Intel produced this fantastic map yesterday at the 2008 Research@Intel Day. Red countries have higher rates of technology adoption. This is really valuable data for thinking about how to influence the adoption of technology, and for thinking about the ICT4D political spectrum in more than two shades of grey (or red and orange I guess). I think anyone who reads about this kinda stuff already has some vague map like this in their head. The only real surprise is how slow, relatively, the US is (I guess South Africa being flat is a surprise too). But the country-by-country resolution here adds such a valuable data point to the conversation about the BoP and the overall role of technology in the developing world. (It’s also a pretty damn good crystal ball on the future distribution of economic development). I want one for my wall.
Just a quick open invitation, if you are in San Francisco this weekend:
UPDATE: Changed the time to 4pm.
I’m meeting with designer-researchers Niti Bahn and Dave Tait on Saturday, April 19th, at 6pm 4pm at Atlas Cafe in San Francisco (in the Mission). Come have a beer with us! We’re talking generally about designing and researching technologies for the poorest people in the world (the “bottom of the pyramid“). Africa, Asia, mobile phones, sustainable change, environmental technologies, research methodologies, product design, application development, user experience … lots of stuff.
Niti is a researcher, strategist and international rock star; Dave is an award-winning product designer and researcher based in South Africa. Developing world cell phone geeks, too. Check out this article they co-authored for a feel for what they are into: Design for the Next Billion Customers.
If you’re interested, email me, or just show up!
Oh and, we’re doing some planning for a BarCamp unconference of the same themes this summer. Let me know if you would be interested in attending or supporting an event like that. Probably Late June or July.
Photo by meanestindian via flickr.
So I went to this Street Hacks talk 2 nights ago is here: http://www.janchipchase.com/ (it was awesome, you missed it. Clam Pizza.) And then it turns out Chipchase just got all famous this week, seriously: First a rad video in the Economist:
And then in the New York Times.
Here’s my Reader’s Digest version, since I know you graphing how much time you spend on blogs.
About Chipchase, who really is a super-nice guy:
“To an outsider, the job can seem decidedly oblique. His mission, broadly defined, is to peer into the lives of other people, accumulating as much knowledge as possible about human behavior so that he can feed helpful bits of information back to the company — to the squads of designers and technologists and marketing people who may never have set foot in a Vietnamese barbershop but who would appreciate it greatly if that barber someday were to buy a Nokia. …
About getting over your hatred of your cellphone (cursed device efficiency-obsession). This bit hit a nerve for me:
Understanding [stuff] requires forgetting for a moment about your own love-hate relationship with your cellphone, or iPhone, or BlackBerry. Something that’s mostly a convenience booster for those of us with a full complement of technology at our disposal — land-lines, Internet connections, TVs, cars — can be a life-saver to someone with fewer ways to access information. … Jan Chipchase and his user-research colleagues at Nokia can rattle off example upon example of the cellphone’s ability to increase people’s productivity and well-being, mostly because of the simple fact that they can be reached. There’s the live-in housekeeper in China who was more or less an indentured servant until she got a cellphone so that new customers could call and book her services. Or the porter who spent his days hanging around outside of department stores and construction sites hoping to be hired to carry other people’s loads but now, with a cellphone, can go only where the jobs are. Having a call-back number, Chipchase likes to say, is having a fixed identity point, which, inside of populations that are constantly on the move — displaced by war, floods, drought or faltering economies — can be immensely valuable both as a means of keeping in touch with home communities and as a business tool.
On the incredible value that can be provided by something so simple, like SMS:
“… public health workers in South Africa now send text messages to tuberculosis patients with reminders to take their medication. In Kenya, people can use S.M.S. to ask anonymous questions about culturally taboo subjects like AIDS, breast cancer and sexually transmitted diseases, receiving prompt answers from health experts for no charge.
On Microfinance and the bottom of the Pyramid:
… A cellphone in the hands of an Indian fisherman who uses it to grow his business — which presumably gives him more resources to feed, clothe, educate and safeguard his family — represents a textbook case of bottom-up economic development, a way of empowering individuals by encouraging entrepreneurship as opposed to more traditional top-down approaches in which aid money must filter through a bureaucratic chain before reaching its beneficiaries, who by virtue of the process are rendered passive recipients.
On “sente,” which as Chipchase put it the other night, “turns anyone with a cellphone into an ATM:”
Someone working in Kampala, for instance, who wishes to send the equivalent of $5 back to his mother in a village will buy a $5 prepaid airtime card, but rather than entering the code into his own phone, he will call the village phone operator (“phone ladies” often run their businesses from small kiosks) and read the code to her. She then uses the airtime for her phone and completes the transaction by giving the man’s mother the money, minus a small commission. “It’s a rather ingenious practice,” Chipchase says, “an example of grass-roots innovation, in which people create new uses for technology based on need.”
And then my favorite part, thinking about the pace of change and the oh noes! of the human condition:
“People can think, yeah, monks with cellphones, and tsk, tsk, and what is the world coming to?” he said. “But if you wanted to take phones away from anybody in this world who has them, they’d probably say: ‘You’re going to have to fight me for it. Are you going to take my sewer and water away too?’ And maybe you can’t put communication on the same level as running water, but some people would. And I think in some contexts, it’s quite viable as a fundamental right.” He paused a beat to let this sink in, then added, with just a touch of edge, “People once believed that people in other cultures might not benefit from having books either.”
And then my other favorite part, their research methodology, an “open design studio” in Ghana:
“There was a sheet of fabric strung up in front, with neat painted lettering that read: “Your Dream Phone. Share it with the world.” It went on to describe how the community was invited to come share ideas and drawings for the ideal mobile phone. Prizes were offered. So far, 140 people had shown up to sketch their dream phone.”
And on the Election Violence in Kenya (check out Ushahidi.com created by Erik Hersman, who told me that this article had been published today!):
“After the government imposed a media blackout in late December last year, Kenyans sought news and information via S.M.S. messages on their phones and used them to track down friends and family who’d fled their homes. Many also reported receiving unsolicited text messages to take up arms. The government responded with an admonition, sent, of course, via S.M.S.: ‘The Ministry of Internal Security urges you to please desist from sending or forwarding any S.M.S. that may cause public unrest. This may lead to your prosecution.’ “
Now you have to read the whole thing.
Now this is what I am talking about: A mobile phone based API for doing things like managing quantitative research projects. Supports a bazillion types of phones. Developed by a South African company. You own your own data. Sounds like a brilliant new project and I look forward to hearing more about it.
The platform was developed for Africa, with all of the barriers that normally come to mind: types of phones used, bandwidth availability and user patterns.Erik Hersman
Now the exciting part is that this isn’t just a single application, but rather a platform for application development; that’s Populi.net.
Then there is Mobile Researcher(what I think is the first and only app thus far developed for it). Mobile Researcher sounds itself really amazingly cool — you develop surveys on the web and then anyone can take them with their cellphones. They’ve got an interesting case study up on the web featuring the South African Medical Research Council.
Quoting directly from their case study, it’s obvious that there are some exciting ideas going on — I hope to see some further news that reinforces these findings (the only thing that makes me wary is that they have no pricing information, and no screen shots of the survey builder interface):
- Low cost Nokia 2626 handsets were successfully used by field workers to conduct surveys. Several field workers had never even sent an SMS before.
- On average, over 400 households were surveyed every day with data available for analysis and reporting before the field workers returned to the field the following day.
- Research staff and management were able to isolate and rectify issues whilst the study was in progress.
- Field worker productivity and quality was monitored on a daily basis for training and remuneration purposes.
- More than 25,000 households were surveyed in under 3 months.
- In total over 65,000 surveys were conducted.
Via MobileActive.
I’m just getting started on a new project nicknamed Kestrel.
The basic idea a simple and user-centered web app that helps facilitate ordering, billing and member management for CSA’s. Things are JUST getting started and I am soliciting help in doing some feasibility research as well as a basic evaluation of existing CSA management applications.
A CSA, (for Community Supported Agriculture) is a way for the food buying public to create a relationship with a farm and to receive a weekly basket of produce. By making a financial commitment to a farm, people become “members” (or “shareholders,” or “subscribers”) of the CSA. Local Harvest
So far were in stage zero: Over the holidays I was brainstorming with some of my agri-geek friends in North Carolina, notably tes thraves. (I like to say that tes is to poverty + agriculture issues as Jay-Z is to hip-hop — a badass producer who just makes things happen.) :) So far there’s been a lot of excitement about it from both consumers and producers.
- Stage zero is lots of talk over drinks around the New Year’s bonfire, basically. Check.
- Stage one is research about what real CSA’s need.
- Stage two is getting a few CSA’s to pilot test a first iteration for a season.
- The rest is iterating and improving based on real feedback. This is the hard part. And the fun part.
The only real spec so far is an application that is incredibly simple and driven purely by a real understanding of the users’ needs.
There is no timeframe yet. I imagine things could take a year or so; nobody’s getting paid by Kestrel.
Codewise, I’ve done some simple scaffolding of the application, but really I think the requirements for this type of thing are simple — the codebase is not really the issue. Just a few forms, login/out and billing. So I’m not looking for help from coders as much as I am trying to garner some interest from A) the users of the application, farmers and consumers and B) people with experience in user-centered application design and user testing.
The goal is a management tool that would simplify the process of ordering food from your CSA, but also serve as an educational model of CSA best practices.
Right now I’m thinking a hosted solution, almost certainly built in Rails. And of course completely Open and Free.
The basic use case comes from my mom : she doesn’t like very much lettuce in her box. Last year she got six heads of lettuce at a time. So ideally mom could just login and set her preference, pay her bill, update her address, give notice that she’s out of town for a month, etc. The farmer then knows exactly how many heads of lettuce to harvest, and can keep the rest in the ground until going to the market on Saturday.
It’s not a new idea, I know. There are several in San Francisco. I haven’t seen them yet. But I am sure that they’re not as good as they can be and I want to put the users at the front of developing a new open source solution.
CSA’s are great for environmental, social and economic reasons. And they’re really just a lot of freaking fun. So if you are a consumer or producer with opinions about what you’d like to see in this type of software, let me know in the comments or unthinkingly-at-gmail.com.
Recently there has been a lot of discussion among the nonprofit technology geeks about the use (and usefulness) of the tag “nptech”.
When the nptech tag started one of the ideas was to gather enough data to look and see what words people were using to describe, say, open source (open source, floss, foss, open source software) and then use those words to inform a taxonomy. It’s a taken a long time but I bet there’s enough data in the nptech tag on a combination of bookmarking systems to do a little crunching and get at some of those commonly used terms. Sort of an emergent taxonomy… Marnie Webb,
nptech proto-tagger
The nptech tag (on del.icio.us) dates back to December of 2004 and was created by a group of nonprofit technologists that were exploring the potential for social tagging in the community. While I have a “curmudgeonly” eye for Web2.0 gizmos, in addition to a deep distrust of technophilic “progress” … I think that the development of this tag is arguably the single largest reason for the current (thriving I think) state of what is commonly called the “nptech community.” Which means a lot to me.
(A great summary of the current conversation is at Beth Kanter’s blog.)
Opinions abound. Most of us seem to be worked up about the efficiency of the tag. On this note there has been a lot of interesting reaction to a post by Gavin Clabaugh, which was critical of folksonomies. Laura Quinn of Idealware largely agrees with Gavin.
In this context, it seems that generally the consensus has been that 1.) Taxonomies are harder to create than Folksonomies, but they are better in many contexts. And 2.) we need more data about how to make the nptech tag more useful as an “emergent taxonomy”.
So, in the spirit of improving the tag and promoting the nptech community, here’s some data:
- A plain text listing of every word that has been used on del.icio.us in association with nptech. fulltext.xml
- A sorted and ranked list of these tags. nptech-tagged.txt
- All of the tags presented as a scrollable tag-timeline.
- The script that I wrote to gather the data from delicious (in perl): community-tag-robot.txt. (The code is also displayed below with syntax highlighting.)
The script that I wrote crawls the pages of del.icio.us and pulls out all of the tags that were used to describe the same stuff tagged “nptech”. This gives us an idea of how the tag has been used — effectively describing the tagged links, if we assume taggers are using “synonym clouds”. Del.icio.us has a “related tags” feature but it is lame (only 10 are listed), and judging from my initial review of the data it is pretty random. (Not really sure if I broke some terms of use or not with my script, but it’s *our* data, right? And besides, the script is very polite.)
There are a lot of delicious mashupy-type things that show you tagging patterns, but these approaches seem somehow very passive, and not community-oriented. I mean, in general delicious is used very passively — people want to be able *consume* more efficiently, not create some community in which greater action can be taken. Or it is just used for explicitly personal purposes, as a web-based bookmark service.
What I like so much about the nptech tag is that it was intentionally created to support and reflect a community (unlike, say, the tag “nintendo,” which may very well support a community, but it is not active in a self-critical, dialogic way.) And certainly there is a beauty, I think, in using these hyper-technological tools (which have the ability to be very atomizing and consumerist) for the sake of doing things that are explicitly not-for-profit and mission-driven.
And personally I tend to agree with Michelle Murrain that we need to be wary of an “expert” approach to developing our tags and community taxonomies. That line of thinking is what made me want to do this in the first place. (Likewise I need to point out how much I have really been thinking lately about stuff that I have been reading at Ulises Ali Majias’ blog like this.)
Anyway, further experimentation (graphs/charts from excel would be easy using the text files, for instance) would be nice; please let me know if you are doing something interesting with the data. I’m hoping that this will help us, as a community, determine what we want to do with this tag now that we have been using it for more than two years. What patterns do you see in the data? What does the nptech tag mean for our community? I am not going to try to start doing any analysis here, now — but I would really like to hear what people’s reactions to the tag timeline are.
There are still a lot of holes in this data that I could answer with a bit more programming. (i.e., who has been using the tag?) Suggestions for extending the script are welcome. What do we want to know?
37 Signals is a supersmart little company known for creating easy-to-use web-based project management tools (namely the Basecamp suite), and they have just announced the latest in their product family: Campfire. 
According to their website, “Campfire brings simple group chat to the business setting. Instant messaging is great for quick 1-on-1 chats, but it’s miserable for 3 or 4 or 7 or 15+ people at once. Campfire solves that problem and plenty more. ”
With the release of this simple chatroom platform, I think they’ve just taken one major item off of my personal to-do list.
- Do the dishes
- Fix the front gate
Find a simple, stable, cheap platform for online nonprofit focus groups- Save the world
A little background: By day I work at a university with a nonprofit evaluation team. We work for other nonprofits that are trying (…or are being forced to by their funders) to discover and amplify the best aspects of their program. A major part of our job is finding out what people think works well — so we are typically creating surveys and conducting focus groups or our clients.
Focus groups are a great way to bring together a lot of good people and get a lot of good advice about a program. Among all the fun things we do with nonprofits, they’re my favorite. But in-person focus groups are expensive and difficult to arrange, especially when you are working with busy people. Who has time to sit around and talk about making a program better? You’ve too busy working on the program, dammit!
This problem is what first attracted me to the idea of conducting focus groups online. At the American Evaluation Association’s conference last year in Toronto, I was fortunate to sit in on a session that discussed the existing methods for doing this type of work. All of the evaluators in the room seemed to really get excited about it: online focus groups solve so many of of the distance/time/money problems evaluators face, especially in the nonprofit sector. Some people have already been doing this with telephone surveys, but in many cases (depending on your phone company and country) this can be really expensive — and it’s unlikely to give you a transcript.
And, unfortunately for most of us at the evaluator’s conference, the presenters were from the for-profit world, and their solutions were ridiculously expensive — about $1500 per focus group administration. These are basically managed chat rooms in which invited participants are egged on with questions from a well-trained facilitator. This is why online focus groups have been largely a marketing research arena — big pharma et al don’t need no stinkin’ open source solution.
After the session I raised the issue of reconfiguring WordPress or a more robust CMS (Joomla or Drupal) with a chat feature. If you could just manage to get all of your participants together online at the same time (or over a 3-day period), you could easily solicit lots of feedback. (And you wouldn’t have to transcribe the results). Folks (including focus group guru Richard Kreuger) were excited about the possibility of finding a cheap way to do this: there is a serious need for something way below the $1500 range.
Unfortunately, in my research, I that most server-side free/open source chat software is buggy, poorly designed, and horrible with server resources. I found that people were using hosted solutions like Yahoo discussion groups in a pinch, and having limited success. So, not really able or willing to create a program from scratch, I put the project on hold. The recent release of Campfire brings a number of awesome features to the under-$20 table. Here are my notes on the best features for focus groups with Campfire:
- It’s simple, clean, easy, elegant (all synonyms for “37 signals product”)
- Real time image previewing (for getting reactions, for example, to a chart)
- You get a unique url for your chat, unlike an IM chat, so you can invite people to a web page
- It tracks previous conversations
- It keeps a record of who said what when (the timestamps are just killer)
- You can have secure chats (essential, I would think, for IRB approval …)
- No software other than a web browser is needed.
- Repeat: automatic transcriptions!
So I’m really excited about Campfire and I look forward to trying it out, hopefully with a longer post in the near future about the existing options for online research of this nature. Until then, check it out for yourself if you need to do some group instant messaging, I think the possibilities are amazing if you just have a talented coordinator and some people that have valuable things to say.
I am currently researching a field of design known as “Participatory Design” that has a fascinating history (dealing with Scandinavian labor unions) and a very promising future. In short, PD is about incorporating the user in the design process from day one. The resulting ideas and workflows are, in my mind, incredibly powerful tools for working on any project. My focus is web development.
Most of my interest in this concept comes from my day job at a nonprofit evaluation firm — we do “collaborative evaluation” to help programs develop. The concepts are largely the same, and I’m just trying to apply them to web design and the development of usable, useful online tools.
This process is intimately involved with many of the same user-centered concerns that preoccupy other ICT-development folks, such as the advocates of free and open-source software.
The center of the world for PD is the organization Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. They have a site dedicated to PD resources.
Here’s a link to a nice comparison of Google Scholar and Scrius. It points out that Google Scholar has become neglected and is no longer updated regularly. This is a super-unfortunate development; Google is the web’s best hope for easy, inexpensive archiving of scholarly research. (In other news, however, Amazon is now offering scholarly articles for a fee. It’s easy — they’re delivered electronically, but they aren’t cheap — about $5.00 per article.)
Here’s the link to the Google article:
Scholarly Web Searching: Google Scholar and Scirus
Perhaps not what you’ve been waiting for all year — an extensive resource for researching various qualitative data analysis programs — but if you’re in a research environment, this is actually extremely helpful.
This page is from a university in the U.K., and would be useful if you’re about to sink a few hundred dollars in some software (which will in turn play an important part in your research, of course.)
Research it: CAQDAS (New Media Methods @ Loughborough University)
Do you work with interviews or documents in which you have to make meaningful correlations between themes?
Perhaps you have a lot of data from interviews and you want to know what your respondents associate with a problem.
Atlas.Ti isn’t new, but you may have missed the boat. It provides a visual way of organizing and coding data for this type of research projects, especially those involving qualitative data, or data that can’t be understood using traditional statistical methods.
All the best research, right?
It’s relatively easy to learn, fun to use, and incredibly powerful in the right context.
For a few years now, it has had increasingly powerful support for video and audio coding, which means that you can analyze data from almost any source imaginable. Here’s a blurb:
“ATLAS.ti serves as a powerful utility for qualitative analysis, particularly of larger bodies of textual, graphical, audio, and video data. The content or subject matter of these materials is in no way limited to any one particular field of scientific or scholarly investigation. The typical application areas for ATLAS.ti are characterized by a systematic, yet creative approach to analyzing unstructured data.”
Visit the atlas website.
