In short, a postcard consists of a photograph and short narrative that explains why the image is important – or how it relates – to that person’s work. The idea is to go beyond usual explanation and website narrative to reveal more personal insights and motivations of the people who work in our field.

Here’s a selection of five that have come in so far, in no particular order.

Jonathan Donner. Kigali, 2003 | Website | Twitter

In 2003, mobile phones were just appearing in Rwanda. Penetration was just 1.5 per 100 people (1.5%) then. It is over 33% now. I organized some studies to ask microentrepreneurs about how they were using their new phones. Everyone was quite accommodating, letting us ask details about each of the last 10 calls recorded on the phones call log. Though we learned a lot about business processes and productivity, our data also demonstrated just how intertwined these phones had already become into daily life – two-thirds of the calls were with friends and family. I suspect these trends still hold.  At this moment, the interviewer (Nicole K. Umutoni) was probably looking back at me and wondering why I was taking this picture. Now we know!

Jan Chipchase. Lagos, 2011 | Website | Twitter

That your and my cultural sensibilities about what is appropriate is irrelevant. That there are many ways to extend the internet – and that those that make the effort to do so, show us where the value is. That everything can, and will eventually be remixed.

Linda Raftree. Cameroon, June 2010 | Website | Twitter

This picture is taken on top of a large rocky hill during a workshop in Ndop, Cameroon. I love the young man’s rasta hat and the delicate lavender colored felt flower in the girl’s hair, the tender manner that they are learning together to film, and how the camera helps them see themselves and their surroundings in new ways. Up on that rock in the middle of the fields, breeze blowing under the giant sky, watching two young people teach other; the reminder that I am transient in this line of work and do not matter much in the larger scheme of things was strong, beautiful and comforting.

Erik Hersman. Liberia, 2009 | Website | Twitter

“ICT4D” represents a mental roadblock. A term that brings as much baggage with it as a sea of white SUVs, representing the humanitarian industrial complex’s foray into the digital world. It means we’re trying to airlift in an infrastructure instead of investing in local technology solutions. Like the SUVs, it’s currently an import culture that will not last beyond the project’s funding and the personnel who parachuted in to do it.

Heather Underwood. Kenya, 2011 | Website | Twitter

In August, 2011, I visited several health clinics in Kenya to determine the feasibility of using digital pen technology to enhance paper health forms. This photo was taken in a rural clinic in Mangalete. The woman using the digital pen is filling out a partograph – a paper tool used to monitor and detect prolonged or abnormal labors. She simply picked up the pen and started showing me how to properly fill out the form. When the pen’s audio suddenly informed her that she had crossed the alert line and should consider transferring the patient, her surprise and immediate understanding of the quality assurance and training benefits of this tool were incredibly gratifying. This interaction highlighted one of my core beliefs about ICT4D: big problems can often be addressed with simple solutions.

If you’re interested in taking part there’s still time. I’ll need the following:

1. A photo (high resolution if possible) – one you’ve taken, please. All it needs to qualify is to have a technology theme – radio, mobile phone, computer, solar lamp and so on.
2. Details of where it was taken and the year (if you remember).
3. A short description of what it is, and why it means something to you. Keep it short – think back of a postcard! We want personal stories – how you connect with the picture – not just a description of what it is.
4. A link to your website, blog or Twitter handle (or all three) so I can point people back to you and your work.

You can email all of this to postcards@kiwanja.net – I’ll collate all the postcards in the coming weeks and publish them online.

The post ‘ICT4D postcards’: The picture so far appeared first on Socialbrite.

Luxury Travel Stories is about the idea of connecting the world via ‘stories’ in postcard format. A photo with accompanying text no more than what would fit on the back of a postcard.

Last month I was invited to contribute a postcard to the Luxury Travel Storiesproject, and chose the photo and text above You can view the post, and those from other contributors, here. The whole site is based on the idea of “connecting the world via ‘stories’ in postcard format. A photo with accompanying text no more than what would fit on the back of a postcard.” Like “Dear Photograph” (which I blogged about here), it’s a simple but compelling idea.

One of the things I’ve always maintained is that we often know little about the background and motivation of people working in our field, and how they came to work in it. So in part as a way to rectify this I thought it would be great to put together a slideshow of ICT4D-related postcards to share online.

If you work at the intersection of technology and international development and have a favorite photograph – one you’ve taken – with a technology/development theme and would like to take part, send it to postcards@kiwanja.net with your name, a short description of when and where it was taken and what it means to you. Remember, the text needs to fit on the back of a postcard, so keep it concise. And if you know anyone who you think might want to take part, please pass this on.

Once I have enough I’ll pull everything together and drop it into Slideshare. If enough people contribute it might be fun to map the photos, and stories, on Ushahidi.

Looking forward to reading your stories and contributions!

The post The ‘ICT4D Postcards Project’ appeared first on Socialbrite.

“For about a decade now I have been fortunate enough to work on a small and niche-focused program called RANET (Radio And Internet for the Communication of Hydro-Meteorological Information for Rural Development). The program has a simply stated goal to make meteorological forecasts, warnings, and observations more readily available to rural and remote communities. It does so through a variety of training, system development, and site deployment activities.

The technologies used by RANET have ranged from satellite broadcasts, to satellite telephony, to FM community radio, include HF e-mail networks, a variety of web based applications, and of course mobile phone messaging and data services. We recently began experimenting with and using FrontlineSMS to scratch a particular itch. I’ll try to describe the challenge and problem that FrontlineSMS uniquely addresses well.

RANET began with the notion that rural communities are often most affected by and vulnerable to environmental changes and variability, yet the information products communities may find beneficial are not easily distributed outside of major cities in developing regions. The quote that embodied the launch of RANET came from an Algerian nomad who said when interviewed, “Just tell me where it has rained, and I’ll know what to do.”

A story about a nomad

Such a simple statement is loaded with insights and information. Think of the challenge. The nomad is constantly on the move in remote desert areas to shepherd his herd to food and water. Under the best of circumstances, it is a difficult technical challenge to deliver information to this individual in a timely and sustainable manner. Beyond the physical delivery of information, there are barriers related to language and perhaps literacy. But moreover his statement counters assumptions about what information is valuable. Most meteorological services try to improve forecast quality and generally the science behind weather products. This hard work and dedication often leads to the conclusion that forecasts and newer products are the most valuable to an end user. Indeed this is probably true for most end consumers of meteorological products and services. In this application, however, the nomad wanted a simple observation of where it has rained as that is where there will be fresh water and new vegetation. He cannot afford to follow a probabilistic forecast, no matter how accurate it might be.

The story of the nomad touches on the challenge of scale, which I suspect arises in all ICT4D programs. Scale is the tension between macro and micro. It is regional versus local.

What do I mean here? If you abstract out why we do ICT4D projects, it comes down to solving ‘problems’ of information access and inequality, data management for efficiency, and letting individuals and communities speak in their own voice. In the abstract, the development community, be they foreign or indigenous, wants to be able to replicate local successes across regions, countries, and continents where other people have similar needs. Resources are simply too scarce to not strive for scalable solutions.

Scale vs. relevance

There are two major problems of scale here. One is content, information, or the ‘byte’. If you have a network that can distribute across a region, country, or even continent, the information distributed or shared often becomes less locally relevant and powerful the more widely distributed it is. (The exception to this is of course sports scores.) Certainly, technical or science based information does not change all that much. Information on disease prevention is not going to change in substance from one locale to another, but it will necessarily need to transform how it is portrayed to fit within local cultural, religious, language, education/literacy, economic, and even political contexts. To me the ‘what’ of information in ICT4D is perhaps the most challenging.

I work mostly on the ‘how’, which is simply the movement of information from point A to B in its most basic description. Nonetheless, ‘how’ needs to be cognizant of the ‘what’, and as a result faces its own issues of scale. Communication platforms that cover large geographic areas are often broadcast in nature, and therefore diminish the ability to target or carry information tailored to local needs. Of course broadcast systems are easier and more affordable to deploy than many networked systems, but with a broadcast you lose the ability to receive timely feedback or foster sharing / local production of information. Many point-to-point or networked systems operating over large areas face regulatory challenges, are extremely expensive to operate, or require significant technical competence. Community based systems, such as information centers and FM radio, require significant upfront investments and require considerable maintenance and training costs as well. And these may not be connected such that local information and knowledge can benefit others. When done right the results are clearly amazing, but the initial investment and time required to effectively establish such sites often prevents widespread deployment throughout a country; to say nothing across multiple countries.

All of this is to say its easy to find a communications solution that is sustainable and meets the needs of a small community or area. Demonstrating success at this scale is easy. Identifying something that suits local needs yet can be replicated elsewhere (often with an expectation of decreasing cost) is not so simple.

Enter the mobile

Mobile phone services offer a potentially interesting solution. With rapid growth of networks in even the most remote of locations, there exists a standard and geographically expansive platform; even if operated by many different service providers. Because of the point-to-point nature of the network, it manages to cater to local information needs and interests. In fact I would argue that in areas where the Internet has not penetrated, mobile phones change the expectation of how and what information is transmitted. Even in comparison with a community FM station, a mobile device is inherently more local and simply intimate. I believe this creates a new expectation for ever more tailored or individualized information. And of course the basic economics of mobile, as well as the form factor, makes it ease to deploy. Messages can be sent for mere cents, and as it is in the interest of commercial providers to make durable and easy to use devices, many deployment headaches are assuaged.

Clearly, mobile is not new. There are hundreds of ICT4D projects out there utilizing mobile to collect and disseminate information. But, there still remains a scale challenge I believe. To process messages for collection of field data, reporting, or to distribute information beyond a small social circle or region of a country, you need some automation. Creating these scripts and programs on a computer/server to interface with a mobile network is not always straight forward. It requires expertise and funding to do so. This unfortunately represents a barrier to scaling and replication. If you examine many mobile messaging projects underway, many are either still pilots or very geographically limited. At times it really is the content that limits scaling, but I also believe that as the technical basis for the local system is so highly tailored, it can’t be easily transferred without starting with a whole new reinvestment in setting up servers, programmer time, etc.

As a program working in multiple countries across Africa, Asia, Pacific, and recently Central America, RANET has been struggling with this issue for some time. Do we help our country and community partners develop highly customized mobile messaging applications, but then be unable to transfer this effort to other countries? Or, do we develop some generic data management and messaging interface that while feature reach is unwieldy or lacks the specific function needed in a local circumstance? Frankly, we have experimented with both, and we have experience of success and failure with each approach.

FrontlineSMS and the local

In the last year I came across FrontlineSMS, which I believe represents an interesting genre of tool. The desktop application prepackages most of the basic messaging features a small social group might want in order to exchange messages. But the ease of use extends into more advanced applications. The more RANET experimented with automation tasks and keywords in FrontlineSMS, the more amazed we frankly became. Want to automatically collect field data and filter for keywords, users, etc.? Not a problem. Want incoming messages to auto-respond? Simple. Have a database half way around the world you want to store incoming messages or use to feed an auto-response sent as SMS? Easy. Did I mention it is free?

Many reading this have probably experimented with or used FrontlineSMS, so I don’t pretend this is news. But, I have also used other commercial applications that cost thousands of dollars and have half the features. Some applications are feature rich and enterprise in scope, but these then require considerable technical expertise to use and maintain. The FrontlineSMS team has done the hard job of creating an easy to use application that can be used to meet local community needs, but it also performs well for scaled applications that at the end of the day connect and replicate successful local implementations.

RANET has only begun to introduce FrontlineSMS into its country programs, but I already see the possibilities. To help showcase some of the capabilities, as well as provide our community with baseline training, a few tutorials/discussions were added to our relatively new ‘Weaver‘ series. The articles on FrontlineSMS are available in English, French, and soon Portuguese. In the near future we plan to add some video tutorials and discussions, and after that hope to start sharing some of our experiences on how FrontlineSMS has been used for collection of data, ‘broadcasting’ weather information, and even allowing on-demand and automated information requests. We are looking forward to utilizing this application, as well as learning how others might be using it in earth science and services applications”.

Kelly Sponberg
Project Manager, International Extension and Public Alert Systems (IEPAS) / RANET
Joint Office of Science Support (JOSS)
University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR)
www.ranetproject.net

The post Scale vs. ownership: A conflict in the making? appeared first on Socialbrite.