I can’t talk much on my blog about what I’ve been doing in Uganda, besides the usual elevator pitch about my research (mobile-phone and web-based claims administration for treatment of STDs in Western Uganda).  Mostly, I’ve been taking care of errands like paying my Uganda National Council of Science and Technology fees, and working with Marie Stopes to identify a new partner to help them barcode the vouchers and process claims.

In addition, I had the opportunity to attend the Makarere University Faculty of Computing EpiHandy workshop, where I was asked to talk about TIER’s research and how we might be able to collaborate with universities in Uganda.

My slides are a little photo-heavy, and Office 2008 seems to have taken out the “compress all pictures in the document” feature, so I’ve only put the pdf online:

http://melissaho.com/talks/epihandy-11-28-08.pdf (2.6MB)

Here in Sweden at m4d I’ve just given a very different presentation, talking about our long distance wireless (WiLD) deployments in Guinea Bissau and Ghana, and how the parameters for these cases differ from TIER’s deployment in India.

http://melissaho.com/papers/m4d08-mho-reassessing.pdf (workshop paper, 1.7MB)

http://melissaho.com/talks/m4d-mho-reassessing-121208.pdf (1MB)
http://melissaho.com/talks/m4d-mho-reassessing-121208.ppt (10.1MB)

I’ll eventually put these up also on some sort of index on my main web page. Eventually.

By the way the m4d conference has been really good so far. I’m totally torn between all of the different tracks, and it is a great blend of technical, development, and social-speak.  Despite the initial lack of information preceding the conference, it’s been really well organized thus far, and the talks have been interesting – I’m seeing a lot of projects here that I haven’t heard of before, and meeting people that I’ve heard of but not had a chance to meet in person.  The keynotes have been excellent and insightful – Adam Denton from GSMA, Victor Bahl from Microsoft Research (on white spaces), and Richard Heeks from University of Manchester. Karlstad is a nice location, and last night’s dinner included very interesting lessons on the bios of Alfred Nobel (timely!) and Lars Magnus Ericsson by Peter Sundh and Dag Nielsen.

I’ve just been going over the sessions, and it’s totally action packed. Here’s the schedule of the ICTD-themed sessions I’m hoping to attend:

• Thursday, October 2
  • 11.20-12.20: Enabling Nonprofits to Accomplish Their Missions through Technology (Torreys Peak III)
  • 2.45-3.45: Social Impact of Advanced Technologies and Telemedicine in the Developing World (Crestone Peak II – IV)
• Friday, October 3
  • 10.00-11.00 Building a Better World: Using Anthropology to Ensure Success in Your Project (Crestone Peak I) (actually this one is interesting but I’ll probably be at the next one…)
  • 10.00-11.00 Experiences with OLPC Technology in Ghana, West Africa and Build a Better Future with Creating an ACM-W Chapter in the United Arab Emirates to Help the Peace in the Persian Gulf (Torreys Peak IV)
  • 11.20-12.20 Engaging Students in the Free Open Source Movement Through Civic Engagement (Quandary Peak III)
  • 1.30-2.30 Having Global Impact as a Technical Woman: Information Technology Applied to the Developing World (Torreys Peak I-II) (I’m speaking at this one)
  • 2.50-3.50 Women Working in International Development to Build a Better World (Creston Peak II-IV)
  • 4.00-5.00 Change Agent Awards Panel (Quandary Peak III)

Come find me (I have no idea who will actually read this). And maybe we can go explore the rockies a bit on Thursday afternoon!

Come join the conversation!

Panel Info:
http://gracehopper.org/2008/conference/program-schedule/friday-october-3-session-7

Our Portal:
http://gracehoppper.ictdchick.com

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I’m honestly really divided between the two. My vote? That we pick both, choosing one to be ICTD 2010 or 2011, two conferences from now.

One of my main concerns about the content in this year’s conference, is that it seems even more biased towards Indian projects than last year’s, when we had at least one paper from China, as well as keynote speaker Prof Zhiwei Xu from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Out of the 18 papers and 20 posters:

• 22 presented results from work in India alone,
• 4 from India and other countries (“S. Asia”, India and S. Africa, India and Central America, Kenya/India/Bolivia),
• 2 from Pakistan,
• 1 from Nepal,
• 1 from Honduras,
• 5 from Africa (7, if you count the combos: Zambia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Botswana, and 3 South Africa) , and
• 3 non-specific (the meta-ICTD panel)
• 0 from China

I think several regions are under-represented. This is not to say that there is a flaw in the review process – I’m sure part of it is just that Microsoft Research India is just producing a lot of high-quality research, and another part is just that there are a lot of ICTD projects in India, so a good bulk of the submissions are about reasearch in India. Indeed it’s a lot easier to set up WiLDNet links in Tamil Nadu than in, let’s say, Ghana. I might suggest, however, that maybe some communities just didn’t get the invitation? Or that they saw that the conference was in Bangalore and thought the invitation wasn’t for them. Or they saw the program committee and At the same time I’m not sure that there’s much more we as a community can do to draw in more perspectives from projects in other countries; there’s some diversity on the program committee, they provide scholarships for participants from developing countries, and we’ve always been (as far as I can tell) an open and inviting group of people. Okay, well, I guess I for one could start writing more papers on my work in Uganda and Ghana. (Which might mean that this is a generational issue, since many of us wet our toes in India.) But I think a healthy next step could be to hold the conference in one of these under-represented areas. And, unfortunately for my decision-making process, both of these fit the bill. At the same time – given that Rahul Tongia is already firmly on the program committee, along with M Bernardine Dias (who I don’t think I’ve met yet), perhaps it makes sense to use this opportunity to engage with the universities in Argentina. But then again, this conference is still in its fledgling years, so I can also see how one would want to go with a well-known quantity and give the less-well-known quantity a year or so to become a well-known quantity. I know a certain School that does the same thing with PhD applicants…

If I were forced to choose, I would vote for Qatar (I don’t think I actually have a vote). It’s closer to Africa, where I’m likely to be at the time of the next conference. And the Argentine bid’s (I’m really sorry I forgot your name) tourist video was a little over-the-top for me; I think it was so long and so flashy that by the time it ended I forgot whatever academic reasons there were for locating the next ICTD in Buenos Aires. Besides, I’m really not all that into salsa.

ICTD 2007 Opening Keynote Notes – Anirudh Krishna
ICTD 2007 Session 1: Design Notes
ICTD 2007 Session 2: Extending the Boundaries of ICTD
ICTD 2007 Session 3: Telecenters
ICTD 2007 Panel Discussion Notes: Meaningful Research for ICTD
ICTD 2007 Session 4: Alternatives to Real-time Internet
(Oops, no notes for Sessions 5 and 6)
ICTD2007 Session 7: Children and PCs
ICTD 2007 Closing Keynote Notes – Paul Polak

The (unedited) notes available in the links above are not verbatim (I can’t type quite that fast), and don’t include everything said. Please don’t attribute content in these (especially the Q&A) to the labeled speakers without consulting with the speakers first – I may have misheard what they said, or paraphrased it in a way that misrepresented their meaning. For the talks themselves, you should refer to the corresponding papers for details and missing graphics, although of course the Q&A won’t necessarily be represented. In any case I hope these notes help you find ICTD work that is of interest to you!

The keynote speakers were both incredibly engaging. Anirudh Krishna spoke on his research on how people move in and out of poverty. For me – two main points were:

1. Poverty is escapable: many people escape poverty every year, just as many fall into it. At a high level, this indicates that while working on ways to help people escape poverty is good, our efforts may be moot if we fail to also prevent others from becoming impoverished
2. The capacity to aspire: Krishna notes a glass ceiling for those in villages; although they may try to aspire higher, their condition (the socio-economic-political context) prevents them from aspiring beyond the level of schoolteacher. Perhaps we can work on ways to provide protection against descents into poverty by connecting talent with opportunity.

Interestingly, two papers spoke directly to the topic of aspiration. Renee and Kathi’s paper on gender and shared computing in Chile and India (Akshaya) looked at women’s aspirations; Joyojeet’s paper on his work with parents of schoolchildren in India talked about how computers factored into children’s aspirations as well as parent’s aspirations for their children.

Paul Polak started off the closing keynote with some of Krishna’s slides on the consistent divisions (asset/status-wise) between extreme poverty and poverty, and between those in poverty and those who are not. And then went on to talk about his last 25 years of work talking with and listening to $1/day farmers, trying to understand how they want to move out of poverty. His takeaway: we need to collaborate and co-design with them to find ways to help them make more money, noting that by starting with the problems they give priority to, one opens up the door to addressing their next priorities… Anyways – his talk was packed with interesting stats, observations, an three-step how-to’s, courtesy of the editor of his forthcoming (Feb 2008) book Out of Poverty.

Tap also did an awesome job with the poster session – probably the most interesting and engaging poster session I’ve attended; since each one was also accompanied by a peer-reviewed conference-length paper, all of the posters exhibited real work, real ideas and were well thought-out. The posters in the same room as the sessions, exactly where everyone was during the break, so they had great exposure to a great audience.. And the fast forward session, in which each author gave a 90 second intro to their work, was a brilliant way for all of us to get an overview so we could quickly target the posters we were interested in during the poster session.

Before I close, there’s a couple of presentations I want to highlight as ones that I thought were especially interesting and well-crafted. (Apologies to those who presented in the sessions I missed – I’m sure J Sherwani and Indrani’s presentations were excellent, and I’ve also heard good feedback about Aishwarya Ratan’s paper on Welfare, agency, and ICT4D.)

ICTD 2007 Session 1: Design Notes

Digital Green provides a sort of “Indian Farmer Idol”/YouTube to farmers employing new agricultural technology advocated by the Green Foundation (see paper for details) . I think it’s really interesting to note their results on how various deployment/video strategies affected the farmers’ adoption of practices, with low receptiveness to expert-facilitated video and hole-in-the-wall/tv-broadcast strategies, and 6-7x more adoption with videos including low/medium-skilled mediators working with local farmers. These results underline ideas and observations from Janaki’s paper on the role of trustworthiness in the Parry information kiosk: information access is not sufficent – “whether a community uses the information services offered by information kiosks depends, among other factors, on the perceived quality of the information offered by such services.”

ICTD 2007 Session 2: Extending the Boundaries of ICTD

This was a one-paper session. Janini’s presentation did a great job of explaining the transnational flows of e-waste, and the associated issues. It would definitely be remiss for us not to consider these issues as we pursue our ends of employing ICTs for development, and as markets (some consequent of ICTD movements) draw more and more toxic materials into developing countries.

ICTD 2007 Session 4: Alternatives to Real-time Internet

I’m really impressed by Revi Sterling. Out of all the papers presented, hers truly integrates theory and practice, enabling theory-backed (driven?) engagement in development using novel technologies.

ICTD2007 Session 7: Children and PCs

Of course in this session (as with Session 3 on Telecenters), I’m a little biased. I think I must have listened to Joyojeet’s research talks at least two or three times each now, but I’m still riveted every time. With all of the (often hype-driven) push towards information-kiosk-as-community-centers and computers-in-schools (with Internet or without), I think Joyojeet’s findings on the engagement of the local communities with these projects are critically important, but often not done because they are, well, hard to do.

Rabin’s paper on usage models of classroom computing gets started on some important critical thinking about how one can plan for computers in schools. Although they did pull out some numbers on public spending in other countries, I wonder how these models translate outside of India. I just visited some secondary school computer labs in Jinja, Uganda (urban, private schools, no internet access), and indeed, the multiple students per shared computer model is the norm, with one school putting 10 students at each of their computers. At the same time – multimouse/multipoint is certainly not mainstream – so their representation, while nice, isn’t representative. In Uganda’s secondary schools, computer education is largely about basic “theoretical” (what is RAM, CPU, etc) and practical (create a word/excel/access/powerpoint document, print, move files) computer skills. While they are taught with 10 students to a computer, they are tested with one person per computer (they have to test the students in shifts, since there aren’t enough computers). I think it’s possible that a multimouse approach might be useful for teaching/learning certain aspects, there are limits to where that approach can be employed in teaching computer skills. I think their main arguments still hold up – even the single-user-per-community-computer model is significantly more financially feasible than the single ownership model.

That’s all she wrote.

But hopefully she’ll also write a couple of submissions for the next ICTD conference!

(Early reg deadline is on Nov 15th.)

——————————-

ICTD2007 Call for Participation
——————————-

2nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD2007)

http://research.microsoft.com/workshops/ictd2007

December 15-16, 2007
Bangalore, India

Following on a successful conference at Berkeley in May of 2006 (http://sims.berkeley.edu/ictd2006), we are pleased to announce the second ICTD conference to take place in Bangalore, India!

India is home to a robust IT and telecommunications industry as well as a huge agrarian economy which supports many of the world’s poor. As such, it is an ideal setting for a conference focusing on information and communication technologies (ICT) and socio-economic development. Every sector is involved – governments, academia, small start-ups, large corporations, inter-governmental organizations, and non-profits and non-governmental organizations. In spite of the tremendous energy and resources behind these projects, scientifically sound research in this space is still just beginning to emerge: What is the actual impact of ICT projects? What novel technology is required to meet development needs? What methodologies lead to success or failure of a project?

The goal of the ICTD conference is to provide a forum for academic researchers working with ICT applied to development. The conference will be scientifically rigorous and multi-disciplinary – papers reporting high-quality original research were subject to double-blind peer review by a program committee of leading scholars in the field. The conference will bring together researchers in both the social and technical sciences, with anticipated representation from anthropology, sociology, economics, political science, computer science, electrical engineering, industrial design, and so on.

Conference details are available at the ICTD2007 website: http://research.microsoft.com/workshops/ictd2007.

PLEASE NOTE THAT REGISTRATION FEES WILL INCREASE ON NOVEMBER 15 AND AGAIN ON NOVEMBER 30. EARLY REGISRTATION IS RECOMMENDED.

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Chair: Kentaro Toyama (Microsoft Research India)

Program Committee Chairs: Balaji Parthasarathy (IIIT Bangalore), Krithi Ramamritham (IIT Bombay)

Advisory Committee: VS Arunachalam (CSTEP), Michael Best (Georgia Tech), Ken Keniston (MIT), Raj Reddy (CMU), S. Sadagopan (IIIT Bangalore), AnnaLee Saxenian (UC Berkeley), Ernest Wilson (U Maryland)

Local Arrangements Chair: Balaji Parthasarathy (IIIT Bangalore)

Publications Chair: Rahul Tongia (CMU)

Sponsors:

International Development Research Centre (Canada)
Microsoft Research India
Alliance for Technology, Learning, and Society (Univ. of Colorado)

Conference held in association with…

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore

Program Committee

Richard Anderson University of Washington
Akhtar Badshah Microsoft
V Balaji ICRISAT
Anupam Basu Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur
John K. Bennett University of Colorado, Boulder
Michael Best Georgia Tech
Subhash Bhatnagar Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad
John Canny University of California, Berkeley
John Chuang University of California, Berkeley
Royal Colle Cornell University
Chris Coward University of Washington
Rahul De Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore
M. Bernardine Dias Carnegie Mellon University,Qatar
Jonathan Donner Microsoft Research India
Kevin Fall Intel Research Berkeley
Pat Hall Open University
Claire Heffernan University of Reading
Bill Hefley Carnegie Mellon University
Arding Hsu Siemens Research China
Heather Hudson University of San Francisco
Mahad Ibrahim University of California, Berkeley
Ashok Jhunjhunwala Indian Institute of Technology, Madras
Atreyi Kankanhalli National University of Singapore
G.R. Kiran London School of Economics
Jim Koch Santa Clara University
Beth Kolko University of Washington
Richa Kumar Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Suresh Lodha University of California, Santa Cruz
Colin Maclay Harvard University
Shirin Madon London School of Economics
Margaret Martonosi Princeton University
Shrikant Naidu Motorola Labs
Brian O’Connell University of Connecticut
Joyojeet Pal University of California, Berkeley
Govindan Parayil University of Oslo
Tapan Parikh University of Washington
Nimmi Rangaswamy Microsoft Research India
Tony Salvador Intel Research
Nirvikar Singh University of California, Santa Cruz
K R Srivatsan International Institute of Information Technology and Management, Kerala
Christoph Stork University of the Witwatersland
Eswaran Subrahmanian Carnegie Mellon University
Rahul Tongia Carnegie Mellon University
Tim Unwin University of London
Zubin Verghese Siemens

The mission of the BiD Network Foundation is to contribute to sustainable economic development by stimulating entrepreneurship in developing countries. They achieve this by:
Stimulating small and medium sized entrepreneurship to create jobs and raise income in developing countries.
Engaging professionals, investors and organizations offering them the opportunity to directly contribute to poverty reduction through SME development in developing countries.
Inspiring people that business and poverty reduction can go hand-in hand.
Come hear Thierry Sanders and Koen Wasmus discuss how they have created an online investment platform and community called the BiD Network to tackle the key problems facing investors wanting to help stimulate economic development in emerging markets.
The BiD Network now operates the world’s largest business plan competition for entrepreneurs in developing countries.  This year the BiD Network received 3,400 business proposals from over 100 countries.  It operates competitions in Kenya, Tanzania, Philippines, India, Argentina, Columbia and Peru.  All of this happens online though www.bidnetwork.org  In addition to the business plan, over 3,700 active members contribute to the online community to help entrepreneurs in developing countries.  In the first year alone the BiD Network assisted the start-up of almost 20 companies in developing countries that help reduce poverty and employ over 500 people.
Speakers Bio:
Thierry Sanders is the Founder of the BiD Challenge, an international business plan competition for developing countries. He has a blended career background in development and business, with a dash of IT, carbon markets and finance.

http://www.bidnetwork.org/person-43-en.html

Koen Wasmus focuses on the internal organization and the roll-out of the local BiD challenges in developing countries. He is a development economist with experience in micro and small finance.

http://www.bidnetwork.org/person-40994-en.htm

Craig, as a self-proclaimed-and-proud-of-it geek is a fun speaker with lots of interesting perspectives. As someone who has lucked out by having some really good insights into what people want (simple, functional, straightforward ways of linking people with things to people that want them), he looks at his brainchild from a very technologically deterministic perspective. Give them what you have, listen to what they want. And if they don’t like the principles you stick to, its okay – there’s always another community that will.

And so it turns out that the stuff that I think is really interesting about craigslist (besides the fact that it is so useful) isn’t really all that interesting to Craig. I asked if he could highlight any differences in how different communities have picked up craigslist – if perhaps there were certain characteristics that lend towards the craiglist-principles being more appropriate or not. At the very least, there’s a tipping point – if there aren’t a lot of postings then it’s less useful as a resource for people that are looking for things. Craigslist apartment listings, for example are probably more useful in the bay area, than some random small town. There was a time where it was only useful in the bay area. Although it’s in a lot of cities now so maybe we aren’t so different after all. But try to transfer the idea to another country (madrid?) and see what happens. Do the categories and everything reflect some structural element of American culture, or is their model flexible enough to reflect any culture?

What I’d really like to see is a sort of Craiglist-free tag for connecting specific NGO-needs with micro-donors. A micro-donation marketplace, where approved social entrepreneurs can list their needs and be matched with people willing to donate time or money, either on a one-time or an ongoing basis. We’d have to be careful not to inculcate dependence, but to make sure the projects listed are well thought out. I guess instead of craigslist you could think of it as a kiva.org, extended to allow micro-donations and not just micro-loans, crossed with an idealist.org that recruits people to come and do particular tasks. For example, HEAL Africa, a hospital I do some volunteer/missions work for in the Dem Rep of Congo, could list their needs: salaries for their employees, school fees for the families that take in orphans, oxygenators, etc, and individuals could adopt particular needs, rather than donating to an unlabeled bin called “HEAL Africa”. People like being connected to specific achievements; it just feels more engaging to pay a particular doctor’s salary, than to be writing a yearly check to a faceless NGO.

Getting back to the topic at hand, I’m really glad Craig never sold out – especially to the banner ad people. I stopped using Yahoo! Mail because the banner ads kept getting more and more…umm…skanky. I didn’t really appreciate always having some half-naked model on a banner ad occupying my screen while I was reading email. (Besides, threaded conversations are just so much easier to track/manage.) It’s amazing to realize that a site with 9 billion page views per month is managed by only 24 paid employees. An ongoing problem is that of scammers, something that is as much as possible policed by users, but still a serious concern. And a recurring theme is the one of listening to the users. He who has ears to hear, let him hear. It’s not just about listening, but about hearing what they are saying and knowing what to do about it. And I think that’s what a lot of development-speak boils down to: take the time to listen to your users and you might actually be able to work with them to develop something they will actually use!

I gave a presentation at the Blum Student Symposium last Thursday.

For anyone that’s interested, the slides (65MB) are downloadable here:

http://tier.cs.berkeley.edu/~melissa/blum-symposium-oct-04-07.ppt

The talk was about current health information practices in rural health clinics in Uganda, how PDAs have been integrated into a particular district, and our projections for what we’re working on now.

The future symposiums look really interesting (See Blum Event Calendar for times and locations):

Legal Aid Organizations and the Rule of Law in Sudan
Presentation by Mark Massoud, Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program Graduate Student
Thursday, November 1st

Media and Development in Zambia
Presentation by Laura Hubbard, Visiting Faculty, Anthropology
Thursday, November 15

Reducing Rape and Mutilation in Darfur with Fuel Efficient Stoves
Presentation by Susan Amrose, Graduate Student, Energy & Resources Group
Thursday, November 29th

What: Goma Adult Ministries/Global Strategies Teams Report
When: October 14, 12:15–2:15 PM or 6:30–8:30 PM
Where: First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley, G202

On Sunday, October 14th, the Goma Missions Teams (including mine) will be giving a report on the Congo, what we did, and what we’re planning to do.  We’ll have two sessions, one at 12.15pm (following the morning service at 11am) and another at 6.30pm (following the evening service at 5.05pm) You are all invited to attend – I would love for you to meet my teammates and to hear about all the things we saw and heard and did.  There will be videos and music and (gasp!) time for questions.  If you are interested in attending the service, let me know and we can meet before. I hope you can make it!

Directions to First Pres:
http://www.fpcberkeley.org/directions.asp

(Official Announcement Below)

Melissa

Goma Adult Ministries/Global Strategies Teams
October 14, 12:15–2:15 PM or 6:30–8:30 PM, G202

Partnering with the HEAL Africa hospital in the city of Goma in war-torn eastern Congo, these three teams taught classes, led retreats, offered pastoral care to victims of the conflict that continues to rage in eastern Congo, provided in-service training for nurses, enhanced the hospital’s engineering and equipment needs, participated in a sports outreach and education ministry, assisted with pastoral visitation and the palliative care of HIV patients, painted a mural in the pediatric HIV clinic and much, much more. Learn more at the Goma Team Blog ( http://gomateam.blogspot.com ).