View Katrin Verclas and Tapan Parikh
Presentations: Katrin Verclas, Tapan Parikh (one afternoon session with two speakers)
Moderator: Leslie Regan Shade
Rapporteur: Satyan Ramlal
Katrin Verclas, Mobile Phones and Social Development
Katrin Verclas’ lecture on mobile phones and social development (advocacy, activism, (other) NGO-activities) started with Verclas asking the audience about any of their work with mobile phones. Answers ranged from the use of mobile phones in information provision in Pakistan (USAID project), to mobile phones as tools for students for course-assignments, and to research into the gendering of cellphones in Canada.
Verclas proceeded to question the term “online” as it carries an assumption of web (or internet)-based connectivity only, and suggested the term “connected” as a better alternative, as it also includes mobile-phone based connections between humans.
Compared to the distinct nature of the new developments in the fields of the social benefit of mobile phones, and of mobile phone networks, Verclas noted that not enough research is currently being carried out in these fields and developments.
Even so, Verclas pointed out a caveat of a cycle beginning with techno-terministic hype and expectations about the possible effects of mobile phones on social development, to disillusionment about the actual effects, to, finally, a practical view on how mobile phones can “make life better”.
Some numbers were provided to indicate the ubiquitous spread / consumption of mobile phones. On a global scale, there are currently more than 4.5 billion mobile subscriptions, i.e. active SIM cards, and 3.1 billion unique users (though numbers are hard to guage - could be as many as 3.5 billion actual users) compared to other media / channels such as newspapers (480 million users) and television (1.5 billion users)
Mobile phones are being employed for such social change and advocacy uses as mobilization, collective action, and other uses. Verclas mentioned, among others, the following examples of how mobile phones are used around the world:
• The ability receive information on one’s mobile phone through the “Unstructured Supplementary Service Data” (USSD) protocol was emphasized for its use in three different situations, prevalent in Africa. First, the overview of the balance on a phone card allows people to decide when and how to communicate through missed calls (“Please Call Me”). Second, the protocol has been used to provide information in various advocacy-activities. Third, for awareness-raising and persuasion purposes, USSD messages have been accompanied with information on an AIDS helpline, which has increased the number of calls made to the helpline.
• The work of Tino Kreutzer shows that mobile phones are popular among the youth in townships in South Africa, even in contexts of low monetary resources, or situations with little webaccess with mobile phones.
• In Geneva, disability rights activists use mobile phones to demonstrate inaccessible (public) areas in the city, as a way to sensitize city officials to the problems faced by people with disabilities.
• An artist created an installation which allowed SMSes –from anyone- to be displayed on a projected image on a wall in a New York street. The projected image was political in nature.
• Mobile phones have been used for human rights advocacy purposes in Caïro, where police brutality has been recorded by mobile phone cameras by ordinary individuals (so called “Sousveillance” ) and distributed on the web.
• Ushahidi allows citizen reporting through SMS to be displayed on online maps, in, for example, the Gaza conflict in 2009.
• In general, users associate their mobile phones with personal, relational and emotional characteristics, and think about their mobile phones in these informal ways.
These are exciting developments and examples, but are we there yet? Verclas thinks we’re not. Even though she believes that (desktop) computers (for the specific purpose of social development) are “over, (and) done”, she’s concerned with several issues.
First, many people might be too poor to have access to and use mobile phones (leading perhaps to a mobile divide).
Second, she’s uncomfortable with the popular notion that relatively unsophisticated, and cheap, mobile phones are perfectly suitable for poor people. She notes that poor people are willing to find the money to use mobile phones, and feels that poor people should not be denied access to more sophisticated mobile devices.
The task at hand for researchers is to investigate mobile phones both in their immediate social context, as well as the broader enabling infrastructural environment (software, policies, operators, carriers).
With respect to the former, there’s currently too little real data on:
• User needs
• Patterns of actual ownership
• Patterns of use / usage (through ethnographic studies)
• Patterns of non-use
• Mobile phone-capabilities
• Sophisticated uses of mobile technology
• Impact research
With respect to the latter, more work needs to be done to study and act on:
• “Mobile phone eco-systems”
• Change the closed and commercial context of mobile phone operators
• Bottom-up development and innovation
• Open source in mobile phones
• Issues of cost and security
In conclusion, Verclas points to the great strides made in terms of number of users of mobile phones, but feels that there is an apparent inconsistency between rhetoric (everyone believes mobile connectivity is important) and reality (the private nature of the enabling environment and corporate interests inhibit open and universal use of mobile technology).
Tapan Parikh, Sustainable Economic Development and Information Systems
Tapan Parikh discussed the very different considerations that need to be taken into account when digital information systems for rural communities in developing countries are designed.
Parikh first outlined the impacts (online) digital communication can have in rural communities in developing countries. Digital transformations are considered a first opportunity for rural communities to engage in two-way communication with modern society.
Moreover, digital communication has a lot of potential benefit for rural communities in terms of the increased access to services and decreases in costs related to transportation, distance etc., for accessing these services.
However, Parikh’s main point was that conventional approaches to the web, which emphasize text-based information and communication, are less applicable to rural realities.
Infrastructural issues (lack of power, connectivity), user-related issues (differences in culture, education, literacy), issues of affordability and lack of skilled human capital (designers, developers) in rural areas, have lead to the need for distinct considerations and approaches in rural computing.
The ways to “bridge such gaps for usable systems” , according to Parikh, are to engage with the rural users, “hang out a lot in villages”, find out what users’ needs are, and do “quick and dirty” prototyping to get ideas across.
Parikh cited several examples of such work in the domain of rural information systems, and the distinct approaches to computing that these studies made obvious.
The first small example illustrated the way a developer was oblivious to (illiterate) users’ cultural and regional contexts, when he designed a microfinance application in the colour grey, when instead the users’ cultural preference was to have many colours all around them (i.e. in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu).
The second example noted the importance of speech and spoken content in people’s own language, in making villagers (inexperienced in and wary of computers) more comfortable with working with and being around computers.
It is the importance of oral communication in rural contexts (over our current text-based conception of the web), which makes mobile phones “excellent devices”, and which prompts Parikh to ask how the internet can be reconceptualized to support oral communication.
In this respect, Parikh mentioned a third example of a study by his student Neil Patel into the design and use of a mobile phone-based system that supports professional and community-based agricultural extension, in the Indian state of Gujarat.
Given the importance of agriculture in overall economic development, agricultural extension provides farmers information on how to use and apply pesticides, fertilizers etc. Farmers currently depend too much on commercial agricultural dealers for information, and this has lead to harmful agricultural practices.
The mobile phone based system allows a range of communication between agricultural experts (instead of commercial dealers) and farmers, and among farmers themselves. Farmers can listen to news messages and they can ask questions to experts and other farmers in a-synchronous ways (the questions, answers, feedback and responses are recorded for playback). (according to a participant in the audience, the emphases on shared resources resembled the “Community Memory” system used in the 1970’s).
The results of the mobile-phone based agricultural extension system are that 50 users are making 1500 calls a month, which is more than 1 call a day per user per day. Moreover, “three times as many questions are answered by other farmers as by NGO experts”, which shows that the system provides more opportunities for farmers to give eachother contextual information.
Parikh’s final example showed the use of mobile phones for a range of activities by a rural coffee cooperative in Mexico, involved in organic certification. In this study undertaken by Parikh’s student Yael Schwartzman, mobile phones are used to carry out intensive data collection (formal data, feedback, data on farmers’ decisions, etc) by inspectors of rural produce.
Next to the benefits the system brings in terms of “standard” data management, the distinctiveness of the system lies in the transparency and direct interface it provides between producers (farmers) and consumers of the end-product of the rural produce, coffee.
Consumers are better able to judge the organic certification of the product, and assess for themselves whether fair trade has improved farmers’ lives. In the other direction, farmers get more transparency on the cuts made in different steps of the coffee’s supply chain. And, farmers would appreciate consumer-feedback for itself, and this could act as an incentive for farmers to do organic farming as a way to increase earnings. Finally, the system reduces time spent on inspections by the cooperative, and gives the cooperatives more information on the farmers’ situations.
Parikh pointed out that these fields of study (digital systems in rural contexts) are still young and a lot of “experimenting” is happening to find out “what works, and what doesn’t”.
Nevertheless, he concluded by listing the lessons learned so far:
• When tools are provided, these should help people help themselves (no philanthropy).
• It should be sought to empower existing institutions (villages, cooperatives, communities, governments), and make them work better (more transparent), instead of creating new institutions.
• The systems should increasingly make it possible to allow feedback on the systems themselves in order to improve programs.
Questions and Discussions
The questions mainly centered around facets of mobile networks and the “enabling environment”, and of new directions, developments and technologies for mobile-phone connectivity and services:
1) What should mobile phones do better than now?
Verclas: Challenges lie ahead in achieving “real p2p”: wifi channels on and among mobile phones themselves, ad-hoc mesh-networks outside of mobile phone networks (not in the interests of operators).
Parikh: Making devices more open will become challenging; mobile phones carry much computing power, but this is hardly used because of “walled garden approaches”. Cultural changes within companies will have to occur, and Microsoft and Google are already becoming more open in the mobile areas.
2) Isn’t SMS inappriopriate for illiterate people, why not use toll-free voice messages?
Parikh: SMS is popular because it is cheap; it is cheap because it uses “dead capacity” in networks (so the cost is zero). He agrees though that SMS is “not fun” and there are issues with language and literacy. Unlike SMS, voice is synchronous (“no load balancing”), and toll-free voice is not practical due to high costs. What can happen, is having asynchronous voice, where speech is saved, and sent when there is (cheap enough) capacity on the network.
Verclas: Much is already happening in this respect: Freedomphone and other technologies (VOIP and SMS queries) allow calls originating from NGOs. Voice of America (VOA) has developed its own voice information service, based on VOIP through “trixbox” (PBX). Next developments could include SMS-queries, after which one can be called back on the costs of the producer.
3) Are NGO-activities in the South on price negotiations wasted energy? Is change likely, what about pressure points in policy-respects ?
Parikh: There are challenges in how to allocate names more effectively.
Verclas: Policy is a problem; there’s a lack of organized consumer advocacy / consumer constituency, unlike the forum for mobile industry, GSMA. Governments and regulaters are weak compared to powerful operators, that rather dole out harmless “CSR-like MTM-charity dollars” (MTM = mobile to mobile) (….than be enganged in meaningful corporate reform).
4) Is there not a more symbiotic relationship between voice and graphic interfaces, and what is the role of participation?
Parikh: Yes, both text and voice modalities offer advantages that the other do not posses; they are complementary. However, computers are too much based on text. Graphics will become a complement to voice-based information (visualization of information). Multi-modal interfaces are the future, and we “should not be stuck in current main affordances”.
Bi-directional feedback loops in systems decrease transaction costs of participation, both in feedback on domains (agriculture etc) and on the systems themselves.
5) What are the emerging directions and risks of mobile banking?
Verclas: There are many different uses of mobile payments and banking in countries such as South Africa, Kenya, the Philipines, Uganda. For mobile payments, mobile phones require Near Field Communication (NFC), and are used, among others, for paying taxi-drivers. It can (or already does) play a huge role in facilitating remittances of migrant workers (which constitute the largest amount of cross/within-country money transfer).
While mobile banking is safe and saves trouble (and will make a lot of money for banks and operators), there are concerns about fraud and the changing role of operators into banking-like institutions.
Parikh: There are technological risks to mobile transfers of money, especially through SMS, which does not provide security or encryption. Besides, there are questions of privacy and the accountability of intermediaries.
6) What does mobile web have to offer, and what is the capacity of mobile networks given increasing use of mobile (web) services?
Verclas: Mobile web is controversial as it is expensive and as yet not user-friendly. However, new developments are emerging in the field of mobile web user interface design (Microsoft Research India, Nokia, etc).
Parikh: In terms of network bottlenecks, the issue is of the inapproprateness of HTML for GSM networks. The major physical cost is maintaining towers, and there are no solutions for mesh-networks as yet. The only way of making things cheap, is to consider (alternating) synchronous and a-synchronous ways of sending data / voice.