Keynote Addresses

Monday, March 22, 10 am

Prof. Mary Beth Rosson,
Pennsylvania State University
From the Outside In: Designing Community Systems to Suit Their Context of Use
Prof. Mary Beth Rosson

The Web provides a platform for many forms of communities to share activities across time and space. In some cases the communities are emergent, taking advantage of whatever services and tools its members can find and use. In other cases the group members need support to discover one another, cohere and pursue shared goals. In this talk I will survey a number of design case studies conducted by my colleagues and I in the context of community system development, for groups that are both geographically bound and forming through computer-mediated interactions. The case studies are part of more than a decade of research and thus also offer an historical perspective on the emergence of many web-based services and technologies we now take for granted. I will use these case studies to reflect on what we have learned about contextual factors that must be understood and addressed in the course of building community information systems.

About Mary Beth Rosson
Mary Beth Rosson is Professor of Information Sciences and Technology at Pennsylvania State University, where she co-directs the Computer-Supported Collaboration and Learning Lab; she is also Affiliate Professor of Instructional Systems. Prior to joining Penn State in 2003, she was Professor of Computer Science at Virginia Tech and Research Staff Member IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. Rosson is internationally known for her research and education in human-computer interaction, including participatory and scenario-based evaluation and design methods, computer-supported collaborative learning, community informatics, and end user developmnt. She is author of Usability Engineering: Scenario-Based Development of Human-Computer Interaction (Morgan Kaufmann, 2002) and numerous articles, book chapters, and professional tutorials. She has also served in many professional leadership roles, including conference chair for OOPSLA 2000, CHI 2007, and VL/HCC 2010. She is a member of the CHI Academy and an ACM Distinguished Scientist. More details are available at http://mrosson.ist.psu.edu.

 

Tuesday, March 23, 9 am

Mr. Anurag Gupta
A Little World
Human Computer Interaction: at the Bottom of the Pyramid
Mr. Anurag Gupta

I will talk about my experience in building a bank branch on a mobile phone, now operated by women 'branch managers' in thousands of far flung villages who cannot read or write English, and utilized by tens of lakhs of customers, many of them completely illiterate, to deposit, withdraw and transfer tiny sums of money, without direct intervention of anyone from outside the village. I will show live demonstration of how accounts are opened, cards issued, cash deposited, withdrawn and transferred using a very simple voice guided interface on a mobile phone.

About Mr. Anurag Gupta
Anurag Gupta, 49, graduated in architecture in 1982 from SPA, Delhi. He started his professional career as a media company’s creative lead for print and television campaigns. In 1985, he won a national competition to design the extensions to the National Gallery of Modern Art (Jaipur House). He set up an NGO called Information for Action Teams (INFACT) in 1992, which worked for 2 years in Latur and Osmanabad to create an extensive documentation of best practices to retrofit non-engineered stone houses to strengthen them against a future earthquake. Anurag worked with several Government agencies to disseminate disaster vulnerability, low-cost building materials and simple construction techniques, through documentaries, publications and exhibitions. Anurag made three documentaries on street children and pavement dwellers of Mumbai; and savings and credit systems developed by underprivileged women in Ahmedabad and in Mumbai working with SEWA and SPARC. Several of these were showcased on national television.

In 2000, Anurag set up A Little World, to attempt the creation of India’s first payment system, focussed on small value transactions and the bottom of pyramid segment. Anurag has mobilized industry opinion and led initiatives with Banks, regulatory institutions, universities, standards bodies, government and industry to support standardization and enhanced security as the basis of mass deployment in the Indian environment. In 2003, Anurag started a collaborative research and documentation process with IIT-Bombay and the IDRBT-Hyderabad to pilot new generation technologies for small value payment transactions. He started the Go-Mumbai initiative for Automatic Fare Collection (AFC) in Mumbai buses and local suburban railways in 2004 and built the mChek mobile payment product in 2004. He has built the ZERO technology platform for branchless banking, and brought key banks like SBI and industry majors such as Nokia and NXP to support the implementation Financial Inclusion in villages. In 2007 Anurag founded the Zero Microfinance and Savings Support Foundation – a not-for-profit Section 25 Company which today acts as a Business Correspondent to 21 banks in 18 States across India.

Wednesday, March 24, 9 am

Prof. Anil Gupta
IIM Ahmedabad
Overcoming Barriers of Language, Literacy and Localism: My wish list for spreading creativity and innovation at the top of the ethical pyramid
Prof. Anil Gupta

Learning by doing is well known, a lot of people learn that way. But I wish to talk about learning by connecting creative people through multimedia, multi language, collaborative platform. Why has this vision for linking creative people in formal and informal sector remained undressed since 1997 when Sristi presented first such prototype made in tool kit at first Global Knowledge Conference? I attend meetings of several advisory committees on ICT applications at different level with in and outside the country but seem to hit a hard impermeable wall every time I mention this. May be the issue of accountability to mostly illiterate but thoughtful and creative people speaking in multitude of languages is not easy. May be this is not what funding agency consider as a mark of inclusiveness or social priority. May be it is messy and not very exciting technologically. There could be many other reasons.

What I propose to discuss are the priorities that I feel need to be addressed to use mobile phone based platform to share grassroots innovation database with Honey Bee Network, to help people learn from each other and also to craete bridge between formal and informal science.

I will also discuss how collaborative design platforms can be created to link designers beyond borders with grassroots innovators.

About Prof. Anil Gupta
Anil Gupta is a professor at Centre for Management in Agriculture, Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. One of his major endeavours has been to support the grassroots level innovators who do not have a representation in conferences, papers or communiqués. Their capacity to address their own needs within their own context has not resulted in the three Rs - Recognition, Respect and Reward - which Dr. Gupta has been striving towards getting for the thousands of unknown creative people. He has been able to take his mission forward by successfully expanding the space – both global as well as local – for the grassroots innovators. This achievement was possible due to sensitivity towards various issues involved – whether it is a question of how to balance the best from both formal and informal sciences; how to protect the individual intellectual property rights and at the same time expand open source as a part of ‘technology commons’; the issues of ethics regarding conservation and prospecting of biodiversity; and, how to link innovations, investments and enterprise.

His vision has resulted in the creation of knowledge network at different levels for augmenting grassroots green innovations and inventions in informal and formal sector. In addition, he has been employing the learning from grassroots innovations in helping organizations become more creative and innovative from bottom up.

HoneyBee Network was established in 1988-89 to address the issues involved with unsustainability of the methods of knowledge extraction from and knowledge dissemination among the people. Later, in order to augment HoneyBee Network, Dr. Gupta also established Society for Research and Initiatives for Sustainable Technologies and Institutions (SRISTI, 1993, www.sristi.org ), which aims to strengthen the creativity of grassroots inventors, innovators and ecopreneurs engaged in conserving biodiversity and developing eco-friendly solutions to local problems. Another endeavor, Grassroots Innovation Augmentation Network (GIAN, 1997,www.gian.org), helps scale up grassroots innovations and convert them into viable products or services with appropriate benefit sharing arrangements.

Dr. Gupta was instrumental in setting up of National Innovation Foundation (NIF, 2000, www.nifindia.org ) assisted by Department of Science and Technology, Government of India to make India innovative and creative society and a global leader in sustainable technologies.

 

Wednesday, March 24, 4 pm

Prof. Edwin Blake,
University of Cape Town
Redesigning Ourselves
Prof. Edwin Blake

 

Can we move the debate on “Design-for” Development to being “Designed-with” Development? Can we envision a flexibility in ourselves to redesign ourselves as much as we design artefacts outside? Do we accept that transformation needs to happen to us and our methods as much as the community we seek to develop? Are our methods and beliefs as much up for grabs as the cherished values of the community that we are trying to transform with our technology?

I present a (South) African perspective where the challenge is to re-vision western methods to accord more closely with the multi-facetted local values. For Africans the challenge is how do we turn the insight, captured in the term ubuntu, that our humanity is intimately interconnected with, and dependent on, the community of the living and the dead, into something that helps us design computer artefacts? More formally: can we extract normative values for design from the implicitly held views of a community?

Further: is it not probable, once we accept the community as co-designers that we might not even have the last word in design? Can we accept that, as designers, we might never be able to remove uncertainty in purpose and functionality and thus we leave it up to the users to appropriate our artefacts for their own, unanticipated, uses? Uses that are literally and of necessity situated outside the perspectives which we are able to entertain?

About Prof. Edwin Blake
My awareness that Information and Communication Technology (ICT) needs to be firmly based on community values arose from my involvement with the South African National Information Technology Forum in the mid-nineties. This organization’s finest contribution was the South African position paper at the G7 conference on the Information Society and Development that was held in 1996 in South Africa where the notion of an Information Community was first formulated.

It rapidly became clear that I was not suited to the boring frustrations of governments and policy. I came to believe that knowledge that does not lead to effective action is not really knowledge and that failure of implementation is equivalent to a failure of understanding. By that definition most of the fine policies announced by government were failures.

A small project illustrating some concrete action was preferable. The first such project (1996) was a system called CyberTracker that allowed semi-literate animal trackers to reveal their deep understanding of nature.
My research has focussed on the interaction of people and computers applied so that it bridges the way ICT has to be applied in a Developing Country. Specifically my work covers flow, presence, storytelling and heritage work in Virtual Environments and Computer Games, visualization and ICT for Development (ICT4D). In the field of ICT4D my work has covered tele-health projects, location aware computing to support animal trackers and ICT applications to assist deprived Deaf communities.

I am a South African with a Computer Science doctorate from Queen Mary College, London University, and I am currently Professor in Computer Science at the University of Cape Town.