Communication between government agencies and not-for-profits (NFPs) within the local funding sector typically require the writing and submitting of long-form text-based reports. These processes are time and resource intensive and require skill in written communication, placing a significant administrative burden on the small, already under-resourced organisations who interact with programs. NFP's now have the technical literacy to create rich video content, but little is understood about how video could be used instead of, or alongside traditional written reports. We present findings from a novel funding acquittal (final report) process that we designed for a government grant programme to explore the affordances of video from the perspective of the grantee. We discuss the affordances of structured short-form video to overcome the barriers faced by organisations during these reporting processes. We present design considerations for digitally mediated processes that could support the media augmentation of these established workflows.

HCI practitioners in development contexts utilize collaborative digital technologies for community engagement in international development, often mediated through platforms like social media, tele-conferencing, and Interactive Voice Response (IVR). However, the lack of standardized representation approaches for these platforms impedes effective communication among stakeholders. We propose a unified graphical framework for characterizing and representing collaborative platforms, focusing on audio/voice-based engagements. Our framework segments community engagement sessions into engagement formats, characterizing them with preconditions, configurations, and outputs, and visualizes them using state machine-based representations. A field study demonstrates the framework's effectiveness in supporting stakeholder communication for real-life scenarios. We contribute to CSCW literature by providing a standardized approach that offers a common framework/language for discussing, developing, or reconfiguring collaborative platforms. Our findings show that this framework enables non-governmental organizations and researchers to navigate under-explored design spaces, enhancing the utilization of voice-based platforms for engaging distributed marginalized communities.

Driven by pragmatic, cost-related, and environmental factors, voice-based remote community engagement tools (such as Interactive Voice Response) are emerging as a key modality for engaging marginalized communities. These voice-based digital solutions offer new opportunities for distributed community engagement and empowerment, and the ability to capture, store, and access a wide range of different records (i.e., recordings, interactions and contextual metadata) associated with community engagements. This potential for large scale, distributed community record collection necessitates an understanding of inclusive and effective recordkeeping approaches for appraisal, documentation, preservation, and accessibility of different types of records (such as audio recordings, transcripts, reports, and observatory notes) related to voice-based community engagements. Through qualitative analysis of stakeholder focus group discussions with domestic workers (as marginalized community members) and NGOs working in the sector, we present valuable insights and recommendations for the development of recordkeeping approaches tailored to voice-based remote community engagement records.

Although listening to community voice is a core value in HCI4D, we have limited methods to capture the community voice of marginalized groups within disadvantaged communities. Working with NGOs and 24 marginalized women farmers in Bangladesh, we promoted psychological safety and empowerment through our configuration of the process. Our stakeholders decided to record and produce a radio-style audio recording that presented their counter-collective narratives for development projects. We reflect on this process using the Benefits of Community Voice framework to document rich insights into community contexts, lived experiences, local knowledge, and building trust and buy-in and through interviews with three NGO workers. We discuss the fundamental need of stakeholders for a safe place to share, the value of letting stakeholders guide method selection, the significance of counter-collective narratives, the benefits of participatory audio to hear community voices for democratizing and sustaining development and design implications of our work for HCI4D.

Voice-based digital platforms are increasingly recognized as powerful tools for fostering community participation and bridging digital divide. These platforms offer unique opportunities for engaging distributed communities, especially those with limited digital literacy and internet access. Despite their potential, the comprehensive impact of voice-based platforms is constrained by challenges concerning design inclusivity, sustainability, and stakeholder empowerment. This systematic review critically examines existing voice-based platforms, identifying key challenges and opportunities for enhancing their effectiveness. Our review reveals that innovative participation archetypes, when supported by inclusive design and robust policy frameworks, can significantly enhance community engagement. Additionally, sustainable business models and stakeholder empowerment are crucial for the long-term viability of these platforms. This study provides actionable insights and a research framework for ICTD researchers and practitioners, emphasizing the need for inclusive, sustainable, and contextually relevant design and development of voice-based solutions to drive sustainable social change and promote digital equity.

Multiple HCI projects have demonstrated the potential of digitally-enhanced, synchronous telephony platforms for use with and by resource-limited communities. However, these platforms were each designed to only facilitate a single archetype of community engagement, limiting their capacity for adaptation when contextual or stakeholder requirements change. This paper builds upon these projects to introduce a design vocabulary, grounded in a formal ontology describing the core components necessary to run adaptable, structured engagements through synchronous group telephony. Through a series of scenarios, we present how this design vocabulary can be used to: help design and communicate different models of synchronous audio engagements, describe existing technologies, and highlight other novel ways in which such platforms could be used. We discuss how while under-explored to this point, synchronous telephony platforms can be designed to orchestrate stakeholder engagements with a degree of flexibility previously impossible in remote, offline contexts.

University students are well known for volunteering within non-governmental organisations (NGOs). A significant part of NGO practice is the production of documents that communicate their work to local communities and international stakeholders. However, organisations often struggle to resource translations of these documents, resulting in the exclusion of the very same communities that they want to reach. Although many students are multilingual and are willing to volunteer their time and language skills, there are few structured opportunities configured for such non-professional translation of content in the short-term mode that would fit into the student pattern of availability. We developed Action Translate to specifically support these motivated, non-professional translators within the volunteering constraints of university life. Action Translate leverages machine translation post-editing to support teams of volunteers working on NGO translation projects online. Through analysis of a real-world deployment, we discuss how digital systems can be developed to better support student volunteer translators, specifically in building collegiate interaction and identity as translators for a cause.

International program development is a complex process involving many stakeholders. Current international practice affords limited, if any, opportunities for direct community-led input into the program commissioning process, resulting in programs that may not meet the specific needs of communities on the ground. Community voice is one source of data that could help focus the design of effective development programs and interventions. However, development programs are primarily formulated based on representative and often quantitative data conducted by experts from outside the community. Through a participatory video production process with disadvantaged women farmers in rural Bangladesh, we explore the opportunities for including meaningful community voices in these institutionalized processes. We present practical design implications for how community-generated voices can act as rich data, establishing confidence, community bonds and senses of accountability to inform early stages of project development, and to specifically augment and contextualize other data sources.

In low-and middle-income countries like India, people with severe mental illness (PSMI) rely on their families as a primary source of care, given the lack of support from healthcare systems. The demanding nature of caregiving places significant physical and mental demands on caregivers, who are the primary source of support to PSMI. We explore how caregivers in under-resourced settings can be better supported through everyday digital technologies. We conducted interviews with caregivers (from urban and rural India), as well as workshops with professionals from Indian NGOs that work directly with PSMIs. We found that technology has the potential to (1) provide carer-centred support that empowers carers who experience stigma and issues with existing support networks; (2) provide support for carers to overcome barriers and progress in the recovery of the PSMI. We conclude with design considerations, proposing how an online peer community can leverage carers’ expertise to actualise support provision.

Community voice is widely used in computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) and human-computer interaction (HCI) work with underserved communities. However, the term is unresolved, denoting disparate activities, methods, and phenomena that are at their most useful when combined. We argue for a rethink by setting out a more nuanced understanding of "community" and "voice". Building on our own experiences of HCI for development (HCI4D) work and the existing literature, we propose a framework for the benefits it can bring to those who actively engage with communities as part of their work. This framework can be understood in terms of its four constituent benefits for CSCW and HCI4D practitioners: (i) understanding context, (ii) creating empathy, (iii) leveraging local skills and knowledge, and (iv) building trust and buy-in. We reflect on how an improved understanding of these benefits applies to three prior projects with women living in Bangladesh and discuss the issues and need for more work on community voice. Finally, we discuss how this more detailed perspective on community voice helps us understand power dynamics and polyvocal communities in development contexts.

People leaving prison experience significant challenges upon release. Due to limited funding, only a small proportion of prison leavers receive specialist reintegration support to help them return to the community. Those who receive support have better outcomes across a range of domains and are less likely to be reincarcerated. This study sought to understand how digital services, such as smartphone-based applications, can provide a low-cost, scalable option to extend reintegration support to a broader cohort. To ascertain this, interviews and workshops were conducted with people with lived experience of prison, program staff from a leading community service organisation (CSO) that provides reintegration services, and policy and operational staff from an Australian state’s Department of Justice (DOJ). It was found that digital services have the potential to help prison leavers find and access relevant services, coordinate their own support, and establish supportive peer networks. This paper outlines the critical design considerations that such a service should encompass, including that it must recognise the diverse needs of prison leavers and embed self-determination.

The rise of gig economy platforms has highlighted the impact platform and algorithm design can have upon workers’ experiences. This paper reports on an extended series of collaborative design engagements with a private company and an international non-government organisation during the production of an Interactive Voice Response component for a gig economy platform. We present the findings of a design ethnography undertaken during this process, and discuss how design decisions reflect how each party’s values, motivations and assumptions are embedded within the final technology. There exists a need for simple methods to assist practitioners to surface and critically engage with the disparate values, priorities and assumptions held by the system’s stakeholders. We demonstrate that this can be done during the production of real-world systems through the application of constrained design as a values lever, and discuss how constraint-based values levers can support critical reflection, even in resource-constrained commercial development contexts.

Community-based migrant organizations play a vital role in the provision of welfare services to temporary migrant workers, international students, and refugees whose access to government support services are limited. Through a co-design based inquiry, we explored the potential to utilize mainstream digital platforms to support the welfare agenda of an Australia-based Filipino migrant organization. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of implementing such technology-mediated workflows within the community-based organization and the essential practices that they may undermine. Drawing on this case study, we present a provisional set of reflections for design practitioners working in the space of migrant communities and other marginalized community groups. These include the importance of designing for the community’s long-term and holistic development, leveraging volunteers’ digital literacy, and a call for more malleable platforms that allow community groups to reflect their core values and needs directly onto the platform configurations.

Telephone-driven community forums have been a widely proposed solution to address the unreliable internet connectivity and large geographic scope that characterizes many international NGO contexts. Primarily, these applications support asynchronous activities, such as information portals or forums to access rural journalism, but opportunities for real-time experience sharing remain largely under-explored. In this paper, we explore the potential of such forums to support remote mentoring of NGO volunteers, a practice that requires synchronous, dialogical formats for experience sharing and peer discussion. We engaged 28 participants from a rural Indian NGO in the design of peer-mentoring sessions that leverage synchronous audio discussions, using the structure and format of traditional talk-show radio as a starting point. The participants favored an entertaining approach to mentoring and discussed the logistics required to achieve this within their resource constraints. We conclude with design implications for designing media-driven community engagement platforms and the ethical challenges around protecting marginalized community interests.

Historically, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Human-Computer Interaction for Development (HCI4D) researchers in the Global South have advocated for a community-based approach to technology design and development. However, even with this "bottom-up" emphasis, the sustainability and scalability of the resulting innovations remain major challenges, and are poorly understood. To address this gap, we take the case of Bangladesh as a typical Global South context in which development work is carried out by a complex intertwined network of stakeholders across governments, NGOs, donors, and industries. To better understand the current development landscape and its priorities for digital technologies, we conducted interviews with 14 influential decision-makers in Bangladesh who play significant roles in the development of nutrition strategies. Our findings highlight a disconnect between the Bangladesh government's "digital mandate" and the reality of digital innovation practice within the nutrition development sector. Our paper contributes to the debate on factors that affect decision-making processes. We explore the dynamics of diverse actors and institutions who are intended to participate in, but can act as obstacles to sustained bottom-up innovations. Our findings expand understanding of institutional priorities, the dynamics of intermediaries, techno-solutionism, postcolonialism, bureaucracy, competition, and other important topics in CSCW scholarship. We suggest understanding the factors that guide the decision-making process of digital innovation practices in terms of four dimensions: internal, external, vertical, and horizontal. Consequently, we recommend CSCW and HCI researchers become mediators to connect decision-makers and communities and bring their voices in ICT innovations for global development. Finally, we offer recommendations for proactive engagement with decision-making stakeholders, enabling researchers to design community-centered sustainable digital innovations for development.

Participatory video (PV) is an established practice for enabling communities to "speak truth to power" and has been widely used by local, national and international Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). However, the digital media landscape has changed dramatically since PV became widely accessible with the rise of the camcorder in the 1980s. Current media practices have evolved considerably since, yet PV remains essentially unchanged. We report on an investigation of current PV practices and reflect on these in terms of what the future for PV holds. We conducted interviews with staff at a global humanitarian network who directly and indirectly engage in community story capture; and explore their reflections on the potentials and barriers to PV use. We propose a new vision for PV that draws on current visual media production, consumption and distribution technologies and practices, and propose principles on which PV 2.0, a new generation of Participatory Video can be founded.

Delivering training to volunteers is a huge challenge for non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Traditional classroom-based approaches that dominate training are problematic due to the limited participation they offer to trainees. Peer-led approaches however, have shown promise in helping NGOs utilise trainee experiences within training. Although technologies are playing an increasing role in training, their benefits are not well understood. We describe our experience of designing peer-led training for community volunteers in rural India. Working alongside an NGO involved in community regeneration and social action, we collaboratively delivered a ten-day training workshop, deploying audio technologies to engage the participants in sharing lived experiences. We draw on reflections from trainers and trainees on how utilising participant voice can enhance training. We highlight opportunities around the usage of audio technologies for engaging with participant voice, including the ability to reclaim trainee agency within training and to work within cultural barriers.

Participatory Video (PV) is emerging as a rich and valuable method for monitoring and evaluating (M & E) projects in the International Development sector. Although shown to be useful for engaging communities within short-term monitoring exercises or promotion, PV in these contexts presents significant complexity and logistical challenges for sustained uptake by Development organizations. In this paper, we present Our Story, a digitally mediated work flow iteratively designed and deployed on initiatives in Indonesia and Namibia. Developed in collaboration with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent (IFRC), it supports end-to-end PV production in the field, and was specifically developed to make PV a more sustainable tool for monitoring. We discuss and evaluate Our Story, reporting on how by lowering skills barriers for facilitators and leveraging consumer technology, PV can be delivered at scale.

The Healthcare system of India provides outreach services to the rural population with a key focus on the maternal and child health through its flagship program of Community Health Workers (CHWs). The program since its launch has reached a scale of over 900000 health workers across the country and observed significant benefits on the health indicators. However, traditional face to face training mechanisms face persistent challenge in providing adequate training and capacity building opportunities to CHWs which leads to their sub-optimal knowledge and skill sets. In this paper, we propose Sangoshthi, a low-cost mobile based training and learning platform that fits well into the environment of low-Internet access. Sangoshthi leverages the architecture that combines Internet and IVR technology to host real time training sessions with the CHWs having access to basic phones only. We present our findings of a four week long field deployment with 40 CHWs using both qualitative and quantitative methods. Sangoshthi offers a lively environment of peer learning that was well received by the CHW community and resulted into their knowledge gains (16%) and increased confidence levels to handle the cases. Our study highlights the potential of complementary training platforms that can empower CHWs in-situ without the need of additional infrastructure.