The structure and mechanics of organized outreach around certain issues, such as in propaganda networks, is constantly evolving on social media. We collect tweets on two propaganda events and one non-propaganda event with varying degrees of organized messaging. We then perform a comparative analysis of the user and network characteristics of social media networks around these events and find clearly distinguishable traits across events. We find that influential entities like prominent politicians, digital influencers, and mainstream media prefer to engage more with social media events with lesser degree of propaganda while avoiding events with high degree of propaganda, which are mostly sustained by lesser known but dedicated micro-influencers. We also find that network communities of events with high degree of propaganda are significantly centralized with respect to the influence exercised by their leaders. The methods and findings of this study can pave the way for modeling and early detection of other propaganda events, using their user and community characteristics.

With the increasing dominance of internet as a source of news consumption, there has been a rise in the production and popularity of email newsletters compiled by individual journalists. However, there is little research on the processes of aggregation, and how these differ between expert journalists and trained machines. In this paper, we interviewed journalists who curate newsletters from around the world. Through an in-depth understanding of journalists’ workflows, our findings lay out the role of their prior experience in the value they bring into the curation process, their own use of algorithms in finding stories for their newsletter, and their internalization of their readers’ interests and the context they are curating for. While identifying the role of human expertise, we highlight the importance of hybrid curation and provide design insights on how technology can support the work of these experts.

Social media has witnessed an unprecedented growth in users based in low-income communities in the Global South. However, much remains unknown about the drivers of misinformation in such communities. To fill this gap, we conducted an interview-based study to examine how rural and urban communities in India engage with misinformation on WhatsApp. We found that misinformation led to bitterness and conflict – rural users who had higher social status heavily influenced the perceptions and engagement of marginalized members. While urban users relied on the expertise of gatekeepers for verification, rural users engaged in collective deliberations in offline spaces. Both rural and urban users knowingly forwarded misinformation. However, rural users propagated hyperlocal misinformation, whereas urban users forwarded misinformation to reduce their efforts to assess information credibility. Using a public sphere lens, we propose that the reactions to misinformation provide a view of Indian society and its schisms around class, urbanity, and social interactions.

The death of Indian film star Sushant Singh Rajput at the peak of the COVID lockdown triggered chaos on the news cycle in India with a range of conspiracy theories that led to a witch hunt of sorts, and the hounding of several entertainers and public figures in the months that followed. Using data from Twitter, YouTube, and an archive of debunked misinformation stories, we examine the drivers and consequences of social media outrage in this case. We analyse these patterns from the framework of conspiracy and astroturfing and contextualize our findings to the socio-political background currently prevalent in India. Primarily, retweet rates on Twitter suggest that commentators benefited from talking about the case, which got higher engagement than other topics. Moreover, we report evidence of political hands in the way the discourse has shaped online, but more importantly that the story bears warnings for the shape and impact of witch-hunts in the backdrop of a fractured media environment. In conclusion, we consider the effects of Rajput’s outsider status as a small-town implant in the film industry within the broader narrative of systemic injustice, as well as the gendered aspects of mob justice that have taken aim at his former partner in the months since.

Propagation of misinformation on various social media platforms is a common occurrence, especially around political events, religious beliefs, and public health. Fact checked articles, which investigate the credibility of dubious claims online, provide a reliable source of debunked misinformation. However, existing (older) fact checked articles remain an underutilized resource for understanding patterns in fake stories. We propose the use of Question Answering (QA) for analysing fact checked articles for systematically extracting metadata, potentially useful for downstream tasks such as misinformation detection, using a range of simple to nuanced questions. We find that the method gives us a context-specific understanding of common patterns and themes in misinformation, which is especially important in the Global South, where misinformation is layered with propagandist underpinning. Our findings suggest that this method can be extended by fine tuning on any event specific data set of fact checked articles to yield more robust and accurate results.

Dangerous speech on social media platforms can be framed as blatantly inflammatory, or be couched in innuendo. It is also centrally tied to who engages it – it can be driven by openly sectarian social media accounts, or through subtle nudges by influential accounts, allowing for complex means of reinforcing vilification of marginalized groups, an increasingly significant problem in the media environment in the Global South. We identify dangerous speech by influential accounts on Twitter in India around three key events, examining both the language and networks of messaging that condones or actively promotes violence against vulnerable groups. We characterize dangerous speech users by assigning Danger Amplification Belief scores and show that dangerous users are more active on Twitter as compared to other users as well as most influential in the network, in terms of a larger following as well as volume of verified accounts. We find that dangerous users have a more polarized viewership, suggesting that their audience is more susceptible to incitement. Using a mix of network centrality measures and qualitative analysis, we find that most dangerous accounts tend to either be in mass media related occupations or allied with low-ranking, right-leaning politicians, and act as “broadcasters” in the network, where they are best positioned to spearhead the rapid dissemination of dangerous speech across the platform.

Social Media is increasingly central to culture wars, and in recent years has been at the center of debates around the weaponization of peoples’ opinions in polarized situations. We examine one such issue, an attempt to allow schools and junior colleges to ban girls from wearing Hijab in India in the southern state of Karnataka, India, by studying Twitter messaging related to the issue in early 2022, when it was in the news. We find that the narrative supporting the ban of the Hijab on Twitter is primarily driven by a minority of highly-influential individuals who are predominantly male and polarised in favour of the ruling party, while the discourse against the ban relies largely on influencers from within the Muslim community. Our findings show that social media can be a useful tool to craft the contours of politically-motivated escalation in the Global South.

With Twitter growing as a preferred channel for outreach among major politicians, there have been focused efforts on online communication, even in election campaigns in primarily rural regions. In this paper, we examine the relationship between politicians’ use of social media and the level of urbanization and literacy by compiling a comprehensive list of Twitter handles of political party functionaries and election candidates in the run-up to the 2022 State Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh, India. We find statistically significant relationships between political Twitter presence and levels of urbanization and with levels of literacy. We also find a strong correlation between vote share and Twitter presence in the winning party, a relationship that is even stronger in urban districts. This provides empirical evidence that social media is already a central part of electoral outreach processes in the Global South, but that this is still selectively more relevant to voters in, and politicians standing for elections from urban and higher-educated regions.

Influencers play a crucial role in shaping public narratives through information creation and diffusion in the Global South. While public figures from various walks of life and their impact on public discourse have been studied, defence veterans as influencers of the political discourse have been largely overlooked. Veterans matter in the public spehere as a normatively important political lobby. They are also interesting because, unlike active-duty military officers, they are not restricted from taking public sides on politics, so their posts may provide a window into the views of those still in the service. In this work, we systematically analyze the engagement on Twitter of self-described defence-related accounts and politician accounts that post on defence-related issues. We find that self-described defence-related accounts disproportionately engage with the current ruling party in India. We find that politicians promote their closeness to the defence services and nationalist credentials through engagements with defence-related influencers. We briefly consider the institutional implications of these patterns and connections.

The digitization of matrimonial matchmaking has implications for work but also subjective notions of family, femininity, parent-child relations, community boundaries which this work relies on. This paper is based on qualitative, ethnographic fieldwork with matchmakers working with middle-class, upper-caste Hindu and Parsi communities in metropolitan India and offering services alongside, or as an alternative to the now widely used online matrimonial services. Through our fieldwork, we found all matchmakers engaged with digital technologies' involvement in the ongoing churn around modern choice. Matchmakers engaged with this wider social discourse through ideas of trust, autonomy and genealogy and in doing so they responded to and re/produced varying imaginations of the future of families, community, individuals. Our findings contribute to an understanding of the digitization of a service as well as make a case for widening the conceptual scope of the future of work debate currently dominated by economistic conceptions of work. By paying attention to the links between the productive and reproductive spheres of life, we follow labor and capital into the families and communities they reside in order to see the variety of moral projects capital can be invested in.

Data collection on the population is a key mode of public health management in the Global South. This information is seen as a means to improve health metrics through welfare programs. In this study, we examine the changes brought about by an ICT-based Real-Time Monitoring System to the infrastructure of a welfare program and the nature of work of Anganwadi workers in India. Anganwadi workers, traditionally serving as daycare providers and community health workers, are increasingly being asked to serve primarily as data collectors for the new digital system. We ask the question 'cui bono?' to this system by drawing attention to the precarity of Anganwadi workers whose care-work is standardized through this app for 'efficient' monitoring by the Indian state but remains contingent on their relationship with the local community and ability to mobilize resources on the ground. Using auto-ethnographic and interview methods, we find that Anganwadi workers are caught between conflicting demands of state bureaucracy and the situated nature of their care work resulting in forms of ambivalent care. We find that the real-time monitoring apps intended to collect data for efficient delivery of state services end up serving the state's need for performing care through data rhetorics produced at the expense of the professional and personal well-being of the workers, and arguably the communities they serve.

Celebrity influencers are increasingly central to political discourse as they engage in, and get engaged with, on matters of electoral importance. In this paper, using Twitter data from 1432 sportspersons and entertainers and their engagement with the 1000 of the most followed ruling party and opposition politicians from India, we propose a new method to measure partisanship of celebrities along different modes of engagement. Our examination of polarization, through topical and retweet analyses, shows patterns related to both party incumbency and the level of internal organization. We find that the ruling BJP has been more effective than the opposition, the INC, in organized outreach to celebrities, by eschewing explicit party-based partisanship, and instead employing non-partisan narrative techniques, such as maintaining nationalism as the central theme in tweets. We find that while entertainers are equally engaged by both the ruling and opposition parties, sportspersons, who often enjoy a nationalist appeal by virtue of representing the country, tend to have a much more partisan relationship with the incumbent party.

Twitter is increasingly important for political outreach and networking around the world. While electoral politics and social relations in India are heavily organized by caste, a broader rhetoric of castelessness among upper-caste politicians has led to the eschewing of caste publicly to appear strategically secular. This has rendered caste dynamics more implicit than explicit. Social media, often cited as a tool for inclusion, offers a unique look into the networks of covert exclusion. Our study analyzes three structural properties of the Twitter network of Members of Parliament in India - influence, bridging capital, and mutual connectivity, to understand how caste manifests as social capital in the information economy. Our results show that those higher in the caste hierarchy are structurally poised for higher social capital through higher influence, incoming bridging capital, and higher propensity for mutual connections with other MPs in the network. Our study offers a methodological window into these invisible relations to show how structural advantages of Brahmanical supremacy are being co-produced and stabilized on social media at the highest level of politics.

We studied the Twitter activity of business leaders of top 250 companies in India and the US between January, 2019 and May, 2021 and looked for trends related to cause-related messaging through a topical analysis of their tweets. Using a Word2Vec bag of words model for textual classification, we quantified their engagement with socio-political messaging, using keywords related to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs). We found that messaging on themes that have widespread social purchase and are not politically sensitive is relatively comparable across the two countries, but that results differ vastly on issues of political sensitivity. Our results point at the complex relationship between business and politics in the two countries, and the growing importance of social media in signalling those. We conclude by pointing out the importance of these findings for political science and policy research and by highlighting the scope for future work in this area.

Twitter’s role in driving political discourse is well documented in scholarship, yet, its affect on electoral outcomes is unclear. In this work, we analyze the Twitter activity of candidates from four major political parties contesting in assembly elections in the Indian state of West Bengal, alongside the outcomes of the election. We find that winning candidates are more likely to have a Twitter presence. However, Twitter presence in itself does not increase the likelihood of winning. We also find that candidates with high degrees of social media influence, typically celebrities, are more likely to lose, as their high following comes to signify their status as outsiders in politics. Finally, studying sub-regional metrics of social media engagement and election outcomes, we find that Twitter offers us insight into the geographical logic of attention paid by parties in the electoral campaign.

The isolating nature of platform-based work, particularly gig work involving deliveries, has created unintended consequences over how workers engage with peers, friends, family, and society in general. We performed a qualitative study involving interviews with 21 delivery workers in Bangalore, India to understand how workers experienced and responded to social isolation perpetuated by the nature and daily function of their work. We found that the stigma and individual nature of app-based delivery work restricts access to inter-relational and instrumental support. As a response, workers organized peer networks for both companionship and emergency assistance. We analyze how the cultural context of India heightens these experiences, and offer ideas for mitigating the risks of isolation as a result of gig work.

Mapping polarization and relationships in political discourse on social media is challenging since politicians' positions and relationships can be hard to pin down. In this paper, we attempt to use politicians' tweets as a metric of their affinities using representation learning, by modifying the Word2Vec method such that politicians are directly encoded into a Euclidean space. Our analysis of Indian politicians shows that the relatively populous, linguistically more homogeneous northern states are cohesively clustered based on their party affiliations, whereas southern states cluster based on geography. We propose that computational methods can be useful in examining the tensions of regionalist tendencies against dominant national political narratives.

We present an in-depth, language-centric, large-scale study of topical discussions on Twitter by 1,711 Indian politicians from 20 competing political parties in a 4-year timespan. We first show that politicians of all parties collectively indulge more in establishing personal branding through low-substance, personality-focused messaging as opposed to broadcasting policy stances. Additionally, compared to the party-in-power, opposition politicians collectively post more complex tweets and demonstrate higher negativity (e.g., using person-based attack hashtags) especially regarding the issue of corruption. Finally, through a contextual examination of the most retweeted messages from two key leaders---the prime minister and the leader of the largest opposition party, we find that there are qualitatively important distinctions between their styles---while the former focuses on positive-themed messaging, the latter employs confrontation and aggressive language with direct attacks on individuals and issues.

Women political workers adopt a range of tactics to navigate the hyper-masculine space of electoral politics in South India, both offline and, increasingly, online. Using interviews and observations over three months of election campaigning, we examine women's outreach work in online and offline adversarial spaces through the lens of Michel de Certeau's, The Practice of Everyday Life, which examines the "tactics" through which people negotiate change and everyday challenges in daily situations. We find that the everyday logistics of election work have changed significantly, and that these bring up two important ways in which "tactics" framework is helpful - first, in the changing ways in which representations need to be managed, as political work requires an interactive digital public face, and second, in ways that which online interactions need to be managed as new and increasingly demanding forms of communication are necessitated for effective voter outreach.

Project Torino is a physical programming environment designed for teaching computational thinking (CT) to school children in the UK, regardless of the level of vision. We introduced Project Torino to children in three schools for the blind in Bangalore, India as a toy for playing with songs, rhymes, and stories. We present the results of 103 semi-structured play sessions spread over three months with 12 children (2 girls, 10 boys) with diverse backgrounds. We found that children progressed from playing with pre-connected examples, to making changes, to actively participating in what items are played. Engaging the children in conversation while they played, we established that the teams had grasped three basic concepts of computational thinking--flow of control, variables, and loops, without any explicit instructions towards learning them. We propose that play-based approaches can be successfully used with low resource overhead to introduce fundamental concepts of CT.

Spirituality-based organizations in India, centered around a set of beliefs and practices, with a charismatic guru figure at their head, have embraced the information age enthusiastically, and have come to the fore as key players in the national narrative around social welfare and development in recent years. We conducted a qualitative study of four Hinduism-oriented Spirituality-based Organizations (SBOs) in India using interviews, on-site observations, and in-depth examination of their online outreach material to understand the ways in which technology impacts and advances their core functions. We examine five core ways which technology plays a critical role in these SBO - community-building, dissemination of core practices, self-fashioning, philanthropic outreach, and organizational growth -- all of which inform these organizations' influence in society beyond the confines of their adherents. We find that all these functions are enabled in different ways by digital technologies, which have organizational value in and of themselves, but also play an equally important role in helping extend these organizations' public image as modern, innovative organizations aligned with broader aspirations of national development and social welfare.

In this mixed-methods study of political discourse, we study the affordances of Twitter in the context of free speech in India. We critically examine specific cases of the legal prosecution of free speech and the use of extreme speech in attacks on people to document the risks to citizens when they engage in antagonistic online discourse, particularly against the state or political institutions. We follow this up with quantitative study of the use of extreme speech through 477 hashtags used by a random sample of thousand political actors on Twitter and find that politicians are rewarded, through higher retweet rates, when they engage in extreme or uncivil messaging. We contextualize these findings to the postcolonial history of India and the laws and institutions that enable differential consequences for engaging in various forms of speech. In conclusion, we propose that the affordances of new ICTs like social media need to be carefully considered for their unintended consequences, and that functional access to free speech may differ dramatically based on one's access to institutions.

Social media has become increasingly important as a space for both organized and ad-hoc activism. As social movement organizations have shifted many aspects of their communication online, bystander populations - citizens who may be somewhat interested in a movement but are largely uninvolved in its activities - have begun to play a more significant role in the achievement of movement aims. In this paper, we examine bystander targeting on social media by social movement organizations in India. Through interviews, observation, and participation, we investigate ways that activists themselves conceptualize, carry out, and reflect upon their own messaging strategies in online spaces, and the perceived success and failure of these strategies. We discuss the limitations of social media as a space in which to achieve movement aims, particularly in a class-segregated context. Our work illustrates the tension faced by activists between prioritizing short and long-term movement goals in the digital sphere.

In the aftermath of the COVID-19 crisis, there has been a massive amount of misinformation both related to the condition, and a range of linked social and economic issues. We present a mixed methods study of misinformation debunked by Indian fact checking agencies since January 2020. Alongside this, we present an analysis of what politicians in India have been discussing in the overlapping period. We find that affective issues dominate misinformation, especially in the period following the lockdown in India. Furthermore, we find that communal prejudice emerges as a central part of the misinformation environment, something that is reflected in the political speech around the same period.

Women gig workers face unique challenges in on-demand platforms as gendered aspects of class, caste, and labor participation intersect with moments of control experienced on the job. Through in-depth interviews with 19 beauty workers on on-demand home service platforms, we explore how the platformization of informal beauty work in India has ruptured dominant socio-cultural structures of control that have traditionally shaped women's mobility and access to work. This paper maps the ways in which women beauty gig workers experience and are impacted by algorithmic and bureaucratic management practices prevalent in the gig economy, in the context of home service platforms in Bangalore. We find that platform control impacts lives in myriad ways, beyond the conditions of work. Women workers negotiate their identities and sense of agency through the visibility afforded by platform control mechanisms. Yet, despite these subversions, being on a platform does not fundamentally change the socio-cultural logic that restricts women's lives in India. These mechanisms work to entrench power asymmetries between customers and workers, as well as maintain them between the platform and the worker.

We studied the topical preferences of social media campaigns of India's two main political parties by examining the tweets of 7382 politicians during the key phase of campaigning between Jan - May of 2019 in the run up to the 2019 general election. First, we compare the use of self-promotion and opponent attack, and their respective success online by categorizing 1208 most commonly used hashtags accordingly into the two categories. Second, we classify the tweets applying a qualitative typology to hashtags on the subjects of nationalism, corruption, religion and development. We find that the ruling BJP tended to promote itself over attacking the opposition whereas the main challenger INC was more likely to attack than promote itself. Moreover, while the INC gets more retweets on average, the BJP dominates Twitter's trends by flooding the online space with large numbers of tweets. We consider the implications of our findings hold for political communication strategies in democracies across the world.

The Hindu caste system plays an important role in the socio-political landscape of India. In recent years, Indian politicians have moved a lot of direct communication online. Social media is now an important space for the articulation and performance of their political positions. In this paper, we study ways in which the political performance of caste relations can be captured from the online connections and messaging of parliamentarians in India. We run tests of odds ratios among the members of LokSabha (lower house) of India to find the extent to which their engagement is insular to their own caste group versus other groups. We observe that in the LokSabha network, Members of Parliament (MPs) have higher odds of getting retweeted by others whose caste is the same or closer to their own in the caste hierarchy. The findings of this research shed light on an understudied, yet critical, social relation of caste in the study of political behavior on social media.

Rumors are an enduring form of communication across socio-cultural landscapes globally. Counter to their typical negative association, rumors play a nuanced role, helping people collectively deal with problems through constructing a representation of an uncertain situation. Drawing on unstructured interviews and participant observation from a technology goods marketplace in Bangalore, India, we study the circulation of rumors related to the government's recent policy of demonetization and entry of online marketplaces and digital wallets, all of which disrupted existing market practices. These rumors emerge as attempts at sensemaking when a community is faced with ambiguity. Through highlighting the relationship of institutional trust with rumors, the paper argues that the study of rumors can help us identify the concerns of a community in the face of differential power relations. Further, rumors are a form of social bonding which help communities make sense of their place in society and shape existing practices.

While researchers have studied the benefits and hazards of crowdsourcing for diverse classes of workers, most work has focused on those having high familiarity with both computers and English. We explore whether paid crowdsourcing can be inclusive of individuals in rural India, who are relatively new to digital devices and literate mainly in local languages. We built an Android application to measure the accuracy with which participants can digitize handwritten Marathi/Hindi words. The tasks were based on the real-world need for digitizing handwritten Devanagari script documents. Results from a two-week, mixed-methods study show that participants achieved 96.7% accuracy in digitizing handwritten words on low-end smartphones. A crowdsourcing platform that employs these users performs comparably to a professional transcription firm. Participants showed overwhelming enthusiasm for completing tasks, so much so that we recommend imposing limits to prevent overuse of the application. We discuss the implications of these results for crowdsourcing in low-resource areas.

We present a large-scale study of social media discourse in India focusing on politicians' tweet frequency of topics related to information technology, poverty, and development. Examining the Twitter feed of 477 political elites, we observe that politicians as a whole more frequently discuss development comparing to technology and poverty. In addition, national-party politicians holding higher offices are significantly more likely to discuss all three topics comparing to regional-party officials and non-elected politicians even when accounting for their Twitter account characteristics. Finally, politicians from different states demonstrate different topic priorities, suggesting differences in local political circumstances contribute to political elites' Twitter topic prioritization.

We explore how different segments of the population in India coped, in terms of business transactions, with the sudden decision of the government to stop accepting certain legal tender bills, popularly referred to as demonetization. The decision to demonetize was followed by a large-scale push for adoption of digital payments. Behavioral changes during such shocks do have specific nuances different from those during normal times. Using the concept of resilience, we examine the drivers of behavior change that differentiated those that were able to make the switch compared to those that weren't. Those technologically more adept were more resilient to the shock, in terms of being able to navigate through new means of exchange. Also, rural poor showed greater resilience than urban poor, a function of the level of homogeneity in those societies with respect to technology adoption and the ability to cope without changing cash practices. We also found that those who had bank accounts and relied largely on those accounts for daily transactions, without being aware of alternate modes, were impacted the most. From a policy perspective this research cautions against unintended consequences of purely access-driven incentives to behavior change, advocating instead a holistic approach.

Beauty and Wellness work in India happen largely in the informal sector and are heavily gendered forms of work. The arrival of app-based on-demand platforms that aggregate beauticians and spa therapists to provide at-home services in urban India have aimed to create new efficiencies in this work, providing both the service providers and users of these with new means of transacting. This paper presents findings from an ethnographic study of an app-based platform that provides beauty and wellness services. We interviewed stakeholders including platform company employees, customers, beauty-trainers as well as platform-workers. Our results show the ways in which technology is creating new expectations around professionalism and training, which intersect with the ways workspaces and provider-receiver relationships are articulated around wellness work in urban India. We argue that this case offers an insightful example into the future of work - specifically platform work's attempts to create entrepreneurial subjects, and its tensions with the realities of gender, class and caste as they relate to care labor in India.

In November 2016, the Government of India banned the vast majority of the nation's banknotes in a move referred to as 'demonetization', with the stated goals of fighting corruption, terrorism, and eventually expanding digital transactions. In this study of 200 shop-keepers in Mumbai and Bengaluru, we found that cash shortage increased digital payment adoption but that digital payments fell after new banknotes became available. Digital payment adoption depended on the nature and scope of transactions, type of product sold, as well as personal factors specific to business owners such as comfort and familiarity with other digital technologies and online transactions. Using theoretical work on market and information behavior, we examined environmental pushes for technology adoption against prevalent transactional practices, trust, and control. We propose that the move toward digital payments must be framed within a larger undertaking of technology-driven modernity that drives these initiatives, rather than just the efficiency or productivity gains digital payments present.

Citizens' perception of politicians and political issues is increasingly influenced by social media. However, little is known about the potential of second order effects of social media in parts of the world where the majority of voting citizens are not online. In this paper, we examine whether a politician can move to communicating through social media as their primary means of outreach, and still present their message to the mainstream population through traditional media. By studying of the use of Twitter by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi between 2009 and 2015, the second-most followed elected official in the world, we present evidence of the impact of social media on print news. We use computational text mining techniques to automatically identify print news reports that use Modi's tweets as a source, alongside manual qualitative coding of tweets to analyze the role of tweet themes in print news coverage. We conclude that while Modi's social media messaging does get coverage in the print news, it is his more "newsworthy" tweets, such as references to celebrities, other politicians, or major events such as holidays that have a greater likelihood of coverage.

Entrepreneurship has long been used to create self-employment opportunities to guard against career uncertainty. Yet, little is known about how social technologies impact the day-to-day work of entrepreneurs in resource-constrained contexts. We performed a qualitative study involving interviews with 26 micro-entrepreneurs in Detroit and observations of entrepreneurship events. We found that micro-entrepreneurs in Detroit are often pushed into entrepreneurship in response to unexpected life disruptions, barriers to employment, and desire to benefit the community. Their resource-constrained contexts shape how they use social technologies, such as sharing economy tools and social media groups, particularly with respect to privacy, safety, and professional agency. We expand the discussion in CSCW around what it means to be an entrepreneur and provide implications for how social technologies can be designed to better meet the employment needs of people in resource-constrained communities.

Ride-hailing services have received attention as part of the growing work around the sharing economy, but the focus of these studies has largely been on drivers. In this paper, we examine how ride-hailing is transforming the transportation practices of one group of passengers - people with visual impairments in metropolitan India. Through a qualitative study consisting of interviews and observations, we examined the use and impact of these services on our target population, who otherwise contend with chaotic, unreliable, and largely inaccessible modes of transportation. We found that ride-hailing services positively affects participants' notions of independence, and we tease out how independence for our participants is not just about 'doing things alone, without help' but is also situated, social and relative. Furthermore, we show how accessibility, in the case of ride-hailing in India, is a socio-technical and collaborative achievement, involving interactions between the passenger, the driver, and the technology.

Local informal markets or bazaars play a central role in embedding the adoption, consumption, and reproduction of digital technologies within the economic and cultural fabric of the Global South. This paper presents ethnographic accounts of informal ICT markets in two sites, one in India and the other in Bangladesh, and assesses how technology consumption unfolds within local practices. Building on social practice theory, this paper depicts the role of materiality, relationships, and situated knowledge in the functioning of a bazaar. We discuss how this knowledge expands our understanding of the evaluation of technology and technical expertise, and the persistence of these informal spaces despite the uptake of corporatized technology marketplaces. We argue that the bazaar represents a special kind of local voice that enriches the HCI scholarship in postcolonial computing.

Studies on technology adoption typically assume that a user's perception of usability and usefulness of technology are central to its adoption. Specifically, in the case of accessibility and assistive technology, research has traditionally focused on the artifact rather than the individual, arguing that individual technologies fail or succeed based on their usability and fit for their users. Using a mixed-methods field study of smartphone adoption by 81 people with visual impairments in Bangalore, India, we argue that these positions are dated in the case of accessibility where a non-homogeneous population must adapt to technologies built for sighted people. We found that many users switch to smartphones despite their awareness of significant usability challenges with smartphones. We propose a nuanced understanding of perceived usefulness and actual usage based on need-related social and economic functions, which is an important step toward rethinking technology adoption for people with disabilities.

In this paper, I propose that ICTD in India has been defined and promoted by an aspirational discourse of modernity that is not necessarily tied to the outcomes of actual projects in this space, but rather exists independently and has wide-ranging implications, including in mainstream politics. I highlight cases from specific ICTD projects, or the way they have been portrayed in the public sphere, to establish ways in which the symbolic value of technology has been an important driver of their purchase in public consciousness. Using these to foreground the discourse of technology in India, I examine the brand imaging of Narendra Modi, the current prime minister of India, and propose that he both understood and ably used the aspirational sentiment toward technology to craft an image of technocrat modernizer, obscuring a longer-standing image as a sectarian politician. I propose that Modi's is a beneficiary of an ICTD wave of thinking in India, and at the same time, his own careful curation of an online persona brings finesse to the notion of a technological self in politics. In this, the citizen-state relationship is mediated by the imagination of an enlightened, tech-savvy politician leading people who are themselves legitimated as citizens by their relationship to the technologies they use.

In this paper, we present our findings on the experiences of West Bengal Community Health Workers (CHWs) in transitioning from paper to tablet- and mobile-based data collection. Through qualitative interviews, usability testing and timed observations, we found that efficiency and quality of data collected were comparable between the use of tablet devices and traditional paper methods, but data collection performed on smaller mobile phone interfaces was less efficient compared to paper. There was no significant difference in the quality of data collected across all three modes. In terms of work practices, we found that while initial interactions with CHWs suggested positive feelings about switching to digital devices, in their actual practices they retained and preferred the use of paper, and had workarounds to circumvent the digital data collection process. While there were foreseeable challenges around individual user experience, such as device familiarity, and application interface flexibility, the more compelling challenge in transitioning CHWs to digital data collection was organizational. The agency of CHWs within organizations, the levels of training with both data practices and devices themselves, and the sense of comfort that the data collectors felt with the overall project emerge as important factors of attention for implementers of new data management practices.

This paper describes two design approaches to health learning -- one a self-paced multimedia portal providing information about a highly specialized injury and the other an instructional aide, assisting educators in delivering content about medical practices. Both systems primarily targeted healthcare staff, namely physicians and nurses and were implemented in the United States and India respectively. Through an analysis of the contextual factors that determined the design of both systems we uncovered common threads concerning 1) social structures within hospitals and their influence on the flow of information within formal institutions 2) the role of institutional culture and its impact on learning. In conclusion we discuss some considerations to inform those intending to successfully deploy healthcare information systems designed for a western audience in a country like India while also discussing takeaways for healthcare systems in both locations.

We propose an "accessibility infrastructure" view to understanding accessibility in real-world settings for people with visual impairments in the Global South. We study six cities --- Blantyre, Freetown, Kigali, Mumbai, San Jose, and Seoul --- all major cities from signatory nations of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). Using mixed methods including a survey of 219 respondents and 59 in-depth interviews, we examine the gap between the policy promise of technological accessibility and existing social and economic infrastructure. We examine the idea of accessibility infrastructure and specifically focus on its social components through two factors --- stigma related to disability, and the community around technology users --- both of which emerge as important factors in enabling or excluding AT use. We propose that efforts around accessibility, particularly in the post-CRPD global awareness need to closely examine the reasons behind the gaps between the technological capabilities, and the real world possibilities for people with visual impairments where a social infrastructure provides a major barrier to meaningful accessibility.

This paper describes key learnings from a project-based class at the University of Michigan in which student teams spent two semesters working on ICTD-related projects with partner organizations in India. These teams spent one semester in India with real users of their work. We highlight common challenges universities outside of ICTD field sites face in offering quality, grounded learning for technology and development students.

We present preliminary research leading to a prototype for Sada Vehra, an online resource for crowdsourcing Punjabi language content. We argue that languages less represented online benefit from crowdsourced volunteer-contributed translation, and present some challenges around effective crowdsourced non-expert translations. These include interface challenges around handoffs and ownership, language-specific challenges such as nuance and standardization, and infrastructure-specific challenges such as bandwidth and media quality.

This paper presents an ethnographically-based account on the impact of technologies appropriated in the livelihood strategies of people with disabilities (PWDs) in Sierra Leone, West Africa. In contrast to other developing countries, Sierra Leone presents a situation where people with disabilities are socially marginalized but not necessarily wholly disadvantaged. Through a lens of technology-amplified capabilities we show how PWDs leverage information and communication technologies (ICTs) to counteract social dampeners they regularly experience that prevent their participation in society. We discuss the role of the war experience and its impact on services and attitudes towards people with disability and how disruptive contexts can open up opportunities to support and amplify existing life skills towards development goals.

We examine the role of mobile devices in access to social, economic, and architectural spaces and resources by people with vision impairments in two urban agglomerations in Rwanda and Malawi using a survey and open-ended interviews. We discuss ways in which the intersection of gender and disability distinguishes the ways men and women experience access in their respective societies.

With a general trend worldwide towards greater life expectancies, interventions and tools that can help caregivers working in elder care are becoming increasingly important. In China, with a greater number and proportion of elders due to the long-term effects of the one-child policy, these interventions and tools are needed even more. Improved communication between care staff of an institutional home can reduce medical errors and improve coordination of care. At the same time, increased conversation with elders with cognitive impairments like dementia or Alzheimer's can help the elder to maintain their cognitive ability, and can reduce negative feelings like loneliness. Our qualitative study with eleven institutional caregivers in Beijing delved into the communication patterns that exist between caregivers and elders with dementia. We found that knowing more about each individual resident's disposition and personal history was helpful in maintaining quality care, that many care staff in China use placating talk as a means to calm or guide elders to a desired action, and that care staff found the topic of past careers or past 'glories ' to be the most efficient in getting elders to chat. In addition, we also found that much of the information that is gleaned through working with an elder long-term is not recorded or shared in any official capacity with other care workers, an area where technology could be particularly helpful.

This paper puts forth a notion of ludic design, drawing from work in HCI by Phoebe Sengers and Bill Gaver, as an avenue through which ICTD can begin to contend with the historical discourse of the developmental enterprise. This discourse, which we term the "developmental optic," is one that envisions the subjects upon which it acts---the primary user audience of ICTD projects and services---as perpetually "backward," perpetually in need of improvements decided upon by a (usually Western) other. Ludic design proposes that "non-productive" activities and desires---the need to have fun, the need for entertainment in one's life---be taken up as central to ICTD projects, as they provide a means by which the developmental optic may be countered. We look at the approaches taken towards "fun" and the desire for entertainment by three ICTD projects---the community radio project Namma Dhwani, the agriculture extension project Digital Green, and the educational project MILLEE. We then discuss how approaches to affect and "fun" in the field of HCI may be of use to ICTD researchers in trying to reimagine the discursive frame in which their projects function.

The quest for the low-cost computer has been among the primal motivations of innovation and practice in the ICTD world from its very beginnings. We discuss continuing developments in case of the low-cost Indian tablet, Aakash, publicized as the world's cheapest computer, and situate these within a history of India's quest for development through technology in the past two decades. We analyze 212 articles on Aakash and find four dominant themes in the way the device has been discussed in the popular media. These include the cult of a technocratic leadership, the discourse of indigenous technology, the recreation of the Silicon Valley dream, and the face of the marginal user. We argue that Aakash has gone beyond being a technology artifact to a device that represents Indian aspirations at several levels -- as a forward thinking state, an ingenious entrepreneurial class, and an energetic population that needs nothing but access to technology to succeed.

We present narratives around the use of Access Technology (AT) by 176 people with vision impairments in Peru, Jordan, and India. Respondents note changes in their economic and social aspirations following access to AT, but experience multiple forms of exclusion from the public sphere due to persistent negative social attitudes disability. We argue that building theoretical frames that examine the nature of marginality is an important direction for ICTD to better understand ways in which individuals appropriate technologies, and use them to change their social environment they exist in.

ICTs are frequently looked to as a missing link between traditional bureaucracy and the modernization of public administration and service delivery. Through the empirical research in the Thai public sector, we find that there is a fundamental gap between the design and normative goal of ICTs and their real world implementation. The structures of power are frequently retained or even reinforced by those who hold budgetary administrative, and authoritative roles and consequently get to make decisions about the development and use of ICTs to facilitate their administrative and managerial goals. While on a discursive level ICTs in Thailand have been projected to counter traditional practices and streamline governance as part of a broader administrative reform since the 2000s, we find that the practice is far different. Situating our work in the theoretical traditions of organization studies and computer supported collaborative work, we discuss how the Thai computerization projects add a valuable case to the vast literature on technology adoption. We also use the case to illustrate the value of this literature in growing work on governance and technology adoption within ICTD circles.

We present the results of two surveys and a qualitative interview-based study with users of screen readers in India. Our early interviews moved us in the direction of examining patterns that differentiate users of two particular software applications -- the dominant market standard JAWS and the free, open source challenger NVDA. A comparison between the two is timely and particularly relevant to issues elsewhere in the developing world. In the short term, the question of choosing one application over another could be based on price and support for custom-made applications, but in the long term, issues of language support are likely to be of concern as well. We explore software adoption behavior and present results that show the relationship between the quality of audio and peoples' willingness to use one software over another. We also compare the switch from JAWS to NVDA to other kinds of switches from dominant software to open source options. In conclusion, we discuss the business aspects of screen readers and examine why the comparison between these two applications is particularly important in the discussion on accessible personal computing for people with vision impairments in the developing world.

In this paper, we extend work examining the issues in language support for screen readers for vision-impaired computer users by building and testing a Hindi-language text-to-speech interface for screen reading. The paper first discusses the importance of 'mechanical voice' screen reading for the ICTD community in an environment where many 'natural voice' options are proprietary and expensive. We find that the main criticism against mechanical voice -- the issue of comprehension -- can be overcome by training using familiar metaphors, and that the most persistent problems in audio comprehension are ones that are solvable through technical means. Given the structure of vowel-consonant structure of most Indo-Aryan languages, we argue that mechanical voice audio output holds very significant scope for screen reading for vision impaired populations in India.

This is a qualitative study into the workforce participation of computer-based assistive technology users in Bangalore, India. We conduct a systematic examination of respondents' discussions on their workplace experiences, aspirations, social inclusion, future concerns, institutional perceptions, and technology use. We present results on six resulting themes: The evolution of aspiration post AT access, the economic engineering of AT users, Underemployment, Peer effects in employment choice, Perceptions of the state, and finally telecommuting and social inclusion. The participants' responses highlighted here present a rich narrative of the transition from training to the desk, given that many here are the first or only employees who are visually-impaired in their workplaces. These voices of the first generation of assistive technology users in India offer useful insights into the design of policies and services for visually-impaired populations, and a more accessible public sphere in the future.

In this paper, we examine the deployment of a group of technology centers serving people with disabilities in five Latin American countries: Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, and Venezuela. We explore the impacts of such training courses on the employability, socio-economic inclusion, and visibility of persons with disabilities in civil society. We find an important tension between the short-term objective of job creation for centers focused on individual capacity building, and the long-term goals of rights-based organizations to affect the visibility of people with disabilities in the public sphere. In particular, we examine the public library as a neutral, safe space in our comparison between programs in various countries. We come to the preliminary conclusion that a rights-based organization focused on community building, rather than individual capacity building, has the potential to be more effective in increasing the visibility of people with disability in the public sphere. We argue that the public image of disability and stigma associated with it cannot be extracted from technology training or individual capacity building. Therefore, centers serving people with disabilities must take into account the complex reality of employability for people with disabilities, particularly in the developing world.

Several nations around the world have ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) since 2008. Ratifying states commit that national law will guarantee rights enumerated in the CRPD. The use of Assistive Technology (AT) in ensuring the social inclusion of people with disabilities is specifically mentioned in the convention. Although AT is increasingly seen as necessary in facilitating functional equity in social and economic participation, most AT and accessibility tools are not just expensive but are also and typically designed for use by people in industrialized nations. The practical implication of the CRPD's impact on AT for the developing world is a vast subject, in this paper we examine the cost of AT for people with vision impairments at current day costs, and find that the functional fulfillment of the CRPD for a lot of the signatory countries would be extremely difficult without significant technological innovation and market expansion in this space.

Applying information and communication technologies to development (ICTD) is emerging as an interesting and motivating research area in computer science and engineering. It spans application areas from healthcare to transportation, and requires the use of computing skills from networking to user interface design. Addressing problems of developing regions and under-served communities lets students explore a different part of the ICT design space, leading to new implementation and research questions. ICTD is also an area that has the potential to excite students about the CSE field more generally, with its emphasis on enabling social benefits with technology, and is rich in possibilities for interesting student projects. In this paper we report on two offerings of a course at the University of Washington that introduce students to the field by way of 1) reading papers from literature in the area to gain exposure to this very different design mindset and 2) doing practical projects that engage students in engineering problems under unique design constraints. Our hope is that CSE educators may find our experiences useful in identifying an approach to integrating the field of ICTD into their curricula.

Past research has shown the benefits of increased engagement and collaboration for learning using multiple inputs for children sharing computers. Taking the work forth beyond clicks, we demonstrate the use of inexpensive numeric keypads as multiple input devices in shared computing scenarios, as many have argued are well-suited to the developing world, and show its utility in mathematical learning for young children.

Traditional Single Display Groupware (SDG) solutions have been used to create software for developing regions. SDG allows for greater utilization of the limited infrastructure available in such areas. This technology is particularly appropriate in classrooms where groups of children often use educational software on a single computer. However, SDG has faced several challenges working with legacy applications. Our technology, called metamouse, takes a step toward an integrated multi-user application by allowing users to collaborate within unmodified legacy educational software.

Much recent work in multiple input use scenarios for childrens learning software has focused either on math or on English language learning. The persistence of under-information among children in the developing world on issues of hygiene and disease prevention remains a massive challenge within the scholarly community in public health, especially in the developing regions that multiple input learning technologies are designed for. DISHA is a collaborative platform for public health information for children in low-income regions using multiple mice. The system is designed towards collaborative use of screen resources.

The role of technology in development has seen an exceptional spike in interest in the past decade in academia and industry. India has been a key location in the study and practice of technology and development because of the centrality of the technology industry in its growth over the recent two decades. Examining the public discourse on technology in areas where computers are not ubiquitously used or available, we find that cinema is important in constructing how people in Indian villages and even cities perceive computers. Turning back to the films themselves, we find a strong aspirational discourse in the ways in which computers and technology-users are portrayed on Indian popular cinema. These in turn relate to how technology and development have been portrayed in cinematic discourse over generations, in cinema from around the world, from the earliest days of silent film. We find from interviews with users of technology in rural India that these images create strong ideas of value and legitimacy derived from using technology. Reflecting on this, we find that study of public discourse has been a critical missing piece of ICTD studies. A study of media imagery such as the one presented here is a small step in that discussion.

In this study we examine the history and growth of ICTD since the 1990s. We underline the trends defining this research field and examine the progress in research areas that have come to dominate discussion in ICTD through a thorough literature review of the last decade of ICTD work. In order to answer questions pertaining to the rigor, impact and significance of ICTD, and to compare the expectations and perceived achievements with respect to different development goals, we interview 50 expert ICTD researchers and practitioners. We analyze these results to understand stakeholders' opinions on the past performance of ICTD, both as an academic field and as an area of development practice, and identify defining ideas on the potential directions for the future of ICTD. This study is work in progress and we have continuing research in this area, the subset presented here is rigorous and ready for wider discussion.

Tracking and ensuring disbursements make it to their intended recipients is among the problems development professionals are most concerned about. To examine the potential monitoring role playable by technology, we present RuralScope, an information repository designed to handle the information needs of a newly started welfare scheme offering daily wage payments to over 31 million families in rural India. Since the problem of monitoring development extends beyond project specific needs to a general sense of awareness, RuralScope works on two levels. First, for project auditors, RuralScope acts as an easily searchable, disconnected database of disbursements that helps speed up the audit process. Second, for a more general audience, an organized and annotatable front end for casual viewers, policy-makers, and researchers alike to keep track of documents and data related to the project RuralScope.

This study evaluates single-mouse and multiple-mice configurations for computer-aided learning in schools where access to computers is limited due to resource constraints. Multimouse, a single display groupware solution, developed to allow multiple mice to be used simultaneously on a single PC, is compared with single-user-single-mouse and multiple-user-single-mouse scenarios. Multimouse itself is trialed with two unique interaction designs -- one where competitive interaction among students is encouraged, and another where more collaborative interaction is expected. Experiments were conducted with 238 schoolchildren from underprivileged households in rural India on an English vocabulary retention task. On the whole, Multimouse configurations (five users each) were found to be at par with single-user scenarios in terms of actual words learned by students. This suggests that the value of a PC can be inexpensively multiplied by employing a multi-input shared-use design. Gender effects were found, where boys show significant differences in learning depending on interaction modality, whereas girls learned at similar rates across configurations. In addition, a comparison of the two Multimouse modes -- collaborative and competitive -- showed the striking difference in learning outcomes and user behavior that is possible due to even slight variations in interaction designs for multiple-mice.

The Akshaya project from Kerala has been a much discussed case for the community of practitioners and scholars working on technology and development. A unique feature of the project is its state-wide e-literacy goal in which one member of every household was trained in the telecenters set up under Akshaya. Using a survey of 1750 households in the experimental area of Malappuram and a comparison group of neighbouring Kozhikode, this work investigates the extent of e-literacy and discusses the performance of service delivery using telecenters.

Computer centers in rural Indian public schools raise questions about the value of expensive modern technology in starkly poor environments. Arguments for or against spending on computers in low-income schools have appeared in policy circles, academia, teacher conferences, and philanthropic discussions, with passionate rhetoric from all sides. One shortcoming of the debate has been the absent voice of parents and children themselves. We present the results of a qualitative study of computer-aided learning centers in four districts of rural Karnataka, South India, where we discussed with parents issues such as aspirations, quality of schooling, and the perception of computers more generally. The research reveals a range of voices on hopes for the next generation, perceived value of computer courses and higher education, and views on the arrival of computers into their village schools. It emerges that in the minds of many parents, the computer has an immense symbolic value - separate from its functional value - that is tied to social and economic ascendancy. We find that this symbolic value derives from associations that parents imbibe from their various interactions with people using computers in a range of situations. Despite a large number of parents not entirely clear on what a computer does, the sense of mystical quality about technology is a feature we find across the board. In discussions with rural parents, we find an environment of great fear about the future of agriculture, because of which computer-aided learning centers have become a symbol of future aspirations of jobs for their children. The research also reveals varied related concerns of parents from the dowry implications of having computer-trained daughters to the relative value of English versus computer literacy as the key to social mobility.

This paper examines low-cost computing projects for education in developing regions, and presents some of the common entrepreneurial and technical problems faced by past and current initiatives. In particular, we look at various models of computer usage, and evaluate their appropriateness according to their effectiveness in education, their socio-cultural suitability, and economic feasibility. Based on detailed field studies and interviews conducted in rural Indian classrooms and economic analysis, we show that shared rather than single-user devices constitute a more realistic and sustainable approach for low-cost computing projects targeting children's education.

In the past decade, several projects have explored the possibility of enabling human development for economically underserved populations by giving people direct access to modern computing technology. The main economic and distributional hurdle in the access of such provision has been the prohibitive cost of computing devices. The quest for lowering this bar has resulted in research into solutions aimed at modifying existing technology to reduce the cost through innovation with the software, hardware, and distribution processes. Some common threads are manifested across such projects, both in terms of the approaches to building new technologies, and the subsequent outcomes. Using two important case studies we generate some hypotheses about the possibilities and barriers to new technology development for poor populations

Understanding technology adoption in emerging regions is challenging given the complex interrelations among socioeconomic factors that affect it directly and indirectly. The issue of impact assessment of technology adoption projects, especially the kind implemented in areas where prior technology has been very limited, is highly problematic and open to many methodological difficulties. Ethnographic evaluations have provided insight into the quality of interactions and into conceptions of technology and its adoption, whereas some quantitative analysis has been useful for high-level abstraction. In this paper, we examine the use of Bayesian networks as tools that can be used in revealing the structure of the relationships between demographic, social, and economic factors, and penetration for various technologies. Our hypothesis is that technology adoption cases in emerging regions display unique aggregated characteristics that make Bayesian network-based analysis a useful starting point in defining relationships between variables in project analysis. We compare the usability of Bayesian networks in analyzing two data sets: (1) a detailed survey focusing on 500 respondents across 14 favelas in Rio de Janeiro; and (2) a comprehensive survey of 998 users of the Akshaya tele-kiosk initiative in Kerala, India. Our illustrations show how Bayesian networks can be useful as statistical analysis tools that reveal new hypotheses, suggest unintended correlations in data, and confirm standing hypotheses

A distinct feature observed in computer use in schools or rural kiosks in developing countries is the high student-to-computer ratio. It is not unusual to see more than five children crowding around a single display, as schools are rarely funded to afford one PC per child in a classroom. One child controls the mouse, while others are passive onlookers, without operational control of the computer. Learning benefits appear to accrue primarily to the child with the mouse, with the other children missing out. The obvious technical solution is to provide each child with a mouse and cursor on screen, thus effectively multiplying the amount of interaction per student per PC for the cost of a few extra mice. To our surprise, both the concept and the implementation appear to be unique to date, for the specific application to computers in education in resource-strapped communities, with previous work restricting studies to two mice, or for largely non-educational applications. We have developed software that allows multiple coloured cursors to co-exist on the monitor, along with two sample games with some educational content. Initial trials with both single-mouse and multiple-mice scenarios suggest that children are more engaged when in control of a mouse, and that more mice increases overall engagement. Our results suggest new areas of research in pedagogy for computers in education

In rural Tamil Nadu and other predominantly illiterate communities throughout the world, computers and technology are currently inaccessible without the help of a literate mediator. Speech recognition has often been suggested as a key to universal access, but success stories of speech-driven interfaces for illiterate end users are few and far between. The challenges of dialectal variation, multilingualism, cultural barriers, choice of appropriate content, and, most importantly, the prohibitive expense of creating the necessary linguistic resources for effective speech recognition are intractable using traditional techniques. This paper presents an inexpensive approach for gathering the linguistic resources needed to power a simple spoken dialog system. In our approach, data collection is integrated into dialog design: Users of a given village are recorded during interactions, and their speech semi-automatically integrated into the acoustic models for that village, thus generating the linguistic resources needed for automatic recognition of their speech. Our design is multi-modal, scalable, and modifiable. It is the result of an international, cross-disciplinary collaboration between researchers and NGO workers who serve the rural poor in Tamil Nadu. Our groundwork includes user studies, stakeholder interviews and field recordings of literate and illiterate agricultural workers in three districts of Tamil Nadu over the summer and fall of 2005. Automatic speech recognition experiments simulating the spoken dialog systems' performance during initialization and gradual integration of acoustic data informed the holistic structure of the design. Our research addresses the unique social and economic challenges of the developing world by relying on modifiable and highly transparent software and hardware, by building on locally available resources, and by emphasizing community operation and ownership through training and education

Computer-aided learning is fast gaining traction in developing regions as a means to augment classroom instruction. Reasons for using computer-aided learning range from supplementing teacher shortages to starting underprivileged children off in technology, and funding for such initiatives range from state education funds to international agencies and private groups interested in child development. The interaction of children with computers is seen at various levels, from unsupervised self-guided learning at public booths without specific curriculum to highly regulated in-class computer applications with modules designed to go with school curriculum. Such learning is used at various levels from children as young as 5 year-old to high-schoolers. This paper uses field observations of primary school children in India using computer-aided learning modules, and finds patterns by which children who perform better in classroom activities seat themselves in front of computer monitors, and control the mouse, in cases where children are required to share computer resources. We find that in such circumstances, there emerges a pattern of learning, unique to multi-user environments - wherein certain children tend to learn better because of their control of the mouse. This research also shows that while computer aided learning software for children is primarily designed for single-users, the implementation realities of resource-strapped learning environments in developing regions presents a strong case for multi-user design.