As researchers working in different subareas within human-computer interaction, we have been keen to explore alternative approaches to designing with communities. In particular, we are enthusiastic about moving away from focusing on a community's needs toward building on its strengths. However, our varied experiences with assets-based design across contexts have also unearthed two fundamental questions: *What is the right thing to do?* and *How do we know we have done it?*
It is increasingly in vogue to describe research as community-engaged, but the incentives of academia often misalign with the needs of communities that academics purport to serve. This leads to abusive and exploitative work under the guise of engagement. To address this probem involves more than well-meaninged researchers, but to address the distorted incentive structure of academia at multiple levels.
Action-oriented researchers aim to design and evaluate how technology can be used to improve the lives of underserved populations around the globe. However, improvement is a value-laden concept with normative, causal, and methodological assumptions. As researchers, we should examine how different perspectives on improvement influence the choices made in the design of action.
In Cameroon, no exam is more important than the baccalauréat, which serves as the gateway to professional and higher-education aspirations. We build on existing literature on practice tests to evaluate how SMS-based quizzes could help students prepare for the baccalauréat. We find that students used our practice tests for formative assessment, as a prompt for recall and review of study material, and as a focus of collaborative study sessions.
I survey past literature of ICTD interventions targeting practitioners to identify a common typology that spans domain and context. I use Lave and Wenger’s Communities of Practice (CoP) theory as a way to understand the situated and social aspects of practice and describe how ICTD interventions have often engaged with such communities. I discuss how a CoP lens may intersect with other theoretical lenses in ICTD and related fields, to address issues around concepts of agency, intrinsic motivation, amplification, and sustainability.
We created a system to send regularly-spaced, multiple-choice questions to students' own mobile devices to help secondary school students in Cameroon with exam practice via either SMS or WhatsApp. Students' participation rates were heavily impacted by trust in the intervening organization and perceptions of personal security in the socio-technical environment. WhatsApp-based users had significantly lower participation as compared to SMS.
Their results were surprising. With all the hype around Internet messaging services like WhatsApp, the researchers were expecting WhatsApp to well outdo old-school SMS text messages. Yet, SMS beat WhatsApp for mobile phone test prep!
Anthony Poon, a Cornell Ph.D. student studying information science, is working on test preparation technology initiatives to improve high school graduation rates in Cameroon.
We present an SMS-based system for providing transit information based solely on existing cellular and GPS networks. We developed and applied our system to privately-run marshrutka buses in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. However, our goal is to more broadly address issues of ad-hoc shared transportation systems in the developing world. A custom designed GPS-GSM unit is placed on a vehicle, and users can query our server over SMS with their own non-GPS-enabled cell phones. We report on the accuracy of our location naming approach and summarize interviews with bus drivers and bus riders relating their views of the system.