This interesting workshop is to be held in conjunction with the Participatory Design Conference (PDC 2008).

Excerpt from the call for participation:

Participatory design within the context of developing countries is an emerging area of interest in the Participatory Design community. This workshop will provide a unique forum for participants to exchange their experiences, consider the different approaches needed in developing country’s context, encourage new partnerships and learn from each others past difficulties and how these were solved. [snip taken from here]

2 page proposals can be submitted until August 1st, 2008. The workshop will take place October 1st, 2008 in Bloomington, Indiana. More information can be found on the workshop website: http://itcentre.tvu.ac.uk/~jabdelno/pd4d2008.htm

I personally find this workshop really interesting since it brings my research interests into the context of ICT4D and I’m looking forward to reading about the submissions.

Ethan points to a very interesting article in New York Times about the situation around the mobile phone market in Nairobi and the rest of Southern Africa. Pascal Zachary gives a round up about the problems using a mobile and developing applications for mobiles.

Four times as many people have them as have bank accounts. Text messages are far more popular than e-mail. Safaricom, the dominant mobile provider, offers a service called M-pesa that lets customers send money with text messages. Nokia sells brand-new phones here for as little as $33. [snip taken from here]

The article also points to Googles initative in East Africa. Google is massively hiring, down in Southern Africa. See to open positions here.

The KOO is the “Koordinierungsstelle der Österreichischen Bischofskonferenz für internationale Entwicklung und Mission“, which means that they are coordinating the actions of several catholic organizations in the field of Development assistance. Their mission is to allocate the funds some member organizations acquire to the organizations that carry out projects in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Furthermore they gather recent job offers on the homepage.

The guideline of KOO (in German) reads quite critical to the recent development of the world, denouncing neoliberal economics, the widening gap between developing and developed nations and the general failure of political authorities. Also the role of new media is mentioned, but mainly neglected as tool for cultural imperialism of the western consumer-society.

As the guideline is from 1997 I don’t know how the current developments in IT are seen, but it does not seem that the usage of ICTs is very popular. The homepage serves as a platform to post news, links and job offers but there seems to be no interactive or participative sector like a blog or a wiki (- I couldn’t log into the intranet though).

I think that’s a pity, as the KOO is one of the major players in Austrian development assistance and having more information on their activities would definitely be useful.

Check out news on this topic in the wiki

Last week Google launched their official blog for Sub Saharan Africa:

You can view it here: http://google-africa.blogspot.com

There is also a discussion group, where everyone can contribute and share thoughts:
http://groups.google.com/group/google-africa-community

Today Martin Tomitsch and I agreed to a date to do the first part of Mobile - The Movie supported by ICT4D.at. I have set up the wiki page to document the progress of the planing and already filled in a timeline. We also set up a Google Map to interactively explore where we are going.

This is when we are going:

10/10/2008
Departure to Johannesburg, South Africa

10/13/2008 to 10/15/2008
Attending Mobile Active 08, Wanderers Club in Illovo, Johannesburg, South Africa

10/16/2008
Departure to Durban, South Africa

10/17/2008 to 10/19/2008
Filming in Durban

10/20/2008
Departure to Narobi, Kenya

10/21/2008 to 10/24/2008
Filming in Narobi

10/25/2008
Departure to Zanzibar Town, Tanzania

10/26/2008 - 10/30/2008
Filming in Zanzibar Town

10/31/2008 to 11/02/2008
Filming in Paje and Jambiani, Zanzibar East Coast

11/03/2008 - 11/06/2008
Filming in Zanzibar Town

11/07/2008 to 11/09/2008
Filming in Nungwi, Zanzibar North Coast

11/10/2008 - 11/13/2008
Filming in Zanzibar Town

11/14/2008 to 11/16/2008
Filming in Kizimkasi, Zanzibar South Coast

11/17/2008
Departure to Dar Es Saalam, Tanzania

11/18/2008 to 11/21/2008
Filming in Dar Es Saalam

11/22/2008
Departure to Vienna, Austria

Picidae is an art project of the two Swiss artists Christoph Wachter and Matthias Jud. It is a project against censorship in the internet and should enable every internet user to access every web page without being constrained or mintored by authorities.
It works the following way:

If you invoke a pici-server a form field appears to fill in a web address. The pici-server then creates an image of that website and sends this back. [snip taken from here]

The authors have made several travels around the world - even to China - to try out their project.
At the PecheKucha event, where I had a presentation they also were there and talked about Picidae.
They said that they receive a big response from countless people in many countries, if you are interested check out their website.

To receive updates about this project, check out the wiki page for this article.

Finally I managed to find time and upload the Linuxwochen Vortrag from around one month ago.
It’s split in 4 parts and all of them can be viewed - sometimes youtube says that they are not available but then you have to reload, it’s kind of unstable.

Regrettably it’s not possible to load it into the wiki, but you can watch it here and on youtube.

Gary Marsden gives an excellent talk about the use of mobile technology in sub-Saharan Africa. He points out issues normal viewers would never discover. Since I am thinking to do a movie about exactly this topic (see the related wiki-page here), I will contact Gary and ask for his opinion soon.

Using Case studies and examples, this talk looks at the challenges of applying standard HCI techniques in a developing world context. We look at how HCI can have a fantastic impact on communities in the developing world, but there is still some way to go in understanding how HCI can best benefit the developing world. Speaker: Gary Marsden Gary Marsden is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science, University of Cape Town, South Africa. He completed his Ph.D. work at Stirling University in 1998. He now teaches computer science and HCI. Besides his academic interests in designing interaction for mobile computers including cell phones, a large part of his time is spent in examining how mobile computers can be used for betterment of the developing world. Gary edits the column “Under Development” in magazine, which is aimed at raising the profile of the developing world both in SIGCHI and in the worldwide HCI community. He has worked to help build a local community of HCI researchers and practitioners, serving the South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technologists (SAICSIT), CHI-SA (the South African chapter of SIGCHI), and Afri-Graph (the South African chapter of SIGGRAPH) as well as bringing well-known HCI researchers for keynote presentations in South Africa. His book co- authored with Matt Jones, “Mobile Interaction Design”, includes chapters on how mobile technology can be used to make an impact in the developing world. Gary’s work and that which he inspires has significantly raised the profile of developing world issues in the wider HCI community and, similarly, has brought HCI to developing world’s computer science community. [text taken from here]

Check out the wiki page of this article to receive updates.

Ismael Peña-López is one of the first people I came across when I did research on ICT4D.
He is a lecturer at the University of Catalonia in Barcelona and publishes current issues and research he does on ictlogy.net. He holds and participates in many workshops and conferences on the topic and in his PhD thesis which he currently writes, he tries, amongst other things, to find empiric evidence on the claim that ICTs fosters economic development.
Other issues he is interested in include e-Learning or Open Access. Overall I have to say that his articles and blog posts influenced me very much in my master thesis and gave me many ideas about the whole topic.
From 15th to 17th October he organizes a course about ICT4D in Barcelona with many interesting persons in that field like Ethan Zuckerman or David Weinberger and I’m pretty sure I will go there.

Check out the wiki page of this article to receive updates.

Hallo liebe Interessierte,

Dies ist ein News-Update der Plattform http://ict4d.at/ , dem “Austrian Network for Information and Communication Technologies for Development”.

In der letzten Zeit war einiges los, wir haben den ersten Entwurf für ein Logo und eine gewissen Frequenz bei den Einträgen. Das Layout der Seite haben wir auch ein wenig geändert. Das Video von den Linuxwochen ist leider noch immer nicht online aber es wird in der nächsten Woche online gestellt. Unser Ziel ist es immer noch, einen Stammtisch zu dem Thema zu initialisieren - jetzt heisst der Stammtisch allerdings BarCamp.

Leider sind mein Partner Martin Konzett und ich, Florian Sturm, über den Sommer jeweils im Ausland und müssen dieses BarCamp auf den Herbst verschieben. Trotzdem würden wir uns über Rückmeldungen bzw. Kommentare auf der Seite freuen. Wenn jemand auch eigene Beiträge oder ins Wiki schreiben will, müsstet Ihr Martin oder mir Bescheid geben - das wäre natürlich super. Wenn jemand nicht mehr von uns kontaktiert werden will, auch einfach schreiben.

Liebe Grüße, ict4d.at - Team