internet access. With caps, each bit of data consumed comes at a cost against a monthly quota or a running tab. Yet, relatively little work has considered the implications of this usage-based pricing model on the user experience. In this paper, we present results from a qualitative study of households living with bandwidth caps. Our findings suggest home users grapple with three uncertainties regarding their bandwidth usage: invisible balances, mysterious processes, and multiple users. We discuss how these uncertainties impact their usage and describe the potential for better tools to help monitor and manage data caps. We conclude that as a community we need to cater for users under Internet cost constraints.

Preeti Mudliar, Jonathan Donner, and William Thies, Emergent Practices Around CGNet Swara, A Voice Forum for Citizen Journalism in Rural India, in Proceedings of the International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development, ACM, March 2012

Rural communities in India are often underserved by the mainstream media. While there is a public discourse surrounding the issues they face, this dialogue typically takes place on television, in newspaper editorials, and on the Internet. Unfortunately, participation in such forums is limited to the most privileged members of society, excluding those individuals who have the largest stake in the conversation. This paper examines an effort to foster a more inclusive dialogue by means of a simple technology: an interactive voice forum. Called CGNet Swara, the system enables callers to record messages of local interest, and listen to messages that others have recorded. Messages are also posted on the Internet, as a supplement to an existing discussion forum. In the first 21 months of its deployment in India, CGNet Swara has logged over 70,000 phone calls and released 1,100 messages. To understand the emergent practices surrounding this system, we conduct interviews with 42 diverse stakeholders, including callers, bureaucrats, and members of the media. Our analysis contributes to the understanding of voice-based media as a vehicle for social inclusion in remote and underprivileged populations.

McCarthy, Ted, Pal, Joyojeet, Cutrell, Edward, Marballi, and Tanvi, An analysis of screen reader use in India, in Proceedings of ICTD 2012, the 5th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development , ACM, 2012

2011

Nimmi Rangaswamy and Nithya Sambasivan, Cutting chai, Jugaad, and Here Pheri: Towards a UbiComp for a Global community, in Personal and Ubiquitous Computing , vol. 15, no. 6, pp. 553-564, Springer Verlag, June 2011

This paper attempts to re-imagine ubiquitous computing and technologies for populations in resourcepoor, digitally unstable, and diversely literate environments. Extending UbiComp’s frame of reference to include any ICT with a ubiquitous presence, we articulate how technologies are adopted, accessed, used, and diffused in three urban slums of India. We showcase important local practices surrounding technology diffusion and their widespread implications for entrenching ICT use through sharing, learning, training, renewing, and extending use and access. We do this by discussing three main processes at the intersection of technology consumption, resource constraints, and cultural production specific to low-income communities in India: Cutting Chai or sharing technology ownership and maintenance to cut costs, Jugaad or workarounds in the face of resource constraints, and Here Pheri or gray market activity that subvert legal business processes. We also suggest a few design principles to provoke new kinds of inquiry and practice in the design and implementation of UbiComp for a global community.

William Thies, Aishwarya Lakshmi Ratan, and James Davis, Paid Crowdsourcing as a Vehicle for Global Development, ACM CHI 2011 Workshop on Crowdsourcing and Human Computation , May 2011

By connecting remote workers to a global marketplace, paid crowdsourcing has the potential to improve earnings and livelihoods in poor communities around the world. However, there is a long way to go before realizing this potential. To date, most workers on microtasking platforms come from relatively well-off backgrounds, and there has been limited impact on low-income individuals. In this position paper, we outline a research agenda to extend the benefits of informal, paid microtasking to low-income workers in developing countries. This goal will require research along multiple fronts, spanning the crowdsourcing platforms themselves, their impact upon users’ livelihoods, and their scalability to large populations. While there are many challenges to overcome, the rewards are great. We believe that a new focus on low-income workers is critically important to unlock the potential scale and impact of paid crowdsourcing platforms.

Jonathan Donner, Shikoh Gitau, and Gary Marsden, Exploring mobile-only internet use: results of a training study in urban South Africa, in International Journal of Communication, vol. 5, pp. 574–597, 11 April 2011

Using an ethnographic action research approach, the study explores the challenges, practices, and emergent framings of mobile-only Internet use in a resource-constrained setting. We trained eight women in a nongovernmental organization’s collective in South Africa, none of whom had used a personal computer, how to access the Internet on mobile handsets they already owned. Six months after training, most continued to use the mobile Internet for a combination of utility, entertainment, and connection, but they had encountered barriers, including affordability and difficulty of use. Participants’ assessments mingled aspirational and actual utility of the channel with and against a background of socioeconomic constraints. Discussion links the digital literacy perspective to the broader theoretical frameworks of domestication, adaptive structuration, and appropriation.

Marion Walton and Jonathan Donner, Read-Write-Erase: Mobile-mediated publics in South Africa’s 2009 elections, pp. 117-132, Transaction Publishers, 4 April 2011

This paper describes four kinds of mobile mediated political participation observed during the 2009 national elections in South Africa: (1) SMS ‘wars’ in the run-up to the election; (2) .mobi websites hosted by political parties; and the political content included on (3) the mobile social network Mig33 and excluded from (4) its counterpart/competitor, MXit. We discuss the failure of all four forms to support the emergence of a networked or mediated public, and consider how particular properties of the mobile internet, vs. the ‘traditional’ internet, are partially responsible

Marshini Chetty, Richard Banks, AJ Brush, Jonathan Donner, and Rebecca E. Grinter, While the Meter is Running: Computing in a Capped World, in Interactions Volume 18, Issue 2, vol. 18, ACM, 1 March 2011

What happens when your Internet use is palpably constrained? What happens when you only have a fixed amount of bandwidth per month and where every byte you access uses up this precious resource? Or worse, what happens when you have to share that bandwidth pool with the three other Internet users in your household? These are the questions raised when we begin thinking about how users interact with the Internet in metered bandwidth situations. By answering these questions, we can help Web developers, interaction and application designers, and even Internet service providers (ISPs) customize their experiences for situations in which each byte delivered has a monetary value. In this article, we report initial insights from our experiences studying how households in South Africa use metered bandwidth.

Akhil Mathur, Divya Ramachandran, Edward Cutrell, and Ravin Balakrishnan, An exploratory study on the use of camera phones and pico projectors in rural India, in Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2011

Nithya Sambasivan, Julie Weber, and Edward Cutrell, Designing a phone broadcasting system for urban sex workers in India, in Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2011

Mohit Jain, Jeremy Birnholtz, Edward Cutrell, and Ravin Balakrishnan, Exploring display techniques for mobile collaborative learning in developing regions, in Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2011

Rajeev Rastogi, Ed Cutrell, Manish Gupta, Ashok Jhunjhunwala, Ramkumar Narayan, and Rajeev Sanghal, Connecting the next billion web users, in Proceedings of the 20th international conference companion on World wide web, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2011

Edward Cutrell, Context and design in ICT for global development, in UN Chronicle. United Nations in a united world., United Nations, 2011

Saurabh Panjwani, Abhinav Uppal, and Edward Cutrell, Script-agnostic reflow of text in document images, in Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2011

Edward Cutrell, Technology for emerging markets at MSR india, in Proceedings of the ACM 2011 conference on Computer supported cooperative work, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2011

Azarias Reda, Saurabh Panjwani, and Edward Cutrell, Hyke: a low-cost remote attendance tracking system for developing regions, in Proceedings of the 5th ACM workshop on Networked systems for developing regions, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2011

Azarias Reda, Edward Cutrell, and Brian Noble, Towards improved web acceleration: leveraging the personal web, in Proceedings of the 5th ACM workshop on Networked systems for developing regions, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2011

2010

Nicole Bidwell, Ann Light, Ilda Ladeira, Jameila Roberson, Shikou Gitau, Nimmi Rangaswamy, and Nithya Sambasivan, Gender Matters: Female Perspectives in ICT4D Research, 4th IEEE/ACM Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and International Development (ICTD) 2010, London, UK, IEEE, December 2010

Olga Morawczynski, David Hutchful, Nimmi Rangaswamy, and Edward Cutrell, The Bank Account is not Enough: Examining Strategies for Financial Inclusion in India, in Proc. of the 4th IEEE/ACM Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and International Development (ICTD) 2010, London, UK, IEEE, IEEE, December 2010

The Indian government has undertaken an ambitious strategy for financial inclusion (FI) as part of its development agenda. With the aid of technology-enabled branchless banking initiatives, this drive has been successful in regards to extending access—nearly 60% of the Indian population is banked. However, empirical evidence suggests that the majority of bank accounts are not being utilized, especially not by the poor who are the target of FI. This paper examines the reasons for such underutilization and also recommends ways to improve the FI drive. The paper contributes to the strand of ICTD literature that focuses on FI in two ways. First, it makes clear that the measures of FI success should not be focused on access alone. The real impact comes from appropriate usage of these accounts. Second, it argues that financial education (FE) should be integrated into the FI drive. This would help the poor to more effectively exploit their links to formal financial services and decrease their reliance on costly informal alternatives.

Shashank Khanna, Aishwarya Ratan, James Davis, and William Thies, Evaluating and Improving the Usability of Mechanical Turk for Low-Income Workers in India, in Proc. of DEV 2010, ACM, December 2010

While platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk have generated excitement as a potential source of income in developing regions, to date there remains little evidence that such opportunities have transformed livelihoods for low-income workers. In this study, we analyze the usability barriers that prevent those with basic digital literacy skills from accomplishing simple tasks on Mechanical Turk. Based on our observations, we design new user interfaces that reduce the barriers to task comprehension and execution. Via a study of 49 low-income workers in urban India, we demonstrate that new design elements – including simplified user interfaces, simplified task instructions, and language localization – are absolutely necessary to enable low-income workers to participate in and earn money using Mechanical Turk. We synthesize our findings into a set of design recommendations, as well as a realistic analysis of the potential for microtasking sites to deliver supplemental income to lower-income communities.

Jonathan Donner, Framing M4D: The Utility of Continuity and the Dual Heritage of “Mobiles and Development”, in The Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing Countries, vol. 44, no. 3, December 2010

The paper suggests that research on the role of mobile telephony for socioeconomic development (M4D) draws on two frames. One frame stresses the relative freedom of telephone users to do whatever they choose. The other stresses how technologies and technology-led interventions are embedded in recursive, context specific relationships with user communities. Together these frames support M4D’s “dual heritage”. After detailing current M4D archetypes representing each heritage, the paper introduces a conceptual and practical synthesis, that is, large-scale platforms for distributed, semi-constrained interaction. This paper considers two examples of such platforms – MXit, South Africa’s mobile social networking service, and M-PESA, Kenya’s mobile money transfer system – including both anticipated and unanticipated consequences of operating “at scale” and beyond the confines of a controlled M4D intervention. Finally, this paper introduces implications of the dual heritage and of the rise of hybrid platforms for research and practice.

Bidwell, Nicole, Light, Ann, Ladeira, Ilda, Roberson, Jameila, Gitau, Shikou, Rangaswamy, Nimmi, Sambasivam, and Nithya, Gender Matters: Female Perspectives in ICT4D Research, 4th IEEE/ACM Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and International Development (ICTD) 2010, London, UK, IEEE, December 2010

We present our experience of gender as female ICT4D researchers. We highlight our field experiences and comment on our perceptions of how being a woman and performing our female identity has influenced our own ICT4D research. We discuss how gender tensions are further compounded by the researcher’s own physical and social characteristics, such as race, age, social class, and skin color. We apply the lens of reflexivity and performativity to examine critically and explore analytically our field experiences. We end with practical observations about our collective experience.

Kiran Gaikwad, Gaurav Paruthi, and William Thies, Interactive DVDs as a Platform for Education, in IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development, IEEE, December 2010

While many technologies remain out-of-reach for households in the developing world, one exception to this rule is that of entertainment technologies. Even in poor communities, there is a strong drive to own devices such as TVs and, increasingly, DVD players. Though they are typically used for video content, ordinary DVD players also support rich interactivity and programmability, including the capability to browse over 100,000 menus using the remote control. Our vision is to leverage these capabilities to support interactive applications – such as encyclopedias, language tutoring, and medical decision systems – without any dependence on a computer. As a step towards this vision, in this paper we explore two novel applications of interactive DVDs in the context of education. The first is as a platform for PowerPoint presentations, where TVDVDs have the potential to replace computers while reducing costs and improving teacher familiarity. The second is as a platform for children’s books, where one can provide thousands of books on DVD for the same price as printing a single book. We evaluate each of these solutions – which have already found uptake with NGOs – via case studies in Indian schools.

M. Bernardine Dias, Mohammed Kaleemur Rahman, Saurabh Sanghvi, and Kentaro Toyama, Experiences with Lower-Cost Access to Tactile Graphics in India, First Annual Symposium on Computing for Development (ACM DEV 2010), London, UK, ACM, December 2010

Tactile graphics allow the visually impaired to perceive two-dimensional imagery, which is an essential part of experiencing the world and learning several subjects such as science and geography. In the developed world, such graphics are available to blind students from an early age, and students grow up familiar with tactile representations of images. The production of tactile graphics, however, requires extensive manual labor by sighted people, or costly graphical braille printers. Thus, blind students in developing regions often grow up without any exposure to these learning aids and as a consequence are often prevented from studying the sciences. In this work, we explore the potential of enhancing access to tactile graphics in the developing world through a software tool that can convert images to a form that can be printed as tactile images using lower-cost braille text printers. We investigate the effectiveness of this tool in producing different types of tactile graphics, and also explore the impact of these graphics on students and visually impaired teachers at a school for the blind in India. We find that our subjects are highly enthusiastic about tactile graphics, are quickly able to understand them, and learn how to write the alphabet using them.

Aishwarya Lakshmi Ratan, Sunandan Chakraborty, Pushkar V. Chitnis, Kentaro Toyama, Keng Siang Ooi, Matthew Phiong, and Mike Koenig, Managing Microfinance with Paper, Pen and Digital Slate, in Proc. of ICTD 2010, IEEE, December 2010

India’s extensive Self-Help Group (SHG) microfinance network brings formal savings and credit services to 86 million poor households. Yet, the inability to maintain high-quality records remains a persistent weakness in SHG functioning. We study this problem and present a financial record management application built on a low-cost digital slate prototype. The solution directly accepts handwritten input on ordinary paper forms and provides immediate electronic feedback. A field trial with 200 SHG members in rural India shows that the use of the digital slate solution results in shorter data recording time, fewer incorrect entries, and more complete records. The paper-pen-slate solution performs as well as, and is strongly preferred over, a purely electronic alternative. The digital slate solution is able to comfortably move between paper and digital worlds, achieving efficiency and quality gains while catering to the preferences and budgets of low-income low-literate clients.

Revi S Sterling and Nimmi Rangaswamy, Constructing Informed Consent in ICT4D Research, 4th IEEE/ACM Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and International Development (ICTD) 2010, London, UK, IEEE, December 2010

The field of Information and Communication Technology for Development includes participatory and action research pilots with a research and change agenda. Such ICT4D research does not fit traditional models for evaluating community risk and benefit. Looking at the history of informed consent and international development, uses of informed consent in development scenarios, and at efforts specific to ICTD research, we present how informed consent is currently addressed, as well as the inadequacy of adapting present academic informed consent models to development. Informed consent in ICT4D research provides academic rigor to the field, helps establish a fair, moral and candid relationship with the community to set expectations, and standards for other intervention-based research efforts. We suggest practical recommendations for models that contribute to community involvement and trust, while offering the target community an opportunity to negotiate their level of participation

Ilda Ladeira and Edward Cutrell, Teaching with storytelling: An investigation of narrative videos for skills training, 4th IEEE/ACM Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and International Development (ICTD) 2010, London, UK, IEEE, December 2010

We present a study on using storytelling for teaching skills to low-income workers in the developing world. Taking a cue from work on using dramatized stories and video to promote technology use and agricultural and HIV/AIDS education, we investigated storytelling’s ability for teaching low-literacy populations. We created a series of videos to teach domestic workers in urban India bed-making and vacuuming. We tested the effect on learning of a) embedding instructional content in narratives and b) adding motivational content on the benefits of learning these skills. We compared:1) instruction-only videos, 2) instructional videos book-ended with voice-overs describing skills’ benefits, 3) combined instructional and narrative videos showing no skill learning benefits; and 4) combined instructional and narrative videos which portray benefits for learning a skill. Narrative framing and motivational content each improved learning, but combining them resulted in dramatic improvement.

David Hutchful, Akhil Mathur, Apurva Joshi, and Edward Cutrell, Cloze: An Authoring Tool for Teachers with Low Computer Proficiency, in 4th IEEE/ACM Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and International Development (ICTD) 2010, London, UK, IEEE, IEEE, December 2010

The Multiple Mice project demonstrated the financial and learning benefits of enabling students in resource-constrained schools to share one computer. In India, the lack of Multiple Mice authoring tools coupled with teachers‘ low computer proficiency means little or no customized content is created. This is problematic as the capability to create digital content enables teachers to prepare digital lessons that address the particular learning needs of their students. In this paper, we report on a 34-week field study in three Indian peri-urban schools. We identify key issues impeding digital content creation by low computer proficiency teachers. We also present an authoring framework, Cloze, which successfully enables these teachers to create content for MultiPoint applications. Finally, we recommend guidelines for designing authoring tools for teachers with low computer proficiency.

Indrani Medhi, Raghu Menon, Edward Cutrell, and Kentaro Toyama, Beyond Strict Illiteracy: Abstracted Learning Among Low-Literate Users, 4th IEEE/ACM Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and International Development (ICTD) 2010, London, UK, IEEE, December 2010

One of the greatest challenges in designing applications for developing communities is that potential users may have limited literacy. Past work in UI design for low-literate users has focused on illiteracy as the inability to read per se, with little recognition to other cognitive differences between literate and non-literate users. In this paper, we investigate the correlation between literacy and cognitive skills for conceptual abstraction using video-based skills training. We performed a controlled experiment that compared 28 non-literate and 28 literate participants from low-income communities in India. Results confirm that both the groups did worse when a skill required generalization from instructional material, compared with the case when instructional material was specifically and exactly tailored to the skill. Literate participants did better than non-literate participants all-around on this learning task. In addition, we found that diversification of examples within instructions helped literate participants in transfer of learning, but did not help non-literate participants. We conclude that ICT UI and content for low-literate users should be sensitive to issues beyond strict illiteracy, to additional cognitive differences among these users.

Sterling, S R, Rangaswamy, and N, Constructing Informed Consent in ICT4D Research , 4th IEEE/ACM Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and International Development (ICTD) 2010, London, UK, IEEE, December 2010

The field of Information and Communication Technology for Development includes participatory and action research pilots with a research and change agenda. Such ICT4D research does not fit traditional models for evaluating community risk and benefit. Looking at the history of informed consent and international development, uses of informed consent in development scenarios, and at efforts specific to ICTD research, we present how informed consent is currently addressed, as well as the inadequacy of adapting present academic informed consent models to development. Informed consent in ICT4D research provides academic rigor to the field, helps establish a fair, moral and candid relationship with the community to set expectations, and standards for other intervention-based research efforts. We suggest practical recommendations for models that contribute to community involvement and trust, while offering the target community an opportunity to negotiate their level of participation

Kevin Donovan and Jonathan Donner, A note on the availability (and importance) of pre-paid mobile data in Africa, in Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Mobile Communication Technology for Development, Karlstad University Studies, November 2010

We argue that clear and easy access to prepay data will be as essential to the widespread adoption and use of the mobile internet in developing countries as access to prepay airtime was to the adoption of the mobile telephone. In late 2009, we conducted a desk assessment of the availability of pre-pay (pay-as-you-go) data from major operators in 53 African countries. We identified at least one operator in 38 countries which offered pre-pay data, and in 3 cases we could determine that no prepay data was available. Information available from many operators was vague, incomplete, and hard to obtain, suggesting that a threshold of mainstream promotion of the service by operators may not yet have been crossed. We suggest topics for further research, both on the demand and supply sides of the prepaid data equation

Rangaswamy, N, Nair, and S, The Mobile Phone Store Ecologyin a Mumbai Slum Community:Hybrid Networks for Enterprise, in Information Technologies and International Development, vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 51-65, November 2010

We report on an ethnographic study of mobile stores’ business practices in a slum community in Mumbai. The basic mobile phone store that sells small “talktime” (the period of billing per call) is graduating to repair, formatting, and maintenance of phone hardware and software. Central to this process of store expansion and skill building is the store entrepreneur. He forges relations with procurement channels and mediating agents, renewing existing ties and expanding business loops by interweaving social and business networks. We refer to these aggregations as “hybrid networks,” and we highlight their maintenance as a critical resource governing enterprise potential. By evoking the ecology of the mobile phone business in an urban slum setting, the paper draws attention to the following concepts: 1) the unique potential of ICTs as an entrepreneurial commodity, 2) the micro- and small enterprise (MSE) as a functional model for local technology immersions, and 3) local social networks as pivotal in expanding technology adoption and aligning with the needs of the low-income consumer. In essence, we locate the small mobile phone store as the site of convergence for the commercial expansion of mobile phone technology.

Rangaswamy and N, Ethnography of Photo-Mixing: The Digital Photo Studio in India, Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference, September 2010

For almost a decade, the analog photo studio in India began to change technology tracks to digitize the business of making and printing photos. Not unusually, the demand for photos increased while client taste for an emerging market of photo-situations proliferated. There were several reasons for a studio owner to go digital. A Bangalore studio owner told us “…it was the digital environment. It was better, faster, precise technology. To stay in competition we had to adopt... From taking photos to printing, enlarging, mixing, merging, touching-up, giving background, restoration, giving colour to black and white everything is digitized”. We attempt to thematize and contextualize the following 1. The range of photographic mixing and makeover in the emerging client market for digital studios 2. The specific kinds of trick photography 3. The immense potential these specific preference hold for customized design implications.

Saurabh Panjwani and Edward Cutrell, Usably Secure, Low-Cost Authentication for Mobile Banking, in Symposium On Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS) 2010, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., July 2010

This paper explores user authentication schemes for banking systems implemented over mobile phone networks in the developing world. We analyze an authentication scheme currently deployed by an Indian mobile banking service provider which uses a combination of PINs and printed codebooks for authenticating users. As a first step, we report security weaknesses in that scheme and show that it is susceptible to easy and efficient PIN recovery attacks. We then propose a new scheme which offers better secrecy of PINs, while still maintaining the simplicity and scalability advantages of the original scheme. Finally, we investigate the usability of the two schemes with a sample of 34 current and potential customers of the banking system. Our findings suggest that the new scheme is more efficient, less susceptible to human error and better preferred by the target consumers. [The scheme proposed in this paper, and its variants, were jointly developed by Microsoft researchers and Eko India Financial Services Ltd.]

Jonathan Donner and Marcela X Escobari, A review of evidence on mobile use by micro and small enterprises in developing countries, in Journal of International Development, vol. 22, no. 5, John Wiley & Sons, 30 June 2010

The paper offers a systematic review of 14 studies of the use of mobile telephony by micro and small enterprises (MSEs) in the developing world, detailing findings about changes to enterprises' internal processes and external relationships, and findings about mobile use vs. traditional landline use. Results suggest that there is currently more evidence for the benefits of mobile use accruing mostly (but not exclusively) to existing MSEs rather than new MSEs, in ways that amplify existing material and informational flows rather than transform them. The review presents a more complete picture of mobile use by MSEs than was previously available, and identifies priorities for future research, including comparisons of the impact of mobile use across subsectors of MSEs and extensions beyond studies of existing enterprises. Note to readers: The PDF on this page is the pre-peer reviewed revision of an earlier conference paper. Please use this pre-peer-review version for general reading only – for citations and particularly direct quotations please refer to the final and definitive version, available online from Wiley-Blackwell at http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/123566679/abstract

Michael Paik, Navkar Samdaria, Aakar Gupta, Julie Weber, Nupur Bhatnagar, Shelly Batra, Manish Bhardwaj, and William Thies, A Biometric Attendance Terminal and its Application to Health Programs in India, in ACM Workshop on Networked Systems for Developing Regions, June 2010

Tracking attendance is a necessity in a variety of contexts in the developing world, encompassing health programs, schools, government offices, and a litany of other milieux. While electronic attendance tracking systems exist and perform their core function well, they are expensive, monolithic and offer little customizability. In this paper we describe a fingerprint-based biometric attendance system implemented using off-the-shelf components: a netbook computer, a commodity fingerprint reader, and a low-cost mobile phone. The system identifies visitors based only on their fingerprint, and uploads attendance logs to a central location via SMS. Its functionality goes beyond that of existing market offerings while improving modularity, extensibility, and cost of ownership. We deployed this system in two health programs – supporting tuberculosis patients in New Delhi and sex workers in Bangalore – and logged over 550 users and 4,500 visits over the course of several months. Our experience suggests that the system is usable in real-world contexts, though incentives are needed to sustain usage over time. We reflect on the sociocultural factors surrounding adoption and describe the potential to impact health outcomes in the future.

Shikoh Gitau, Gary Marsden, and Jonathan Donner, After access – Challenges facing mobile-only internet users in the developing world, in Proceedings of the 28th international conference on human factors in computing systems (CHI 2010), Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., 16 April 2010

This study reports results of an ethnographic action research study, exploring mobile-centric internet use. Over the course of 13 weeks, eight women, each a member of a livelihoods collective in urban Cape Town, South Africa, received training to make use of the data (internet) features on the phones they already owned. None of the women had previous exposure to PCs or the internet. Activities focused on social networking, entertainment, information search, and, in particular, job searches. Results of the exercise reveal both the promise of, and barriers to, mobile internet use by a potentially large community of first-time, mobile centric users. Discussion focuses on the importance of self expression and identity management in the refinement of online and offline presences, and considers these forces relative to issues of gender and socioeconomic status.

Rangaswamy, N, Jiwani, S, Roy Chowdhary, and I, Micro-blogging and Mobile Chattering in India, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, April 2010

We report from on-going research of ‘SMS Chatter ’, the largest SMS-based mobile social networking site in India. The aim of this position paper is to share initial results from an investigation of the platform and note its emerging nature and the content of messaging. Unlike other social networking sites like Twitter where conversation, retweeting and maintaining a personalized profile take prominence, mobile social media in India shows different kinds of appropriation. SMS Chatter, seemingly, is not only for ‘egocentric’ users, but also for individuals and small and medium enterprises that choose the platform to promote various products and services. Posts that are not promotional take the form of short poetry, jokes or inspirational messages and constitute secondary content that is circulated without attribution. In this paper, we will emphasize and delineate two features of SMS Chatter, namely, a) the entwined and informal nature of social and business networking and b) the dominance of borrowed or secondary content of posts and the lack of conversational content or retweets.

Rangaswamy, N, Nair, and S, The PC- aided Enterprise and Re-cycling ICT: An ICT for D Story?, International Development Research centre, March 2010

This paper focuses on three goals: first, to investigate organic ICT (information and communication technologies) immersions from a study of PC-aided Micro and Small Enterprises (MSEs) in a low-income slum neighborhood in Mumbai; second, to articulate anew and evolving socio-technical system in a slum ecology; third, to seek a fit between the goals of ICT for Development (ICTD) and the impacts of PC-aided enterprise on ICT access and adoption. Our findings are also three fold: first, ICT-aided MSEs are self-sustaining; second, they promote self- skill building; third, they re-cycle technology for greater affordability and effective immersion.

Thomas N. Smyth, Satish Kumar, Indrani Medhi, and Kentaro Toyama, Where there's a will there's a way: mobile media sharing in urban india, in CHI '10: Proceedings of the 28th international conference on Human factors in computing systems, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2010

We present the results of a qualitative study of the sharing and consumption of entertainment media on low-cost mobile phones in urban India, a practice which has evolved into a vibrant, informal socio-technical ecosystem. This wide-ranging phenomenon includes end users, mobile phone shops, and content distributors, and exhibits remarkable ingenuity. Even more impressive is the number of obstacles which have been surmounted in its establishment, from the technical (interface complexity, limited Internet access, viruses), to the broader socioeconomic (cost, language, legality, institutional rules, lack of privacy), all seemingly due to a strong desire to be entertained. Our findings carry two implications for projects in HCI seeking to employ technology in service of social and economic development. First, although great attention is paid to the details of UI in many such projects, we find that sufficient user motivation towards a goal turns UI barriers into mere speed bumps. Second, we suggest that needs assessments carry an inherent bias towards what outsiders consider needs, and that identified “needs” may not be as strongly felt as perceived.

Saurabh Panjwani and Rachita Chandra, A Study of Teachers’ Reactions towards Video-Assisted Feedback, in India HCI 2010, 2010

This paper presents results from a 4-week study investigating teachers’ reactions towards the use of video as a feedback instrument. Four teachers in a public-private school in Pune, India, were treated to three feedback protocols involving video technology in different measures and modes of operation. Results indicate that teachers have a strong preference for feedback protocols that involve video, both in terms of effectiveness and ease of use, although most teachers view the advice of a human mentor as indispensable. We also found evidence to suggest that video technology improves the quality of human feedback by enabling rapid recall of events and by facilitating resolution of conflicts.

Susan T. Dumais, Georg Buscher, and Edward Cutrell, Individual differences in gaze patterns for web search, in Proceeding of the third symposium on Information interaction in context, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2010

Divya Ramachandran, John Canny, Prabhu Dutta Das, and Edward Cutrell, Mobile-izing health workers in rural India, in CHI '10: Proceedings of the 28th international conference on Human factors in computing systems, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2010

Researchers have long been interested in the potential of ICTs to enable positive change in developing regions communities. In these environments, ICT interventions often fail because political, social and cultural forces work against the changes ICTs entail. We argue that familiar uses of ICTs for information services in these contexts are less potent than their use for persuasion and motivation in order to facilitate change. We focus on India’s rural maternal health system where health workers are employed in villages to persuade pregnant women to utilize health services. Health workers face challenges due to resistance to change in the village, and because of their limited education, training and status. These factors appear to reduce the motivation of health workers and impair their performance. For two months, we deployed short videos on mobile phones designed to persuade village women and motivate health workers. We also asked health workers to record their own videos. While our results are preliminary, they show evidence that the creation and use of videos did help (1) engage village women in dialogue, (2) show positive effects toward health worker motivation and learning, and (3) motivate key community influencers to participate in promoting the health workers.

Georg Buscher, Susan T. Dumais, and Edward Cutrell, The good, the bad, and the random: an eye-tracking study of ad quality in web search, in Proceeding of the 33rd international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2010

Nithya Sambasivan, Edward Cutrell, Kentaro Toyama, and Bonnie Nardi, Intermediated technology use in developing communities, in CHI '10: Proceedings of the 28th international conference on Human factors in computing systems, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2010

We describe a prevalent mode of information access in low-income communities of the developing world—intermediated interactions. They enable persons for whom technology is inaccessible due to non-literacy, lack of technology-operation skills, or financial constraints, to benefit from technologies through digitally skilled users—thus, expanding the reach of technologies. Reporting the results of our ethnography in two urban slums of Bangalore, India, we present three distinct intermediated interactions: inputting intent into the device in proximate enabling, interpretation of device output in proximate translation, and both input of intent and interpretation of output in surrogate usage. We present some requirements and challenges in interface design of these interactions and explain how they are different from direct interactions. We then explain the broader effects of these interactions on low-income communities, and present some implications for design.

Nithya Sambasivan, Edward Cutrell, and Kentaro Toyama, ViralVCD: tracing information-diffusion paths with low cost media in developing communities, in CHI '10: Proceedings of the 28th international conference on Human factors in computing systems, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2010

We describe ViralVCD: a low cost method for tracing paths of information diffusion in developing communities using physical media. We instituted a participatory video framework for creation and dissemination of developmental videos in seven urban slums and peri-urban communities of Bangalore, India. By combining a call-in contest with Video CDs, we were able to measure developmental impact as well as elicit data on social networks and technology usage practices. In particular, our technique was able to extract data from multiple layers—social, technological, and developmental. ViralVCD allowed us to identify key actors and map information diffusion, as well as technology ownership and access. These findings have implications for HCI initiatives targeting low income locales and populations.

Indrani Medhi, Ed Cutrell, and Kentaro Toyama, It's not just illiteracy, India HCI in conjunction with the IFIP TC13 Special Interest Group on Interaction Design for International Development, 2010

There is increasing interest in using computing applications towards the socio-economic development of the poor. However, because poverty commonly correlates with illiteracy, researchers have identified various usability challenges that low-literate users may encounter in interacting with traditional text-based UIs. To counter such problems, researchers have proposed non-textual UIs for these users. However, most current work focuses exclusively on illiteracy (the inability to read) per se, with little recognition to other problems or the overall context in which a user is situated. In this paper we suggest that the inability to read is only one of several possible concerns that prevent useful interaction of existing computing (PC and mobile phone) UIs by low-literate users. Through our ethnographic and usability studies with 400 low-literate, low-income subjects across India, the Philippines and South Africa, we find a host of nuanced issues which mediate how a user interacts with computing technologies. Such issues include: cognitive difficulties, collaboration, cultural etiquette, experience and exposure, intimidation, mediation, motivation, pricing, power relations, social standing, and others. We observe that these factors can have far-reaching influence on the design of UIs as well as services for low-literate populations.

2009

Jonathan Donner, Mobile-based livelihood services in Africa: pilots and early deployments, pp. 37-58, 30 December 2009

The paper describes a collection of initiatives delivering various forms of support functions via mobile phones to small enterprises, small farms, and the self-employed. Using a review of 24 examples of such services currently operational in Africa, the analysis identifies five functions of mobile livelihood services: Mediated Agricultural Extension, Market Information, Virtual Marketplaces, Financial Services, and Direct Livelihood Support. It discusses the current reliance of such systems on the SMS channel, and considers their role in supporting vs. transforming existing market structures.

Nithya Sambasivan, Nimmi Rangaswamy, Edward Cutrell, and Bonnie Nardi, Ubicomp4D: Infrastructure and interaction for international development--the case of urban Indian slums, in 11th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, UbiComp 2009, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., October 2009

This paper attempts to re-imagine ubiquitous computing for populations in low-income and information-challenged environments. We examine information infrastructures in mid-sized urban slums of Mumbai and Bangalore in three ways—1) highlighting technologies supporting social networks, 2) examining underlying notions of trust and privacy in building information networks, and 3) discussing protocols and practices around shared access. We then discuss our thoughts on designing for low-income, low-literacy, and resource-challenged communities, presenting new ways to think about the design of ubiquitous technologies for international development. We argue for collaborative exchange between the established strengths of the Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) and Ubicomp communities to generate new ways of shaping technologies towards poverty alleviation in previously neglected socio-economic contexts—Ubicomp4D.

Kentaro Toyama, Teresa Peters, Michael Best, Chris Coward, and Beth Kolko, The Big Questions of “ICT4D”, no. MSR-TR-2009-101, 1 October 2009

There is no clear consensus on the appropriate role for information and communications technology in social and economic development to improve the lives of the poor around the world. The field is fraught with conflicting views about what is most important, what works best, how to measure benefits, what processes lead to good solutions, and who should pay for it all. And, because ICT4D is still young and assessment is difficult, concrete evidence of positive outcomes are scant. Thus, instead of adding to the loud, but weakly supported rhetoric in ICT4D, this paper presents 13 “hot button” questions that characterize the debate in the field today, and it attempts to summarize the arguments on all sides. The hope is that this will help the reader navigate through the various issues in ICT4D and identify the questions most worthy of further consideration.

Rahul De and Aishwarya Lakshmi Ratan, Whose gain is it anyway? Structurational perspectives on deploying ICTs for development in India's microfinance sector, in Information Technology for Development, Wiley, 10 September 2009

The idea of information and communication technology (ICT) being a “hammer” that can be applied to a wide variety of “nails” across different geographic locations, sectors, organizations, and contexts to improve efficiency and/or have a beneficial social impact has come under severe criticism, particularly in the realm of implementing socioeconomic development programs. Structuration theory remains one of the key metatheories that deconstruct the complexity of technology introductions in the context of organizational and behavioral change. In this study, we use a structurational lens to examine two pilot ICT implementations in the Indian microfinance sector, specifically exploring the interactions between the ICT intervention, the organizations and people implementing the change, and the structural and institutional context within which these projects were rolled out. We showcase how an “ICT for development” intervention is inherently a political process, involving choices around defining efficiency and targeting particular social welfare improvements, with varying repercussions for the involved microfinance institution and client. Where the client's context, constraints, and welfare are placed at the heart of the “efficiency” discussion during the technology's design and implementation, the development impact is seen to be far greater and more sustained.

Saurabh Panjwani, Luana Micallef, Karl Fenech, and Kentaro Toyama, Effects of integrating digital visual materials with textbook scans in the classroom, in International Journal of Education and Development using Information and Communication Technology (IJEDICT), September 2009

This work examines the effects of treating learners in a classroom to digital visual materials on a shared display, while interleaving such materials with scanned copies of relevant textbook pages. Forty-six ninth-grade students in a public school in Bangalore (India) were divided into two groups and given instruction in Science and Literature, the first group (control) being exposed to digital visual materials in both classes while the second (treatment) to the same materials interspersed with digitally-scanned copies of textbook pages. Students in the treatment group outperformed those in the control group on tasks involving recall and recognition of the visual materials (although the gap was significant only for recall-based tasks). Our results suggest that digitized versions of textbooks are useful in improving students’ retention of visual materials utilized during classroom instruction.

William Thies, Why it is Hard to Identify Technical Research Problems in ICT4D and How to Make it Easier, in CCC Workshop on Computer Science and Global Development, August 2009

My position is that a shortage of detailed and compelling problem statements is the primary bottleneck that prevents most computer scientists from conducting research in ICT4D. While interesting problems exist, they are usually discovered via months of fieldwork, and there is little incentive to formalize and disseminate problems for the benefit of other researchers. To address this bottleneck, I argue that we should create a prestigious venue for publishing problem descriptions, rather than problem solutions. I also propose that we establish problem-exchange websites to solicit problems from practitioners; organize structured design contests that aggregate knowledge in a problem area; and leverage the domain knowledge of funding agencies in defining technical research problems.

M. Kaleem Rahman, Saurabh Sanghvi, Kentaro Toyama, and M. Bernardine Dias, Experiences with Lower-Cost Access to Tactile Graphics in India, no. MSR-TR-2009-102, August 2009

Tactile graphics allow the visually impaired to perceive two-dimensional imagery, which is an essential part of learning science, geography, and other subjects. In the developed world, such graphics are available to blind students from an early age, and students grow up familiar with image representations. Tactile graphics, however, require special printers whose costs are often beyond resource-constrained institutions; thus, blind students in developing regions often grow up without any exposure to these learning aids. In this paper, we investigate the potential of a software solution for converting regular images into a form that can be printed as tactile imagery on relatively low-cost embossing device meant only for braille text. Using techniques of ethnographic design, we explore how students at a school for the blind in India interpret tactile graphics on their first contact with such material, and for a variety of subject matter. We find that our subjects were exceedingly enthusiastic about tactile graphics, rapidly able to understand and absorb two-dimensional representations, and that studying tactile graphics of the alphabet could lead to their learning how to write the alphabet for the very first time.

Indrani Medhi, Aishwarya Lakshmi Ratan, and Kentaro Toyama, Mobile-Banking Adoption and Usage by Low-Literate, Low-Income Users in the Developing World, in Proc. of HCII 2009, Springer Verlag, July 2009

Due to the increasing penetration of mobile phones even in poor communities, mobile-phone-enabled banking (m-banking) services are being increasingly targeted at the "unbanked" to bring formal financial services to the poor. Research in understanding actual usage and adoption by this target population, though, is sparse. There appear to be a number of issues which prevent low-income, low-literate populations from meaningfully adopting and using existing m-banking services. This paper examines variations across countries in adoption and usage of existing m-banking services by low-literate, low-income individuals and possible factors responsible for the same. It is observed that variations are along several parameters: household type, services adopted, pace of uptake, frequency of usage, and ease of use. Each of these observations is followed by a set of explanatory factors that mediate adoption and usage.

Jonathan Donner and Kentaro Toyama, Persistent themes in ICT4D Research: priorities for inter-methodological exchange, 21 June 2009

Efforts to bridge methodological and theoretical gaps are of particular value to the ICT4D field. In this paper, we highlight how certain persistent themes in ICT4D research are amenable to ‘bridging’ exercises. The themes are: defining users, closing divides, and establishing impact. For each theme, we present a call for more actionable statistics and data, and suggest parameters for improved interdisciplinary dialogue. We close by considering new ways to leverage technology in these bridging exercises.

Jonathan Donner and Shikoh Gitau, New paths: exploring mobile-centric internet use in South Africa, in Presented at the Pre-Conference on Mobile Communication at the Annual Meeting of the International Communication Association, 21 May 2009

The title of this workshop, ‘beyond voice’, is illustrative of one of the central questions currently surrounding mobile communication in the developing world. Put simply, there is a great deal of enthusiasm around the notion that a large group of users will access the internet for the first time via data enabled mobile handsets. Recent estimates from India, for example (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, 2007), suggest there may be more mobile Internet connections than traditional PC Internet connections operational in the country. Concurrently, high-end smart phones promise browsing experiences which are steadily closing the gaps in speed and ease of use which have hampered earlier incarnations of the mobile internet, such as WAP. But the raw enthusiasm, the aggregate statistics, and the glossy marketing images from the top-end of handset markets fail to capture the reality of mobile internet use in the developing world. The crux of this paper’s argument is that the research community knows comparatively little about this supposed community of users who access and use the Internet exclusively via mobile phones. We know little about who they are, how they discover and access the mobile internet, and how the mobile internet fits into their lives. This paper reports on ongoing qualitative/exploratory research in low income communities in urban South Africa. Through convenience and snowball sampling, the researchers have sought out ‘early adopters’ among mobile-only internet users. The analysis of the interviews will delineate and describe distinctive new “paths” to Internet use that largely bypass PCs. We draw on a domestication approach (Haddon, 2003; Hahn & Kibora, 2008; Silverstone & Hirsch, 1992) to move beyond an ‘adoption’ or ‘diffusion’ paradigm and to complement aggregate statistical perspectives. As exploratory research, this project cannot definitively identify all the new paths to the internet, nor the relative frequency with which individuals choose these paths. However, early findings will illustrate current and emerging practices in mobile-only internet use, as well as opportunities and constraints for policymakers interested in promoting or leveraging internet use among a much broader community of the world’s inhabitants

Rangaswamy and N, ICT for Mesh-Economy: Case-Study of an Urban Slum, International Federation of Information Processing, May 2009

The paper submits ethnography of ICT immersions in ‘information poor contexts’ through exploring socio-economic networks of a heterogeneous, low-income community in Mumbai. Here, ICT usages are embedded in two main social processes; 1) grass-root demand for communication 2) a mesh economy of formal and informal networks. We present findings from a contextual study of ICT enabled businesses in a rapidly up-scaling suburban slum amongst its low-income communities. We believe ICTs embedded in resource-stressed survival economies evolve and adapt to fit with existing economic behavior enmeshed in a range of formal and non-formal practices. We observed that here the formal/non-formal dichotomy is transcended, rendering economic distinctions irrelevant at the ground level of business networking processes. We ask if ICT’s, firstly, by the kind of technology they are, have specific potential to aid dissolution of these formal/non-formal distinctions for survival economies. Secondly, by facilitating small businesses, if they bear a special status in promoting survival, sustenance and overall development of the small business community.

Rich Ling and Jonathan Donner, Mobile Communication, Polity, May 2009

With staggering swiftness, the mobile phone has become a fixture of daily life in almost every society on earth. In 2007, the world had over 3 billion mobile subscriptions. Prosperous nations boast of having more subscriptions than people. In the developing world, hundreds of millions of people who could never afford a landline telephone now have a mobile number of their own. With a mobile in our hand many of us feel safer, more productive, and more connected to loved ones, but perhaps also more distracted and less involved with things happening immediately around us. Written by two leading researchers in the field, this volume presents an overview of the mobile telephone as a social and cultural phenomenon. Research is summarized and made accessible though detailed descriptions of ten mobile users from around the world. These illustrate popular debates, as well as deeper social forces at work. The book concludes by considering three themes: 1) the tighter interlacing of daily activities 2) a revolution of control in the social sphere, and 3) the arrival of a world where the majority of its inhabitants are reachable, anytime, anywhere.

Aishwarya Lakshmi Ratan, Sambit Satpathy, Lilian Zia, Kentaro Toyama, Sean Blagsvedt, Udai Singh Pawar, and Thanuja Subramaniam, Kelsa+: Digital Literacy for Low-Income Office Workers, in Proc. of ICTD 2009, IEEE, 19 April 2009

Almost all formal organizations employ service staff for tasks such as housekeeping, security, maintenance, and transport at their office facility. Many of these workers earn wages in line with menial-labor salaries in their respective countries. They have few on-the-job opportunities to upgrade their skills or learn new ones. Kelsa+ is an initiative through which organizations in developing countries can increase digital literacy and skill development among such low-income workers, through the provision of an Internet-connected PC for the service staff’s free, unrestricted use when off duty. We study a Kelsa+ pilot implementation in Bangalore, India, involving an office facility with 35 service staff. In a preliminary exploration over 18 months, we find that at a cost that is negligible for the organization, workers’ use of the Kelsa+ PC is high and can deliver benefits both to themselves and to the office. For workers, broad gains were seen in confidence, self-esteem, and basic digital literacy, while a few individuals experienced improvements in second-language (English) proficiency and career opportunities. These early results point in the direction of a cost-effective ICT4D initiative that could be run in the developing-country offices of the very organizations promoting development off-site.

Neema Moraveji, Kori Inkpen, Ed Cutrell, and Ravin Balakrishnan, A Mischief of Mice: Examining Children’s Performance in Single Display Groupware Systems with 1 to 32 Mice, in International conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI 2009), Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., April 2009

Mischief is a system for classroom interaction that allows multiple children to use individual mice and cursors to interact with a single large display [20]. While the system can support large groups of children, it is unclear how children’s performance is affected as group size increases. We explore this question via a study involving two tasks, with children working in group sizes ranging from 1 to 32. The first required reciprocal selection of two on-screen targets, resembling a “swarm” pointing scenario that might be used in educational applications. The second, a more temporally and spatially distributed pointing task, had children entering different words by selecting characters on an on-screen keyboard. Results indicate that performance is significantly affected by group size only when targets are small. Further, group size had a smaller effect when pointing was spatially and temporally distributed than when everyone was concurrently aiming at the same targets.

Jonathan Donner and Marcela Escobari, A review of the research on mobile use by micro and small enterprises (MSEs), in Proceedings of the 3rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development, IEEE, April 2009

The paper offers a systematic review of 14 studies of the use of mobile telephony by micro and small enterprises (MSEs) in the developing world, detailing findings about changes to enterprises’ internal processes and external relationships, and findings about mobile use vs. traditional landline use. Results suggest that there is currently more evidence for the benefits of mobile use accruing mostly (but not exclusively) to existing MSEs rather than new MSEs, in ways that amplify existing material and informational flows rather than transform them. The review presents a more complete picture of mobile use by MSEs than was previously available to ICTD researchers, and indentifies priorities for future research, including comparisons of the impact of mobile use across subsectors of MSEs and assessments of use of advanced services such as mobile banking and mobile commerce.

Somani Patnaik, Emma Brunskill, and William Thies, Evaluating the Accuracy of Data Collection on Mobile Phones: A Study of Forms, SMS, and Voice, in IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development, IEEE, April 2009

While mobile phones have found broad application in reporting health, financial, and environmental data, there has been little study of the possible errors incurred during mobile data collection. This paper provides the first (to our knowledge) quantitative evaluation of data entry accuracy on mobile phones in a resource-poor setting. Via a study of 13 users in Gujarat, India, we evaluated three user interfaces: 1) electronic forms, containing numeric fields and multiple-choice menus, 2) SMS, where users enter delimited text messages according to printed cue cards, and 3) voice, where users call an operator and dictate the data in real-time. Our results indicate error rates (per datum entered) of 4.2% for electronic forms, 4.5% for SMS, and 0.45% for voice. These results caused us to migrate our own initiative (a tuberculosis treatment program in rural India) from electronic forms to voice, in order to avoid errors on critical health data. While our study has some limitations, including varied backgrounds and training of participants, it suggests that some care is needed in deploying electronic interfaces in resource-poor settings. Further, it raises the possibility of using voice as a low-tech, high-accuracy, and cost-effective interface for mobile data collection.

Jonathan Donner, Blurring livelihoods and lives: The social uses of mobile phones and socioeconomic development, in Innovations: Technology, Governance, Globalization, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 91-101, MIT Press, 2009

This paper focuses on how an intermingling of lives and livelihoods, as mediated by the mobile phone, figures into the micro-processes of economic development. It argues for a perspective on work and on livelihoods that is broad enough to account for (and perhaps even take advantage of) the social processes surrounding these activities. Analysts, policymakers, and technologists interested in the application of Mobiles for Development (M4D) should not ignore the way mobiles blur livelihoods and lives; the developmental and ‘non-developmental’ uses of the mobile are not in competition, nor are they always distinguishable. Instead, the uses of mobiles for developmental and ‘non-developmental’ purposes are often interrelated and sometimes mutually reinforcing. The social functions of the mobile (in matters of connection and self-expression) are helping drive its widespread adoption, and these same functions inform the very behaviors that make the mobile a tool for economic development.

Indrani Medhi, Nagasena Gautama S. N., and Kentaro Toyama, A Comparison of Mobile Money-Transfer UIs for Non-Literate and Semi-Literate Users, ACM Conference on Computer-Human Interaction, 2009

Due to the increasing penetration of mobile phones even into poor communities, mobile payment schemes could bring formal financial services to the “unbanked.” However, because poverty for the most part also correlates with low levels of formal education, there are questions as to whether electronic access to complex financial services is enough to bridge the gap, and if so, what sort of UI is best. In this paper, we present two studies that provide preliminary answers to these questions. We first investigated the usability of existing mobile payment services, through an ethnographic study involving 90 subjects in India, Kenya, the Philippines and South Africa. This was followed by a usability study with another 58 subjects in India, in which we compared non-literate and semi-literate subjects on three systems: text-based, spoken dialog (without text), and rich multimedia (also without text). Results confirm that non-text designs are strongly preferred over text-based designs and that while task-completion rates are better for the rich multimedia UI, speed is faster and less assistance is required on the spoken-dialog system.

Molly Steenson and Jonathan Donner, Beyond the personal and private: Modes of mobile phone sharing in urban India, in The Reconstruction of Space and Time: Mobile Communication Practices, vol. 1, pp. 231-250, Transaction Publishers, 2009

This chapter contributes to the overall dialogue on the significance of mobile communication for human, social space by expanding the inquiry into one of the world’s largest communities of mobile users, India. In this context, we draw on ethnographic research to identify various modes of mobile phone sharing which cannot be entirely explained by economic necessity, and instead reflect deeper processes of human organization. In the process, the chapter further illustrates how mobile communication helps people create and alter the social spaces around them.

Sambasivan, N, Rangaswamy, N, Toyama, K, Nardi, and B, Encountering Development Ethnographically, in Interactions, vol. XVI, no. 6, 2009

HCI for Development (HCI4D) lies at the intersection of Information Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) and Human-computer Interaction (HCI). The mainstream HCI community creates user experiences for the developed-world consumer, while ICT4D is concerned about creating relevant technologies for developing nations. Their fusion—HCI4D—evolved and re-aligned goals to design user experiences for a new audience, namely populations living in contexts of low rates of telecom diffusion and digital literacy.

Jonathan Donner, Mobile media on low-cost handsets: The resiliency of text messaging among small enterprises in India (and beyond) , in Mobile technologies: from telecommunications to media , pp. 93-104, Routledge, 2009

This chapter begins by describing the limited use of most mobile functions—except for voice calls and SMS/text messages—among small and informal business owners in urban India. It draws on this illustration to suggest that forms of mobile media based on low cost, ubiquitous SMS features have the potential to be accessible, relevant, and popular among many users in the developing world. Further examples of SMS-based mobile media applications illustrate an important distinction between these systems. While some applications stand alone, others function as bridges to or hybrids of other media forms, particularly the internet. Over the next few years, these hybrid forms will play an important role in offering flexible, powerful information resources to a sizable proportion of the world’s population.

Rangaswamy and N, The non-formal business of cyber cafes: a case-study from India, in Journal of information, communication and ethics in society, 7, (2/3), pp 136-145, 2009

Small businesses enabled by information and communication technologies (ICTs) are deeply embedded in a context of non-formal business relations and practices in developing economies. We take the specific instance of 30 internet cafés in the city of Mumbai as subject of our study to explore the non-formal business culture operating in and through an unregulated grey market. Using ethnographic methods, we profile café management of everyday business strategies and contextualize them in the broader and pervasive culture of non-formal business relationship in the Mumbai economy. Regulatory discourse of information technologies in general and the internet in particular is foreclosed by the language of piracy and ill-legality. Our main contribution in this paper is re-thinking issues related to piracy and ill-legal practices when they are embedded in non-formal economic relations. These define and support a way of life for millions participating in a developing economy. We attempt to open debates by positing non-formality as alternate premise to understand, the so-called, piracy and ill-legal practices among small ICT enabled businesses. By dismissing the ICT grey market as piracy we ignore the nature of market relations critical to governing the non-formal IT sector bringing IT inclusion to the majority in India.

2008

Jonathan Donner, Katrin Verclas, and Kentaro Toyama, Reflections on MobileActive08 and the M4D Landscape, in Proceedings of the First International Conference on M4D, December 2008

This paper revisits presentations at the MobileActive08 conference in Johannesburg to critically examine the current diversity of projects and approaches in mobiles for development (M4D). We identify four common choices facing individual M4D projects (intended users, technical accessibility, informational links, and market links) which collectively mark the current landscape of M4D. Discussions of M4D projects have tended to be delineated by traditional development domain (health, education, agriculture, etc). By focusing on choices that cut across domains, we highlight elements which vary across M4D projects, but which to date have not been observed to correlate with project success. We discuss these four choices in light of the broader course of the field of information and communication technology and development (ICTD). Further, we argue that choices made at the project level may create different M4D landscapes, with implications for the breadth and depth of the technologys impact on development.

Rangaswamy, N, and Divya Kumar, The Rise of ICT for Commerce in Small Product Offerings, 19th Australasia Conference on Information Systems, December 2008

The paper makes a case for information and communication technologies (ICT) in small businesses against the broader backdrop of the developing economy of India. ICTs come to India through two routes; the global employment route of IT information companies or the development route of donor-driven services to bridge internal digital divide. Local and context specific ICT based services in small businesses are organic, market-driven and self-sustaining bringing affordable services to hitherto „underserved‟ and „information poor‟ contexts. It seems pertinent to ask if ICT as service offerings in small business can sustain and evolve a participatory eco-system resulting in expansion of benefits to the player/entrepreneur and customer/user of technology. From a case-study in urban India we observe that most ICT-based or ICT-empowered businesses, services and products are shaped by two factors 1. The nature of key players driving business 2. Local and evolving customer relevance of the product. The two can combine to produce a third- opportunities that can turn businesses round to a more aggressive consumer oriented service offerings to sustain business and increase ICT infusion into local markets.

Rangaswamy, N,, Nair, S, Toyama, and K, “My TV is the family Oven/Toaster/Grill”:Personalizing TV for the Indian Audience, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, October 2008

Interactive TV is a new, exciting entry into the drawing rooms of Indian families. By examining current and nascent interactive TV services we trace ways in which they are deployed, received and consumed in the Indian home. From ethnographic probes we offer observations from Indian domestic contexts in the threshold of adopting interactivity as part of everyday TV viewing. We foreground India as a new and primary emerging site adopting interactive TV and to expand attention from the predominance of designing for Western cultural contexts. We develop a specific focus on personalizing TV, a dominant media attribute of interactive TV, conflicting with conventional viewing patterns in the Indian home. We note emergent challenges for interactive TV adoption patterns, particularly for personalization, in the Indian home. Here, TV is viewed as a) Comfort media b) Shared media c) Media for family bonding and raise concerns for viewer preferences around personalizing TV

Rangaswamy and N, ‘There is no entertainment without TV…’:Changing TV environments - A case-study from India, Springer Verlag, July 2008

The paper contextualizes changing Television viewship from an ethnographic study of 39 individuals and 10 families, in Mumbai, India. Over the last decade, the Indian audiences have been witnessing rapidly transforming television technology, content and services. With changing TV scenarios as backdrop the paper purports to do the following; 1. To evaluate techno-social scenarios of new TV services, 2. To examine how these fit into existing everyday rhythms and routines of family viewing, 3. To gauge initial audience response to nascent interactive TV services. We lead arguments to discuss a set of factors that emerged as critical in influencing families to adopt new interactive TV services as everyday entertainment.

Rangaswamy and N, Telecentres and Cyber Cafés:A Case for ICT in Small Business, International Communication Association, May 2008

Telecentre initiatives run by non-profit agents are largely understood as critical access points for digital inclusion. By the same token internet or cyber cafés viewed merely as commercial sites fall outside the purview of non-profit initiatives promoting e-literacy. From a contextual study of ‘small’ internet cafés in urban and peri-urban Maharashtra, India, we report localization of information and communication technology (ICT).Here, internet technologies localize, find survival niches and in many cases, serve as initiation nodes for first time users. The paper introduces a variety of context specific and commercial immersions of ICT services as part of everyday commerce. We argue for-profit spaces like i-cafes equally contribute to digital immersion in ‘information poor’ contexts. ‘Non-developmental’ (read commercial) spaces successfully use ICTs, sustain businesses, generate regular clientele and adapt to local demand. Here, ICT technologies involve and initiate all those who access them at suitable and affordable prices. Can i-cafés do what telecentres supposedly do? In this effort and from a perspective of commercial adoption of ICTs we try to open up debates around telecentres as privileged sites of digital inclusion.

Aishwarya Ratan and Mahesh Gogineni, Cost Realism in Deploying Technologies for Development, May 2008

In this paper, we present a simple costing model supported by three case studies to demonstrate the ways in which a technology intervention's ability to deliver cost savings through efficiency gains is conditional on the local economic environment. Examining a set of information collection and processing transaction tasks that are part of a microfinance institution's workflow, we find that technology-enabled gains depend critically on the technology's impact on labour productivity and variable capital costs, in the context of the local wage rate for adequately skilled labour. In certain contexts, the per-transaction gains from using capital-intensive technologies are overwhelmed by the fixed and operating resources required to generate and sustain these gains.

Indrani Medhi, Geeta Menon, and Kentaro Toyama, Challenges of Computerized Job-Search in the Developing World, ACM Conference on Computer Human Interaction, Florence, Italy, 2008

Jonathan Donner, Nimmi Rangaswamy, Molly Wright Steenson, and Carolyn Wei, “Express yourself” and “Stay together”: The middle-class Indian family, in Handbook of Mobile Communication Studies, pp. 325-338, MIT Press, 2008

This chapter evaluates the mobile phone’s dual position as change agent and reflection of existing tensions in Indian middle class families. It also offers a snapshot of the aspirational consumption that is characteristic of the new middle class in India. Three case studies are reported here relating to mobiles and family financial decisions, romantic relationships, and domestic space. The studies show that, whereas elements of autonomy and individuation do arise from mobile phone use, the adoption of mobiles as a family process better reflects its diffusion in middle-class India. This culturally specific spread of mobiles symbolizes broader socioeconomic phenomena in India.

Jonathan Donner and Camilo Tellez, Mobile banking and economic development: Linking adoption, impact, and use, in Asian Journal of Communication, vol. 18, no. 4, pp. 318-332, 2008

Around the globe, various initiatives use the mobile phone to provide financial services to those without access to traditional banks. Yet relatively little scholarly research explores the use of these m-banking/m-payments systems. This paper calls attention to this gap in the research literature, emphasizing the need for research focusing on the context(s) of m-banking/m-payments use. Presenting illustrative data from exploratory work with small enterprises in urban India, it argues that contextual research is a critical input to effective “adoption” or “impact” research. Further, it suggests that the challenges of linking studies of use to those of adoption and impact reflect established dynamics within the Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD) research community. The paper identifies three crosscutting themes from the broader literature—amplification vs. change, simultaneous causality, and a multi-dimensional definition of trust—each of which can offer increased theoretical clarity to future research on m-banking/m-payments systems.

Rangaswamy and N, Telecentres and Cyber cafes: The case for ICTs in small business,, in Asian Journal of Communication,, vol. 18, no. 4, pp. 365-378, Routledge, 2008

Telecenter initiatives run by non-profit agents are widely believed to be critical access points for digital inclusion. By contrast, Internet or cyber cafe´s are viewed generally merely as commercial sites, thus falling outside the purview of non-profit initiatives promoting e-literacy. From a contextual study of Internet cafe´s in urban and suburban Mumbai and in peri-urban small towns of Maharashtra state, India, we report on the localization of information and communication technology (ICTs), including how Internet cafe´s discern survival niches and how they often serve as reasonably-priced initiation nodes for first-time users. This article discusses a variety of context-specific and commercial instances of ICT services as manifest in everyday commerce. We argue that for-profit spaces like Internet cafe´s make a major contribution to digital immersion in information-poor contexts and that these so-called ‘non-developmental’ (read commercial) spaces successfully use ICTs to sustain businesses, to generate regular clientele, and to adapt to local demand. In an effort to open up debate around telecenters as privileged sites of digital inclusion, the functions of Internet cafe´s are then compared and contrasted with processes and behaviors associated with telecenters.

Jonathan Donner, Research Approaches to Mobile Use in the Developing World: A Review of the Literature, in The Information Society, vol. 24, no. 3, pp. 140-159, 2008

The paper reviews roughly 200 recent studies of mobile (cellular) phone use in the developing world, and identifies major concentrations of research. It categorizes studies along two dimensions. One dimension distinguishes studies of the determinants of mobile adoption from those that assess the impacts of mobile use, and from those focused on the interrelationships between mobile technologies and users. A secondary dimension identifies a sub-set of studies with a strong economic development perspective. The discussion considers the implications of the resulting review and typology for future research.

Jonathan Donner, Shrinking fourth world? Mobiles, development, and inclusion, in Handbook of Mobile Communication Studies, pp. 29-42, MIT Press, 2008

This chapter revisits Castells’ assertion that the Informational Society has brought about a ‘fourth world’ of marginalized peoples, bypassed by information technologies and excluded from significant participation in the economic and social organization of the new millennium. Using the fourth world framework, it considers the economic implications of mobile technologies in the poorest parts of the globe. It argues that increased access and use of mobile telephony worldwide may erode, but not eliminate, the fourth world as a significant phenomenon. In addition, it uses the case of mobile use under cases of extreme economic scarcity to reflect on the current state of theory about mobile communication.

2007

Aishwarya Lakshmi Ratan and Savita Bailur, Welfare, Agency and 'ICT for Development', in Proc. of ICTD 2007, IEEE, December 2007

This paper deconstructs the term “development” in “ICT for Development” – does it imply welfare or agency? Using a framework of individual capability expansion and social choice theory, we illustrate how these two approaches may conflict, and present a simple model to explore how sometimes the Provider's intention in providing an ICT artifact and the User's ultimate usage differ. We analyze our case studies of Our Voices and Hole in the Office against this and find that the User is likely to gain a tangible, immediate return on using agency-enhancing applications (particularly involving entertainment content), while the impact of welfare-enhancing applications is harder to achieve, given the complex contextual determinants of converting information on “potential” welfare outcomes to “actual” welfare gains. We recommend further research on the welfare-agency tension, and on assessing paternalism in “ICT for development” interventions.

Aishwarya Lakshmi Ratan, An assessment of Pradan’s ‘Computer Munshi’ intervention to improve microfinance accounting operations, September 2007

Jonathan Donner, M-Banking, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, September 2007

Rangaswamy,N, Jonathan Donner, Jan Blom, and Kathy Kitner, Living and Livelihoods: ICTs and the Blurring Domestic and Economic Spheres in Emerging Economies, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, August 2007

Rangaswamy and N, Representing the Non-formal: the Business of Internet cafés in India, American Anthropological Association, August 2007

It is our contention that small businesses of information and communication technologies are deeply embedded in a context of non-formal business relations and practices in developing economies. Cyber cafés in the city of Mumbai, the subject of our study, and illegitimacy, informality of business practices in emerging economies provide an alternate premise to understand its nature and operates in and through an unregulated grey market of non-formal business practices. In this paper we explore the fit of ICTs into this ‘area’ of commercial practices. We do relationships this by profiling café managers, business strategies and contextualizing these in the broader culture of non-formal business pervading every day transactions. With regulatory discourse of information technologies centered on piracy function. These challenge received notions of visualizing IT in emerging economies as simply piracy and illegality. It also implies coming to terms with markets shaped and structured by para-legal and non-formal processes in negotiating on-going and future business relationships.

Mahesh Gogineni, Preliminary assessment of a pilot intervention run by BASIX involving the use of handheld devices to record microcredit repayments, June 2007

Mahesh Gogineni, Aishwarya Lakshmi Ratan, and Shabnam Aggarwal, Evaluating the viability of a mobile phone-based, SMS/GPRS-enabled, client data collection channel for urban microfinance, May 2007

Rangaswamy and N, ICT for development and commerce: A case study of internet cafés in India, International Federation of Information Processing, May 2007

The paper, drawn from on-going studies of internet cafés in India, reports interesting localization of information and communication technology (ICT) offerings in shared public spaces. These are in some disjuncture with the ideology of digital inclusion striving to integrate hitherto excluded and ‘information poor’ communities. We find context specific and commercial localization of ICT services contributing to their immersion in underserved contexts, introducing technology as significant part of everyday commerce. If ‘non-developmental spaces’ using ICT are more open to entrepreneurial activities, multiple players, especially the government, could creatively engage with them to promote ICT interventions in everyday civilian life. We indicate some curious and interesting examples strictly belonging to the commercial realm nevertheless bearing the potential for expansion of ICT services.

Indrani Medhi and Kentaro Toyama, Full-Context Videos for First-Time, Non-Literate PC Users, IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development, 2007

This paper presents the use of full-context video to motivate and aid non-literate, first-time users of PCs to successfully navigate a computer application with minimal assistance. Following previous work focused on non-literate users, we observed that in spite of our subjects’ understanding of the UI mechanics, they experienced barriers beyond illiteracy in interacting with the computer: lack of awareness of what the PC could deliver, fear and mistrust of the technology, and lack of comprehension about how information relevant to them was embedded in the PC. In this paper, we address these challenges with full-context video, which includes dramatizations of how a user might use the application and how relevant information comes to be contained in the computer, in addition to a tutorial of the UI. In experiments conducted with 35 non-literate residents of Bangalore slums, the introduction of full-context video dramatically improved task completion for a job-search task.

Jonathan Donner, Customer acquisition among small and informal businesses in urban India: Comparing face to face, interpersonal, and mediated channels, in The Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing Countries, vol. 32, pp. 1-16, 2007

This study further explores the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in small and informal businesses in the developing world by focusing on the role of ICTs in customer acquisition and retention. Data is drawn from a survey of 317 sole proprietors and operators of small businesses with five or fewer employees in and around urban Hyderabad in Southern India. Respondents describe how various customers were acquired—via walk-in, referral, family connections, landline telephone, mobile phone, internet/email, etc. Results suggest that face-to-face interactions dominate customer interactions, even among those with access to ICTs. Four tests explore whether telephony enables more specialized, hands-off, numerous or distant relationships with customers; a significant relationship between landline ownership and total number of customers is found.

Jonathan Donner, The Rules of Beeping: Exchanging Messages Via Intentional “Missed Calls” on Mobile Phones, in Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, vol. 13, no. 1, 2007

This article explores the practice of "beeping" or "missed calling" between mobile phone users, or calling a number and hanging up before the mobile's owner can pick up the call. Most beeps are requests to call back immediately, but they can also send a pre-negotiated instrumental message such as "pick me up now" or a relational sign, such as "I'm thinking of you." The practice itself is old, with roots in landline behaviors, but it has grown tremendously, particularly in the developing world. Based on interviews with small business owners and university students in Rwanda, the article identifies three kinds of beeps (callback, pre-negotiated instrumental, and relational) and the norms governing their use. It then assesses the significance of the practice using adaptive structuration theory. In concluding, the article contrasts beeping with SMS/text messaging, discusses its implications for increasing access to telecommunications services, and suggests paths for future research.

Indrani Medhi, Archana Prasad, and Kentaro Toyama, Optimal audio-visual representations for illiterate users, International World Wide Web Conference, 2007

We present research leading toward an understanding of the optimal audio-visual representation for illustrating concepts for illiterate and semi-literate users of computers. In our user study, which to our knowledge is the first of its kind, we presented each of 13 different health symptoms to 200 illiterate subjects in one representation randomly selected among the following ten: text, static drawings, static photographs, hand-drawn animations, and video, each with and without voice annotation. The goal was to see how comprehensible these representation types were for an illiterate audience. We used a methodology for generating each of the representations tested in a way that fairly stacks one representational type against the others. Our main results are that (1) richer information is not necessarily better understood overall; (2) voice annotation generally helps in speed of comprehension, but bimodal audio-visual information can be confusing for the target population; (3) the relative value of dynamic imagery versus static imagery depends on other factors. Analysis of these statistically significant results and additional detailed results are also provided.

2006

Rangaswamy, N, Toyama, and K, Global Events Local Impacts’: India’s Rural Emerging Markets, American Anthropological Association, September 2006

The paper attempts to analyse rapidly changing rural Indian socio-economic landscapes from a recent empirical study of rural PC kiosks. Rural contexts in India are essentially composite and digitally immature communication ecologies. Some of the questions we wanted to answer were as follows: How do computing technologies find their way into a rural community? Who are the people driving this technology? How technology is being received by the community? Breaking away from a committed long-term participatory ethnography in a bounded field, we consider an array of wider contexts and a repertoire of methods available for qualitative research to study societies in transition.

Rangaswamy and N, Social Entrepreneurship as Critical Agency: A study of Rural Internet kiosks , 4th IEEE/ACM Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and International Development (ICTD) 2010, London, UK, IEEE, May 2006

My paper looks at rural internet kiosks as small businesses run by owners/operators who display good entrepreneurial spirit and skills that match kiosk offerings to local needs, creating opportunities in constrained commercial environments. Kiosk operators display enough imagination to keep businesses afloat recasting information technologies to accommodate the growing demand for image /visual consumption. We argue for considering the rural internet kiosk not simply as an information booth but as entrepreneurial space to tap several commercial possibilities.

Jonathan Donner, The use of mobile phones by microentrepreneurs in Kigali, Rwanda: Changes to social and business networks, in Information Technologies and International Development, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 3-19, MIT Press, 2006

A survey in Kigali, Rwanda, suggests that mobiles are allowing microentrepreneurs to develop new business contacts. The results detail the impact of mobile ownership on the social networks of microentrepreneurs in lowteledensity areas, focusing on the evolving mix of business and personal calls made by users. The study differentiates between the contacts amplified through mobile ownership (friends and family ties) and those enabled by mobile ownership (new business ties). The article discusses applicability of the results to settings beyond Rwanda.

2005

Veeraraghavan, R., Singh, G, Pitti, B., Smith, G, Meyers, B., Toyama, and K., Towards Accurate Measurement of Computer Usage in a Rural Kiosk, in Third International Conference on Innovative applications of Information Technology for Developing World - Asian Applied Computing Conference 2005, December 2005

Rural PC kiosks are increasingly seen as a tool for socio-economic development in developing countries. In order to make kiosks successful, it helps to understand patterns of usage in existing kiosks. Often, questionnaires or interviews are conducted to determine usage patterns, but self-reporting by subjects is notoriously inaccurate. In this paper, we present a tool that allows accurate measurement of when and how PCs in a kiosk are being used. We discuss how an existing tool has been adapted for easy data collection in rural kiosks and present evidence that even regular users of computers are poor at estimating their own usage statistics.

Rangaswamy and N, Middle Class India's response to rapid development and upward mobility, Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference, November 2005

Rangaswamy and N, Sociology of ICT: Rural Internet Kiosk as Shared Space, Human Computer Interaction International Conference, July 2005

By some estimates, there are over 150 rural PC kiosk projects in India, reaching approximately 10,000 rural villages across the country. Efforts like this to apply information and communication technologies to rural development are almost always led by urban technologists, who have preconceptions about villagers and their aspirations. In some cases, the urban-rural cultural differences are further augmented by transnational differences, as multinational corporations, headquartered in other countries, seek to address markets elsewhere. We discuss a few myths frequently believed by wealthier city-dwellers about poor rural villages in India. While not entirely untrue, these myths tend to create cognitive barriers to good product design. Ethnographic investigation of rural villages and existing kiosk projects can lower these barriers and point product designers in directions that may not be obvious at the outset. In particular, we find that (1) villages are surprisingly up-to-date vis-à-vis modern communications capabilities, (2) some rural villagers aggressively seek out modern technology, and (3) even the poorest populations have desires that go beyond those required for physical sustenance. These facts, along with subtle qualifications, have immediate consequences for the design of rural kiosks and the services they deliver.

Indrani Medhi, Bharathi Pitti, and Kentaro Toyama, Text-Free UI for Employment Search, Asian Applied Computing Conference, 2005