Archive for conferences
At the W3C workshop in Maputo
April 2nd, 2009 Africa, conferences, m-internet
I’m very happy to be back in Mozambique, attending the W3C Workshop on the Africa Perspective on the Role of Mobile Technologies in Fostering Social Development. Highlights so far have included presentations by kiwanja, Ushahidi, Freedom Fone, FARA (agriculture, also slides) and John Nesbit (SMSmedic). Keynotes from Steve Bratt, (head of the new WWW foundation) and Sean Krepp (describing Nokia’s life tools) helped kick us off well. Congratulations and thanks to Stephane Boyera of the W3C for convening this great event. For more, see the agenda and links to papers.
I presented an early report (slides) of work I’m doing with Shikoh Gitau, a graduate student at the ICT4D lab at the University of Cape Town. For the past few months, Shikoh has been interviewing mobile-only (and mobile primary) internet users in low-income neighborhoods in Cape Town. We’ve been finding that a combination of factors, some social/expressive, some instrumental, are linked to the adoption and use of the mobile internet by a broad and growing community of users – some estimates suggest there are upwards of 9 million mobile internet users in a country of just over 40 million.
We will be revising and expanding this analysis in time for the ICA preconference on mobile communication in May in Chicago. In the meantime, our initial paper can be found here
Donner, J., & Gitau, Shikoh. (2009, 1-2 May). New paths: exploring mobile-only and mobile primary internet use in South Africa. Paper presented at the W3C Workshop on the Africa Perspective on the Role of Mobile Technologies in Fostering Social Development, Maputo.
ICTD2009 programme details available
February 16th, 2009 conferences, microenterprise
The next set of details concerning the programme for ICTD2009 is now available:
Speakers Bill Gates and Carlos Braga keynote the confirmed programme for the forthcoming ICTD2009 conference, to be held 17-19 April 2009 at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar: http://ictd2009.org/program.html
The 3rd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development brings together the latest ideas on ICTs-for-development from both technical and social science perspectives. Alongside academic paper presentations, we have poster sessions, workshops, panels and application demonstrations.
Marcela Escobari and I submitted “A review of the research on mobile use by micro and small enterprises (MSEs)”. I’ll try to post a temporary pre-camera draft once we finish up a few last edits.
M4D conference, Karlstad
January 21st, 2009 conferences
Just before the holiday break last month, I attended a great conference in Sweden, dedicated specifically to “Mobiles for Development” (M4D). The conference sparked some interesting discussions, particularly and notably around the issues of affordability and even ‘addictiveness’ of mobile telephony. Richard Heeks (one of the keynote speakers) offers a detailed and judicious post on this. Forgive the teaser – the whole post is worth the read.
If you had to choose three words to sum up the future of ICT4D, they might well be “mobiles, mobiles, mobiles”. And the way to that future is being more clearly indicated as the promise of mobiles-for-development research comes to fruition; reflected, for example, in the recent 1st “m4d” international research conference. But such research is starting to throw up some perplexing – even worrying – findings about mobiles. At its bluntest, such research suggests mobiles are doing more economic harm than good, and sometimes making poor people poorer. Let’s have a look…
In other news, Katrin Verclas (of MobileActive.org), Kentaro Toyama, and I presented a paper, Reflections on MobileActive08 and the M4D Landscape, Here’s the abstract:
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 technology’s impact on development.
Slides from Everyday Digital Money workshop
October 22nd, 2008 conferences, m-banking, Uncategorized
At the recent ‘Everyday Digital Money’ workshop, I presented my thoughts on the importance of linking research on adoption, impact, design, and use of M-Banking applications. The slides are here. This is a longer deck, and reflects the arguments from my paper with Camilo Tellez on the same topic, upcoming in the Asian Journal of Communication.
Congratulations and thanks to Bill Maurer, Department of Anthropology at UC Irvine and Scott Mainwaring from Intel’s People and Practices Group for putting together such a timely and informative event.
Links to Mobileactive08 presentations
October 14th, 2008 Africa, beeping/miss calls, conferences, m-banking, microenterprise
Greetings from day 2 of the fantastic Mobileactive08 conference. It is a rare treat to have so many people interested in mobiles and social change under one roof. For details on the conference, check the live blog coverage here.
I’ll post some additional thoughts soon. In the meantime, here are links to the slides from the three sessions in which I participated – Mobile Use by Small and Informal Businesses; Innovations in Social Marketing (miss calls); and M-Banking/M-payments for Social Impact. Let me know if you have any questions.
There are a few glitches in the .prf files, but I will try to sort these out in the next few days and will refresh with cleaner files.
headed to Mobileactive 2008
October 10th, 2008 Africa, beeping/miss calls, conferences, m-banking, microenterprise, travel
I’m travelling this week to Johannesburg for the Mobileactive 2008 conference. It promises to be a great gathering of people and organizations doing innovative things with mobile technologies. I’ll certainly try to get some reactions up during the week, but don’t count on any liveblogging…..
4S panel on mobiles in Africa
August 26th, 2008 Africa, beeping/miss calls, conferences, microenterprise, sharing behavior, Uncategorized
Thanks to Jenna Burrell of UC Berkeley for putting together a great panel “On the Ground Accounts of the Mobile Phone Revolution in Africa” at the 4S/ESST meeting in Rotterdam last week.
Jenna spoke about her current fieldwork (with an emphasis on mobile phone sharing) in Rural Uganda. Wesley Shrum of LSU shared some initial findings about increased sociability among mobile users in Nairobi. Tom Molony of the University of Edinburgh spoke about mobile use on the streets of Dar es Salaam, with an emphasis on how some small enterprises took advantage of the ‘mobility’ as opposed to simply the connectivity functions of the device.
I did a bit of a re-synthesis of my Africa studies, combining the small enterprises surveys with the open-ended interviews to illustrate how varied (and incomplete) our understanding of mobile’s role in development remains. I contrasted the kinds of high-clarity results available from narrowly focused papers like Jenson’s Digital Provide (which focuses narrowly but so effectively on one independent variable (mobile Use) and one depended variable (price of fish) with broader explorations. These broader approaches so far either place mobile use in context of other communication behaviors like face to face interactions and internet use, or expand the range of behaviors under examination to include both instrumental (enterprise/developmental) uses and intrinsic and/or social uses. This broadening comes with a cost, of course, as the ‘impact’ of mobile use is harder to isolate. Initial slides are here.
Unfortunately, a few others Mohammed Mohammed from Intel, Hsain Ilahiane from Iowa State University and our discussant Don Slater were unable to attend the panel and were each missed, both during the session and during the lively chats occurring afterward, over coffee.
Congrats to Jenna, by the way, for winning the Nicholas C. Mullins Award, given by the Society for the Social Studies of Science for “an outstanding piece of scholarship by a graduate student in the field of Science and Technology Studies.” Her paper explored “West African Internet Scams as Grassroots Media Production”
Mobiles preconference at 58th annual meeting of the International Communication Association
May 24th, 2008 beeping/miss calls, conferences, microenterprise
Time flies! Apparently I’ve been making occasional dispatches to this blog for a whole year now. One of my very first posts was on last year’s ICA.
I want to thank Rich Ling, Scott Campbell and Jan Fernback for organizing a very successful pre-conference workshop on globalization and development issues surrounding mobile telephony. Though a big conference like ICA has its own rewards, it is great to have a full day-and-a-half dedicated to contiguous sessions on mobile society/mobile theory. After a great keynote by Jim Katz, the conversations built on each other as the sessions progressed.
The agenda is here, including some links to full papers. Notable papers in the mobiles and development genre included Harsha de Silva from LIRNEasia on perceptions of the impacts of mobile on livelihoods among BOP users, from Hana Cecelie Geirbo of Telenor on missed calls in Bangadesh, from Araba Sey on the decline of the informal mobile payphone in Ghana, and from Patricia Mechael on her work on mobiles and health in Egypt.
I presented a work-in-progress—A typology of mobile uses among small and informal businesses. By re-surveying the existing literature on the issue, I argue that:
Current evidence suggests that within the small and informal business (MSE) sector, benefits of mobile use accrue mostly (but not exclusively) to existing enterprises, in ways which amplify and accelerate material and informational flows, rather than fundamentally transforming them.
This is not to say that I think the mobile is not a huge boon to small enterprise. Rather, I just emphasize that it is (mostly) a boon in the same way that a landline would be, were it more affordable. The research literature available (so far) suggests that the majority of small and informal businesses use mobiles to serve existing customers, coordinate with existing partners and supplies, and check prices amongst existing alternatives and sources, rather than to replace middlemen, recruit new customers, or start new enterprises.
My review of mobile research, appearing in The Information Society
May 6th, 2008 Africa, beeping/miss calls, conferences, India, Latin America / LAC, m-banking, m-learning, microenterprise, sharing behavior, text messaging
Over the years, I’ve been keeping an eye on the research literature about mobile use in the developing world. I first presented a version of this review at a conference in Hong Kong in 2005. Now, thanks to Leopoldina Fortunati’s efforts to pull together a special issue of The Information Society, the review has finally been published. Thanks also to the editors at the Information Society, and to the reviewers who provided such valuable feedback at various stages.
There’s a lot more of the literature to cover than there was when I started this back in 2005. And, since it is an interdisciplinary review, I’m sure to have missed some citations. Nevertheless, it has been a great exercise for me to get a sense of what’s out there, and to become familiar with the diverse work of an amazing set of researchers along the way.
I hope some of you find this review a useful input to your own work.
Thanks everyone!
Donner, Jonathan. (2008). Research Approaches to Mobile Use in the Developing World: A Review of the Literature. The Information Society 24(3), 140-159.
Abstract
This 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 subset of studies with a strong economic development perspective. The discussion considers the implications of the resulting review and typology for future research.
Mobile papers at ICTD2007
December 18th, 2007 Africa, conferences, India, text messaging
MSR was one of the Platinum sponsors for ICTD2007—the 2nd 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.
