Most mobiles…

MSR was one of the Platinum sponsors for ICTD2007—the 2^nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development— which wrapped up this weekend (Dec 15-16) in Bangalore.   It was a great program, and it was a treat to welcome so many researchers from around the world to Bangalore.

Veeraraghavan, R., Yasodhar, N., & Toyama, K. (2007). Warana Unwired: Mobile Phones replacing PCs in a rural sugarcane cooperative.  This is a project by some of my MSRI colleagues, in which an existing (and successful) agricultural information system was updated, streamlined, and extended via mobile phones.  The upshot has been greater convenience at lower cost to farmers in the cooperative. While we’re waiting for the papers to go live, some details on Warana Unwired are available here.

Mpoeleng, D., Anderson, G., Asare, S., Ayalew, Y., Garg, D., Gopolang, B., et al. (2007). Towards a Bilingual SMS Parser for HIV/AIDS Information Retrieval in Botswana.   This poster is an example of the kind of detailed, patient work that, in the long run, helps make mobile systems flexible and powerful, without sacrificing the appearance (to users) of intelligence, awareness, and magic.  Can an SMS database ‘understand’ both English and Setswana?  If it is going to be helpful in Botswana, it had better do so.

Other researchers tackled broader issues of wirelesses and/or mobility (e.g., store and forward, mesh networks interactive radio), or mentioned mobiles as part of a discussion of user centered design. I’ll update these links when the papers go live. I expect we’ll see more mobile-related papers in future conferences.

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.

DIRSI–Diálogo Regional sobre Sociedad de la Infomación–posted what looks like the entire set of presentations and comments from a July 4 discussion in Lima on “Understanding the Contribution of Mobile Telephony to Development in LAC” (Latin America and the Carribean).

More research and background papers from DIRSI are available on their homepages (English) (en Español).

Kudos to Gerard Goggin and Larissa Hjorth for arranging a great conference in Sydney last week.  Mobile Media 2007 welcomed attendees from around the world, and did a great job pushing new themes within the mobile research community.

There were more than a few papers dealing with mobiles in the developing world, although they were interspersed throughout the conference panels.  Thus, I missed a few good papers, including Thomas Apperley’s talk on mobile gaming inVenezuela, and most of the papers about SMS/MMS in China. 

I did however, get to see Jack Qiu’s presentation on the ‘Information Have-Less’ and their use of ‘Working-Class ICTs’, a topic he continues to explicate with a great mix of ethnographic/micro observations and macro-level summary data from the rapidly changing telecommunications environment in China. (earlier presentation here)

Genevieve Bell also touched on issues relevant to mobiles in the developing world, during her keynote. She mentioned the phenomenal success of handsets and services to support the needs of Muslim users (example), and mentioned beeping/miss call behavior. In general, Genevieve emphasized the importance of exploring the regulatory and infrastructural factors which both support and complicate the ways people use mobiles in different locations. Indeed, she questioned whether there is really a single device called a ‘mobile’, asking us to consider instead the whole range of mobile devices and functions, notably GPS.

I presented a small paper on differences in perspectives towards mobile phones vs. PCs, among small businesses in urban India. This is based on a Q sort I put together a few months ago, but only with the assistance of Gaana Nair, Gautam Prakash, and Arundathi Vishwanath, all students (past or current) at Christ College in Bangalore. Thanks again!

San Francisco last week for another conference; the annual meeting of ICA. It is a huge event with at least a dozen parallel sessions from all facets of communication research, but nevertheless, one can find a path through the crowds to reconnect with colleagues from around the world, and listen to some excellent papers, to boot.

My main focus was a Preconference on Mobile Communication, which I helped organize along with Richard Ling, Concetta Stewart, and Michael Traugott.  We had a very nice mix of papers on mobiles and on community WiFi, and a relatively luxurious day-and-a-half to run through them.  Carolyn Wei presented some of the results from her fieldwork in Bangalore last summer, focusing on questions of mobile hybridity (.pdf). Dr. Wei described the use of mobiles (in love and life) by young IT/business services workers in Bangalore. Many are new to the city, and use their mobiles to build local manage family ties at a distance. I presented a paper on mobile banking, which I’ll describe later.

On Saturday I chaired a session at ICA called ‘Networking the poor for development’, with papers by Araba Sey, Amelia Arsenault, Seungyoon Lee, and Arul Chib. All four are Ph.D. students at USC. The papers did a great job reflecting the range of topics and perspectives confronting ICTD, ranging from Arul’s assessment of a mobiles-for-midwifes project in Aceh, to Amelia’s analysis of some of the unanticipated impacts of internet browsing, with a focus on the net-driven conspiracy theories about HIV/AIDS circulating among some decision makers in South Africa.

On Wednesday March 16, I was at the University of Manchester, at a workshop on mobiles and economic development, sponsored by the Development Informatics Group of the Institute for Development Policy and Management, and the Brooks World Poverty Institute. Most of the presentations highlighted case studies, projects, or interventions designed to use the mobile platform in interesting ways. A brief report from the workshop is available here.

I presented an updated version of a literature review on Mobiles in the Developing World; it was originally presented as part of a conference in Hong Kong in 2005, but the scope and volume of research on the topic has, of course, increased since then. Here are the new slides and the revised paper. old paper. Ask me if you want an updated draft of the review.