One of our big aims when we created this platform was not only to provide information about ICT4D topics, but also to establish real life contact between interested and commited people.
Therefore we want to announce our first “ICT4D.at Stammtisch” in Vienna, open for everybody in the area that wants to get to know us, wants to talk about own projects or just wants to have a nice evening with like-minded people.
It’s not institutional, it’s not even a barcamp so don’t be shy, we are happy to meet you.
We are proud to announce that in the future we will work closely together with the e-Development Group of The World Bank, working together in social networks and general web 2.0 services and covering their events via Twitter and blog posts.
We met our contact person Oleg Petrov first at Coop 2.0 in Gijon and agreed there that it would be beneficial for both of us to collaborate. ICT4D.at is now trying to make the events of the e-Development Group known to a wider public - as we think that what’s happening at these events is definitely influencial to the ICT4D scene as a whole.
We are looking forward to a productive partnership.
In this week’s video interview Jacob Mtalitinya from the University of Dar Es Salaam gives us some insights into the usage and research of mobile technologies in Tanzania. He explains how the introduction of mobile phones has changed the way people in Tanzania communicate and why M-Pesa has become so popular. At the University of Dar Es Salaam Jacob Mtalitinya investigates the social impacts of mobile technologies. His group is also working together with international partners to push forward research in this area.
This is the 19th interview from our MobileActive08 video podcast series, shot at the conference in Johannesburg (organized by MobileActive and sangonet).
A few days ago I attended a talk by Jeanette Blomberg at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). Jeanette worked at Xerox PARC in the 80s and is currently at IBM research. The talk was about ethnography and design, based on her experience from working as an ethnographer in a technology context for the last 25 years.
Since ethnographic research is really relevant for the design of ICT4D solutions and probably most of our readers have used ethnographic methods themselves in their work before, I decided to post a short summary of my notes here.
Jeanette started with a nice introduction about ethnographic research and presented the following principles of ethnography:
study activities in their everyday settings
focus on relations among activities and people (interactions) and not on single tasks or isolated individuals
descriptive accounts of activity
member’s point of view
focus on what people do
She further emphasized how ethnography should be seen as a collection of multiple methods for collecting data, including informal interviews, observations, self-reporting, video analysis, artifact analysis, etc. It’s also important to “adjust as you go”, since ethnography is a very improvisational approach, which requires iteration. This is a very important issue in my opinion and something that I personally often find difficult to implement in an academic context, where you have to define your research approach in detail beforehand.
Another interesting insight that I took away from this presentation was that participatory design (PD) is often used as ethnographic method, meaning that ethnographers don’t only observe people without interfering (one of the myths about ethnography), but also involve them in the design process. Apparently a joining of PD and ethnography happened in the middle 80s.
PD in an ICT4D context has been done (e.g. for developing community radios), but as Gary Marsden said during a session on mobile interaction design at last year’s MobileActive conference, it often doesn’t work to involve users for informing the design process in developing countries. Or more specific, the context and hence the requirements are different to developed countries, where PD and user-centered design (UCD) have been successfully applied and explored for many decades.
The talk ended with a discussion of how both technologies and goals have changed over time. Technology is currently developing towards an anytime/anywhere approach and technology-enabled services. (Very true for ICT4D.) Goals have changed from improving the quality of work life (in the 80s) to designing more usable and useful technologies, and more success products. Recent trends show that now the most important goal often is to design more sustainable (”green”) products. (Again, something that is very true for ICT4D, considering that resources are scarce in developing countries.)
Thanks to Jeanette Blomberg for this really insightful talk and thanks to UTS for organizing the event.
Today was the first day of e-STAS Symposium on Technologies for Social Action. I arrived yesterday here in Malaga and was picked up from the airport and brought to the hotel where all the speakers are staying. In the evening we started socializing and I was introduced (in the real world) to Ken Banks, Christian Kreutz, Jack Dorsey just to name a few of all the interesting people. We had kind of an informal dinner and discussed the actions and topics for day 1 of e-STAS. Today we got up quite early and a bus took us to the venue. We got our name tags and the publication where a saw our article “ICTs for the empowerment of citizens” printed on paper. Very nice.
As Adrian Mangin promised, the event is highly interactive and everybodies voice is heard. As usual, Ismael Peña-López started taking notes and publish them in real time. It was very fascinating sitting next to him and watching him “power-blogging”. Here is his outcome chonologically:
The only missing piece was a workshop, where all the people split into groups and were trying to find a definition for the term “Empowerment”. I was apointed to be the moderator of the bunch of all English speaking guys and we brought up a lot of issues. This will be covered by a separate blog post ASAP.
I was also participating in a round table on Empowerment (see Ismaels link above and the picture) with Bárbara Navarro, Google.es, Luis Millán Vázquez, FUNDECYT and expert at UN-GAID and Fernando Bothelo, Literacy Bridge which was moderated by Idelfonso Mayorgas. Everybody was introduced and had a 2 minutes pitch before we got into medias res. I was the only one speaking English, so I had to stick to my headset with the transation. We brought up our visions and sights on empowerment and I tried to put the focus on the developing world and proposed that we have to educate the people there and let them empower themself. A second topic was cloud computing, where I brought up the lack of computing power and storage capability of mobile devices which are so much growing and cloud computing as a natural result of this. I said that there is open source software for building a cloud system and everybody is able to build it’s own cloud and sticking to e.g. Google is in the long run just a matter of cost (big clouds shoud be cheaper). Another argument we had was on the “information / knowledge / innovation society” which was put into the spotlight by Luis. I said: The problem with this is, that all the information and knowledge is mostly available in written form and in English, so all the illiterate people are not part of it, so it is matter of accessibility. But I insisted later, that this is just a matter of time and the problem should be solved sooner or later.
I will get the video of the round table tomorrow and will push it on youtube.
During the last two Swahili lessons we focussed on reading dialogues to improve our articulation and learn to talk more fluently. These dialogues covered the situations “meet & greet”, “at the market”, “food”, “love / like” and the basics on on how tenses.
Here are some dialogues:
Bariki: Vipi Mzee
Aisack: Salama tu mzee
Bariki: Nipe habari! Mambo vipi.
Aisack: Mambo bomba tu. Vipi, za kazi?
Bariki: Shuari. Inatulia bwana.
Aisack: Safi. Mimi nakwenda shuleni bwana.
Bariki: Haya, kasome vizuri mzee.
Aisack: Issue sawa bwana. Tutaonana badaye.
Bariki: Haya, badaye.
The presentation worked out very well and we ended up discussing issues concerning the next step of automating mashups which would increase the need for automated negiotiatian engines (SLAs) or the substantial importance of simplicity when developing in an ICT4D context.
What was also quite interesting to me was the claim of Mr. Schikuta, one on the examiners, that technology nowadays is like religion in former times - when it comes to standards which we impose to people we consider to be underdeveloped.
What I especially stressed during my presentation was the ongoing shift of ICT4D projects - from development for the local population, to development with or even by the local population. I really think that in this context technologies such as the so-called web 2.0 and mashups have great potentials as they emphasize collaboration and contribution of everybody using the internet.
Presentation: Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) with special focus on Web 2.0 and Mashups of existing Services was published on March 23rd, 2009 by Florian Sturm.
It files under global.
This week’s video from our MobileActive08 interview series features Matthias Wevelsiep, who is originally from Germany, but currently works as Senior Program Manager for Human Rights and ICT at Plan Finland. Plan Finland is an NGO that has projects in Africa, Asia and the Americas, where they work together with children, families, communities, and local organizations to develop programs at grassroots levels in fields such as health and education.
In the interview below (this week in German), Matthias talks about the impacts of digital technologies on social movements. He raises the interesting question whether the focus of such research is on digital social movements or on social movements who also employ digital channels. “I believe that that the social movement will totally naturally use digital channels more and more,” says Matthias and gives some examples, where Plan Finland was involved, such as the African Movement of Working Children and Youth. They operate in different countries and adapting digital communication and organization channels from country to country represents a big challenge.
Matthias concludes that the introduction of new technologies is not necessarily important, but that development rather happens on a different level, since existing technologies are often used in other ways than imagined or intended. - “People like to say, ‘well if it doesn’t work in Finland, why should it work anywhere else?’ but if you look closer, you would be surprised to see how well and economically things actually work, just in slightly different ways,” he says.
This is the 18th interview from our MobileActive08 video podcast series, shot at the conference in Johannesburg (organized by MobileActive and sangonet).
Since my position involves teaching as well as research (40% of my working time as I learned today), I will also push forward research on ICT4D (in the context of interaction design and HCI) as one of my research streams.
The group where I’m working also just started a very exciting master program, called M.IDEA, which stands for Master of Interaction Design and Electronic Arts. Check out the program here and an interview that I gave recently here.
Recently I wrote a short piece about the emerging mobile banking systems in Kenya, Tanzania and Zanzibar. The article was published in the bi-monthly Swedish eco- and lifestyle mag Camino. This issue’s theme was about “smarter money”, and I mention here the advantages of simple SMS-based services like the Z-Pesa, a credit-transfer service from Zantel, one of the main telecom operators in Tanzania/Zanzibar. You can send ‘hard cash’ if you get a Z-pesa account, but more common is to send SMS with ‘airtime’ (cellphone credits) to anybody with a cellphone (requires no fixed account).
The text is also about how the fast growth of mobile technology are changing the economical infrastructure in these countries, the difference it has made for people and the myriad of small businesses which has been generated around mobile phones. Also worth noting is, the embarassing fact that these simple yet great services still are not available in Sweden or Europe (at least not to my knowledge).
Check out the piece here (yes, in Swedish, but neat pictures to look at), or even better, get your own, shiny copy straight from Camino.
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One of our big aims when we created this platform was not only to provide information about ICT4D topics, but also to establish real life contact between interested and commited people.
As some of our readers already know I moved to Sydney in the beginning of this year to join the 
