Most mobiles…

Recently, I attended HOIT 2007—Home/Community Oriented ICT for the Next Billion.  Hosted at IIT-Madras, this was the first time the conference has been held outside the US or Europe. The “next billion” theme of this year’s version provided an umbrella for ICT4D discussions, and included a keynote by Prof. Ashok Jhunjhunwala. 

I presented an updated version of my thoughts on m-banking—although the basic paper is unchanged—as part of a panel called “Living and Livelihoods: ICTs and the Blurring Domestic and Economic Spheres in Emerging Economies”. The panel’s other presenters were my MSR colleague Nimmi Rangaswamy (ICTs in middle class Indian families, with an emphasis on mobile phone sharing), Jan Blum from Nokia Design (street-smart businesses in China and Brazil), and Vinod Gopinath of Novatium Solutions (an overview of Novatium’s netPC).

There were only a few presentations which directly addressed mobiles-in-the-developing-world. Of those, the keynote by David Frohlich of the Digital World Research Centre about the Storybank Project was particularly interesting, Storybank is exploring the use of simple, affordable ICTs to capture to stuff of everyday life in villages in the developing world (David called it community centered design). As the Storybank website explains:

Cameraphones and digital library software will be used to support the capture and sharing of this information in the form of a short audiovisual story. We use the word story to refer to a spoken language report, illustrated with still or moving images. By focusing on audiovisual information of this kind, we hope to give a stronger voice and role to people who cannot read and write, or use the internet to record and access textual information

This general approach has a long history (e.g., Through Navajo Eyes), but mobile technologies open up new possibilities for these initiatives to capitalize on the handset’s affordances for simultaneity, customization, and ubiquity. New projects like Storybank can help us explore the boundaries of mobile appropriation and community use.

Speaking of digital libraries, some of concepts highlighted by Storybank remind me of similar efforts in the Digital Green project, led by my colleagues Rikin Gandhi and Rajesh Veeraraghavan at MSRI.  Digital green is focused specifically on agricultural productivity, but also relies on content generated by members of the community rather than on content created outside.

The logic of blurring the user/producer dichotomy, so central to recent developments in new media and social software, is currently finding its way into all sorts of interesting projects in the developing world; Storybank, Digital Green, and MobilED are just a few.