ICTD 2009 - Conference Program April 17-19, 2009

Conference Schedule

Click here for a detailed pdf of the conference days' events.

Keynote Presentations

 

Papers selected for Oral Presentations

Title	Authors
A Global Empirical Evaluation of New Communication Technology Use and Democratic Tendency	Victoria Stodden, Patrick Meier
A Review of the Research on Mobile Use by Micro and Small Enterprises (MSEs)	Jonathan Donner, Marcela Escobari
An Evaluation of the Use of ICT within Primary Education in Malawi	David Hollow, Paola Masperi
Claim Mobile: Engaging Conflicting Stakeholder Requirements in Healthcare in Uganda	Melissa Ho, Emmanuel Owusu, Paul M Aoki
Computer Games in the Developing World: The Value of Non-Instrumental Engagement with ICTs	Beth Kolko, Cynthia Putnam
Content Creation and Dissemination by-and-for Users in Rural Areas	Sheetal Agarwal, Arun Kumar, Amit Nanavati, Nitendra Rajput
E for Express: "Seeing" the Indian State through ICTD	Renee Kuriyan, Isha Ray
Evaluating the Accuracy of Data Collection on Mobile Phones: A Study of Forms, SMS, and Voice	Somani Patnaik, Emma Brunskill, William Thies
FOLKSOMAPS: Towards Community Driven Intelligent Maps for Developing Regions	Arun Kumar, Dipanjan Chakraborty, Himanshu Chauhan, Sheetal Agarwal, Nitendra Rajput
HIV Health Information Access using Spoken Dialogue Systems: Touchtone vs. Speech	Aditi Sharma, Madelaine Plauche , Etienne Barnard, Christiaan Kuun
ICT4What? - Using the Choice Framework to Operationalise the Capability Approach to Development	Dorothea Kleine
ICTD for Healthcare in Ghana: Two Parallel Case Studies	Rowena Luk, Matei Zaharia, Melissa Ho, Paul Aoki
Improving Child Literacy in Africa: Experiments with an Automated Reading Tutor	G. Ayorkor Mills-Tettey, Jack Mostow, M. Bernardine Dias, Tracy Sweet, Haijun Gong, Sarah Belousov, M. Freddie Dias
Improving Literacy in Rural India: Cellphone Games in an After-School Program	Matthew Kam, Anuj Kumar, Shirley Jain, John Canny
Kelsa+: Digital Literacy for Low-Income Workers	Aishwarya Lakshmi Ratan, Sambit Satpathy, Lilian Zia, Kentaro Toyama, Sean Blagsvedt, Udai Singh Pawar, Thanuja Subramaniam
Mapping the Dynamics of Social Enterprises and ICTD in Cambodia	Kelly Hutchinson, Alemayehu Molla
Political Incentives and Policy Outcomes: Who Benefits from Technology Enabled Serivice Centers?	Jennifer Bussell
Results from a Study of Impact of E-government Projects in India	Subhash Bhatnagar, Nupur Singh
The Contribution of User-Based Subsidies to the Impact and Sustainability of Telecenters	Michael Best, Dhanaraj Thakur, Beth Kolko

 

Papers selected for Poster Presentations

Title	Authors
A Speech Enabled Indian Language Text-to-Braille Transliteration System	Tirthankar Dasgupta, Anupam Basu
Analyzing Statistical Relationships between Global Indicators through Visualization	Prabath Gunawardane, Suresh Lodha, Erin Middleton, Ben Crow
ATMosphere: A System for ATM Microdeposit Services in Rural Contexts	Michael Paik, Lakshminarayanan Subramanian
Building a Transportation Information System Using Only GPS and Basic SMS Infrastructure	Beth Kolko, Ruth Anderson, Gaetano Borriello, Caitin Lustig, Anthony Poon, Waylon Brunette
Challenges in Health Information Systems Integration: A Human Agency Perspective	Edwin Nyella
Cross Technology Comparison for Information Services in Rural Bangladesh	Faheem Hussain, Rahul Tongia
Decentralization, Clientelism and Popular Participation: Can ICTs Make a Difference and Improve Local Governance?	Bjorn-Soren Gigler
Design and Deployment of a Blood Safety Monitoring Tool	Stephen Thomas, Adebola Osuntogun, John Pitman, Santosh Vempala
Dimensions of IT Literacy in an Arab Region: A Study in Barkha (Oman)	Mohammed Sherif Aziz
Emergency Communication and System Design: The Case of Indian Ocean Tsunami	Rui Chen, John Coles, Jinkyu Lee, Raghav Rao
Empowering Muslim Youth through Computer Education, Access, Use: A Gender Analysis	Farida Khan, Rehana Ghadially
eServices Provisioning in a Community Development Context Through a JADE MAS Platform	Mamello Thinyane, Alfredo Terzoli, Peter Clayton
Excavating Relics of a Tech-Educational Idea: The Romance of Free Learning	Payal Arora
Extending the Technology-Community-Management Model to Disaster Recovery in Asia	Arul Chib, Komathi Ale
Featherweight Multimedia for Information Dissemination	Gerry Chu, Sambit Satpathy, Kentaro Toyama, Rikin Gandhi, Ravin Balakrishnan, S Raghu Menon
ICT Governance in Higher Education: Case Study of the Rise and Fall of Open Source in a Gulf University	Sofiane Sahraoui
ICTD State of the Union: Where have we Reached and Where are we Headed?	Sergiu Nedevsci, Rabin Patra, Joyojeet Pal
Information Communication Technology and Sustainable Communities in Africa: The Case of the Niger Delta Region of Nigeria	Uduak Okon
Integrating Health Information Systems in Sierra Leone	Johan Sæbø, Edem kwame Kossi, Tohouri Golly-Kobrissa, Ola Titlestad, Jørn Braa
Mobile Adoption & Usage in 16 African Countries	Christoph Stork, Augustin Chabossou, Pam Zahonogo, Matthias Stork
Numeric Paper Forms for NGOs	Gursharan Singh, Leah Findlater, Kentaro Toyama, Scott Helmer, Rikin Gandhi, Ravin Balakrishnan
Rajnikant’s Laptop: Computers and Development in Popular Indian Cinema	Joyojeet Pal
Regulatory Independence and Mobile Market Development: A Comparative Analysis of two African Nations	Annemijn van Gorp, Carleen Maitland
Social Enterprises: A Vocational Entrepreneurship Framework for Street Youth	Paul Javid, Kentaro Toyama, Manna Biswas
Speech vs. Touch-tone: Telephony Interfaces for Information Access by Low Literate Users	Jahanzeb Sherwani, Sooraj Palijo, Sarwat Mirza, Tanveer Ahmed, Nosheen Ali & Roni Rosenfeld
The Case for SmartTrack	Arthur Meacham, Ashlesh Sharma, Michael Paik, Giulio Quarta, Philip Smith, John Trahanas, Brian Levine, Mary Ann Hopkins, Barbara Rapchak, Lakshminarayanan Subramanian
Uses of Mobile Phones in Post-Conflict Liberia	Michael Best, John Etherton, Thomas Smyth, Edem Wornyo

 

Workshops

ICTD Curriculum Workshop
Organizers: Sarah Revi Sterling and Richard Anderson
April 17, 2009 - 9 AM - 12.30 PM

This half-day workshop will gather ICTD instructors to discuss current efforts in ICTD teaching, and begin a conversation on the content and issues that ICTD instructors think should be taught at the undergraduate and graduate level for future researchers and practitioners. Expected outcomes include a compendium of existing efforts, open issues, and contributions that participants commit to provide to the ICTD academic community. The maximum number of participants will be capped at 50 to ensure a manageable and insightful conversation. There is no fee for this workshop.

Young Researchers' Workshop
Organizers: Gudrun Wicander and Jahanzeb Sherwani
April 17, 2009 - 9 AM - 5:15 PM

The Young Researchers' Workshop aims to provide an informal forum for all "young" researchers to meet, network, and share experiences in ICTD research. While the conference provides an excellent opportunity to present polished publications, the workshop is meant to facilitate discussion on work-in-progress research, field experience, and on the challenges on ICTD research. Preference will be given to those with relevant ICTD research experience. The workshop consists of a morning and an afternoon session, covering presentations of research, as well as break-out discussions in smaller groups, ending with a wrap-up discussion amongst all participants.

What Makes Good ICTD Research
Organizers: Rowena Luk and David Hollow
April 17, 2009 - 1.30 PM - 5:15 PM

ICTD2009 will be the third conference to highlight rigorous, scholarly research in ICTD. Yet, many feel that the question of what constitutes good ICTD research is still unclear. In this workshop, we aim to raise and explore some of the questions around what makes good ICTD research.

 

Panels

Tracing the Genealogy of ICTD Research: Premises, Predispositions, and Paradoxes of a Field in the Making
Panelists: Mike Powell, Onno Purbo, Parminder Jeet Singh, Kentaro Toyama
April 17th 11.00 AM

In many ways, ICTD is a unique field of development. It is anchored around a revolutionary 'general purpose technology' instead of any specific development goals. This context is further complicated by the origins of ICTD's dominant concepts in the North, far from everyday development practice. As a field in the making, ICTD is situated right at the centre of an unfolding global transformation process marked by complex and intense power struggles. It thus comprises a contested multi-actor space often implicating competing positions – between technical and social actors, the corporate sector and development constituencies, and the state and communities.
Against the above background, this panel seeks to examine the following questions: what visions of development dominate ICTD research; how much is the issue of power and the tool of 'power analysis', central to ICTD research; how power is organised and exercised within the ICTD research domain among different actors; how the nature of funding of the ICTD research domain, on the one hand, and geo-political locations of agenda-setting, on the other, potentially influences its form and outcomes.

Opportunity and Challenges of the Mobile Web for Social Development
Panelists: Ken Banks, Gaetano Borriello, Stephane Boyera, Jonathan Donner, David Edelstein, Jesse Moore
April 17th 13.30 PM

Over the past three or four years, new opportunities have emerged thanks to the incredible penetration of mobile telephony in the developing world. Now a minimal infrastructure (GSM networks) and a minimal computing device (mobile phones) are available to tens of millions of people, including the poorest members of society. For under-privileged populations to benefit from the Web, they not only need to be able to access it, but they also need to find accessible, usable and information relevant to them. It is therefore critical to identify key barriers and bottlenecks in content authoring, deployment and access. The panel will identify the role of all actors in relation to their potential to be providers of services, and assess challenges and potential actions which could lower their barriers to developing accessible, usable and useful mobile web content and services. At the end, the panelists will also compare the opportunities, challenges, and limitations of the mobile web approach vis-à-vis ICTD in general, identifying complementarities with other approaches, still-unmet gaps, and some remaining questions as the mobile web continues to spread.

Special Invited Panel: Assistive Technology for Developing Countries
Panelists: Lizbeth Goodman, Hayat Khalil Heji, Yasir Khan, Raj Reddy, Hamadoun Touré, Charles Watt, Michael Thatcher
April 17th 15.30 PM

In this special invited panel, panelists will describe their perspective of Assistive Technologies in developing countries while addressing the following questions:

1. What will it take to significantly increase research activity, as well as scale and/or commercialize promising assistive technologies in developing communities?
2. What are the critical success factors for assistive technology research, development, dissemination, and adoption in developing regions?
3. Is there a vast market for assistive technology commercialization in developing regions?
4. What support is required by leading researching bodies and institutions to concentrate their efforts on assistive technologies?

ICTD Evaluation 20/20: Voices from around the World
Panelists: Akhtar Badshah, Karen E. Fisher, Rich Fuchs, Richard Heeks, Balaji Parthasarathy, Teresa Peters
April 18th 14.00 PM

If technology marches in dog years, ICTD 2009 marks the 60th anniversary of the ICTD field. Perhaps in no domain have exponents argued as much that the field has reached middle age, old age or just plain senility as in the area of evaluation. This panel will create a global dialogue around pivotal evaluation issues that will be spurred by a moderated, spirited debate among experts representing practice, technology, academia, and funders. Pre-and post panel discussion will be conducted on the Center for Information & Society of the University of Washington Information School's website (www.cis.washington.edu/ICTD2020). We aim to create a reflective dialog amongst as many stakeholders as we can identify prior to the event, and to sustain the dialog long after to create maximal impact in the ICTD field. The following statements will be debated by the panelists:

1. ICTD evaluation studies have been conducted for years and yet a common criticism is that these seem to be done infrequently, in poor quality, and are little used. How much of this do we owe to various stakeholders' goals in seeing certain outcomes from the research? Has this changed?
2. Explain your favorite ICTD evaluation model (and why) in 1 minute (alternatively, explain/critique your least favorite model).
3. Academic studies reflect communities' ICTD needs and uses, however: top-down, deductive, blueprint evaluation measures impact but is not truthful; bottom-up, inductive, process evaluation is truthful but does not measure impact.

Demos selected for proceedings and presentation

Title	Authors
A New Generation of Open Source Data Collection Tools	Yaw Anokwa, Carl Hartung, Adam Lerer, Brian DeRenzi, and Gaetano Borriello
FrontlineSMS and Ushahidi - A Demo	Ken Banks and Erik Hersman
Global Youth Connectivity (GYC) . Using ICT for Peaceful Recovery and Long-term Change	Annie Bertrand
Web Search over Low Bandwidth	Jay Chen, Lakshminarayanan Subramanian, and Jinyang Li
Improving Data Quality With Dynamic Forms	Kuang Chen, Harr Chen, Neil Conway, Heather Dolan, Joseph M. Hellerstein, and Tapan S. Parikh
Freedom Fone: Dial-up Information Service	Bev Clark and Brenda Burrell
An Automated Braille Writing Tutor with Multilingual Exercises and Educational Games	M. Bernardine Dias, M. Freddie Dias, Sarah Belousov, Mohammed Kaleemur Rahman, Saurabh Sanghvi, Imran Fanaswala, Wael Ghazzawi, Ameer Abdulsalam, Noura El-Moughny and S. Raghu Menon
T-Cube Web Interface in Support of Real-Time Bio-surveillance Program	Artur Dubrawski, Maheshkumar Sabhnani, Michael Knight, Michael Baysek, Daniel Neill, Saswati Ray, Anna Michalska and Nuwan Waidyanatha
MultiMath: Numeric Keypads for Math Learning on Shared Personal Computers	Sunil Garg, Charlotte Robinson, Clint Tseng, Heather Underwood, Richard Anderson, and Joyojeet Pal
Boosting European Market Access to Malian Mango Growers	Saskia Harmsen
Metamouse: Multiple Mice for Legacy Applications	Kurtis Heimer, Divya Ramachandran, Joyojeet Pal., Eric Brewer and Tapan Parikh
Mobile Phone Job Services: Linking Developing-Country Youth with Employers, via SMS	Amber Houssian, Mohammad Kilany, and Jacob Korenblum
DISHA: DISease and Health Awareness for Children on Multiple Input Devices	Mohit Jain, Aakar Gupta, Navkar Samdaria, Praveen Shekhar and Joyojeet Pal
Implementing E-Government Accessible to Illiterate Citizens	Driss Kettani and Asmae El Mahdi
Creating a Mobile-Phone Based Geographic Surveillance System for Avian Influenza	Yibo Lin and Claire Heffernan
Design of a Blood Flow System	A. Osuntogun, S. Thomas, J. Pitman, S. Basavaraju, B. Mulenga and S. Vempala
RuralScope: An Information System for Tracking Rural Disbursements	Sai Gopal Thota, Rabin Patra, Murali Medisetty, Sivananda Reddy, Vivek Mungala, and Joyojeet Pal
IWB4D . Interactive Whiteboards for Development	John Traxler and Lee Griffiths
Livestock, Learning and Diagnostics: New Directions in Veterinary Tele-medicine	Jun Yu and Claire Heffernan

Demos selected for presentation only

Title	Authors
Private Sector Engagement for Market Oriented Innovation in ICT4D	Sahid Uddin Akbar, and Parvez Asheque
Healthcare Solution: A Case in Botswana using Mobile phones to Access HIV/AIDS Information	G. Anderson, Y. Ayalew, O.T. Eyitayo, D. Garg, B. Gopolang, A. Masizana-Katongo, O. Mogotlhwane, P.A. Mokotedi, N.P. Motlogelwa, D. Mpoeleng*, T. Seipone , E. Thuma, and T. Taukobong
Babajob.com: Bridging the Digital Job Divide	Sean Blagsvedt, Shruti Salghur, and Vibhore Goyal
Mobile Care (Moca) for Remote Diagnosis and Screening	Leo Anthony G. Celi
The Virtual Community as a Channel for Promoting Academic Integrity: Bicharaf.org	Tony Feghali, Rami AbiSleiman, and Raja Chahrouri
The Globalization of Transparency: WikiChains.com and its Potentials for Development	Mark Graham
Realising a lasting jump in health care performance	S. Harmsen
Enabling Community Advancement through Sustainable Technologies Model	Shawntel Hines, Eric Mibuari, Aisha Walcott, and Robbin Chapman
Digitizing the Somali Interactive Radio Instruction Program	Mohamed Ibrahim and Said Yasin
Connecting a billion content resources to education by 2018: the Global Grid for Learning	Theo Lynn and Samuel DiGangi
Integration of ICT in Teaching and Learning in Vietnam	Jef Peeraer
Assessing Engagement with IIT E-learning Videos on YouTube	Hong Qu, Obadiah Greenberg, Maryrose Dunton, Tracy P. Chan, Nick Jakobi, Jonas Yngvesson, Uwe Maurer and Tom Broxton
Research4Life	R. Ramusack
A Digital Literacy Curriculum for Primary Schools Teachers	Isabella Rega, Francesca Fanni and Lorenzo Cantoni
PAN Localization project: From Localized ICT Development to Dissemination across Asia	Sana Shams and Sarmad Hussain
Gendered Outcome Mapping for ICT projects	Sana Shams and Atif Mirza
Portable Media Players as a Cost-Effective Technology for Improving Education in Developing Countries	Matthew York and Andrew Lieberman
Health, Agriculture, and Literacy with a $10 Rural Audio Computer	Cliff Schmidt and Andrew Azaabanye Bayor
LifeLines: Knowledge Services on the Dial of a Phone	Shakeel Ahmad

Demos corresponding to oral or poster presentations

Title	Authors
Understanding the Provenance of Ethically Produced Goods	Ian Brown, Dorothea Kleine, and Ann Light
The World Wide Telecom Web	Sheetal K Agarwal, Anupam Jain, Arun Kumar, Amit Anil Nanavati, and Nitendra Rajput
Analyzing Statistical Relationships between Global Indicators through Visualization	Prabath Gunawardane, Suresh Lodha, Erin Middleton, Ben Crow
Building a Transportation Information System Using Only GPS and Basic SMS Infrastructure	Beth Kolko, Ruth Anderson, Gaetano Borriello, Caitin Lustig, Anthony Poon, Waylon Brunette
The Case for SmartTrack	Arthur Meacham, Ashlesh Sharma, Michael Paik, Giulio Quarta, Philip Smith, John Trahanas, Brian Levine, Mary Ann Hopkins, Barbara Rapchak, Lakshminarayanan Subramanian
ATMosphere: A System for ATM Microdeposit Services in Rural Contexts	Michael Paik, Lakshminarayanan Subramanian
Integrating Health Information Systems in Sierra Leone	Johan Sæbø, Edem kwame Kossi, Tohouri Golly-Kobrissa, Ola Titlestad, Jørn Braa
Speech vs. Touch-tone: Telephony Interfaces for Information Access by Low Literate Users	Jahanzeb Sherwani, Sooraj Palijo, Sarwat Mirza, Tanveer Ahmed, Nosheen Ali & Roni Rosenfeld
Design and Deployment of a Blood Safety Monitoring Tool	Stephen Thomas, Adebola Osuntogun, John Pitman, Santosh Vempala