Most mobiles…

It was a pleasure to compare notes with Andrew Heavens at Reuters about beeping and missed calls in Africa.  Andrew, based in Khartoum, has just completed an article: Phone credit low? Africans go for “beeping”  

I had not heard the Ethiopian term for the practice  – “Miskin” (Pitiful) — until now.  It’s perfect. Also good to hear  another datapoint on the proportion of calls on the network which are beeps/missed calls: 

“We have about 355 million calls across the whole network every day,” said Faisal Ijaz Khan, chief marketing officer for the Sudanese arm of Kuwaiti mobile phone operator Zain (formerly MTC). “And then there are another 130 million missed calls every day. There are a lot of missed calls in Africa.”

I’m sure it varies from network to network, but this instance of 25% of the total dialed calls per day is in line with other estimates I’ve found.

The article mentions an upcoming paper in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication.   It is not live yet, but tThe paper is a significantly revised version of my ICA paper from a couple of years ago.   I’ll keep the ICA paper on this site until the JCMC paper is available.

Some perspectives today from the Hindu Business Line on the needs of rural mobile phone users in India. The article covers a lot of ground; missed calls, sharing, livlihoods, and text-free user interfaces figure prominently.  I thought this quote was particularly interesting:

If you thought missed calls is a purely Indian phenomenon, think again. Says Sarup [from Nokia], “I too thought so but was amazed to see this phenomenon in Africa. There they call it ‘flashing’, and the basic message is ‘Call me back’.

Having spoken to users in both spots (India and Africa) about beeping/flashing/missed calling, I’ve been impressed by how people want to describe the practice as something unique to their region.  One of my interview participants started his explanation of beeping with: “you see, in Rwanda, we have a culture…”.  I think it has to do with how people learn to beep/flash/miss call.   They’re introduced to the practice by friends and family, not by websites or manuals.  Beeping is therefore perceived as a social practice, as a (re) creation of the people they know, rather than a property of the handset or even the network to which it connects.

Putting people first highlights a new piece of research, which makes me wish I read French. 

The French newspaper Le Monde reports on new research, published today, that shows how mobile phones are increasingly becoming objects of collective use.

The research, which involved six months of field observations and interviews, was commissioned by the French Association of Mobile Operators and managed by researchers of Gripic, a research group of the information sciences school Celsa at the University of Paris-IV-Sorbonne.

For monoglots like me, the post on putting people first has relatively lengthy translations of some of the findings, which include observations of family sharing patterns as well as beeping/missed calls.  It’s not exactly focused on the developing world, but the beeping and the sharing make it worth mentioning here.

The BBC reports that Ericsson is providing equipment to bring mobile coverage to the Millennium Villages in Africa.  These villages are the foci of major pilots/experiments in holistic approaches to poverty reduction.  The partnership is great news, as ICTs (and mobiles in particular) are part of the puzzle.

Many of my former colleagues at the Earth Institute at Columbia University are working on the Millennium Villages Project, which is coordinated in collaboration with the UN.

Thanks to a (rare?) confluence of market forces, steady innovation and careful regulation, Most of the world’s population now lives under mobile phone signal, yet the economics of reaching the remain poor rural populations remain challenging. Experiments and pilots like the one announced by Ericsson and the Millennium Villages will be very helpful at this stage.  It is imporant to carefully track how phone ownership and use takes off in the villages, since the patterns that emerge will give us more information on the strength of demand, and the conditions under which any micro/targeted interventions might be necessary (and feasible). 

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.