We articulate a vision for computer programming that includes pen-based computing, a paradigm we term notational programming. Notational programming blurs contexts: certain typewritten variables can be referenced in handwritten notation and vice-versa. To illustrate this paradigm, we developed an extension, Notate, to computational notebooks which allows users to open drawing canvases within lines of code. As a case study, we explore quantum programming and designed a notation, Qaw, that extends quantum circuit notation with abstraction features, such as variable-sized wire bundles and recursion. Results from a usability study with novices suggest that users find our core interaction of implicit cross-context references intuitive, but suggests further improvements to debugging infrastructure, interface design, and recognition rates. Throughout, we discuss questions raised by the notational paradigm, including a shift from ‘recognition’ of notations to ‘reconfiguration’ of practices and values around programming, and from ‘sketching’ to writing and drawing, or what we call ‘notating.’

This paper explores computing education as a potential site for intercultural learning and encounter in post-conflict environments. It reports on ethnographic fieldwork from the Nairobi Play Project, a constructionist educational program serving adolescents aged 14-18 in urban and rural multi-ethnic refugee communities in Kenya. While the program offers programming and game design instruction, an equal goal is to foster interaction, collaboration, dialogue and understanding across cultural backgrounds. Based on fieldwork from two project cycles involving 5 after-school classes of 12-24 students each, we describe key affordances for encounter, important resistances to be managed or overcome, and emergent complications in the execution of such programs. We argue that many important accomplishments of intercultural learning occur through moments of friction, breakdowns, and gaps -- for example, technical challenges that produce sites of shared humour; frictions between intercultural activities and computing activities; acts of disrupting order; and unstructured time that students collaboratively fill in. We also describe significant complications in such programs, including pressures to adopt norms and practices consistent with dominant or majority cultures, and instances of intercultural bonding over artefacts with xenophobic themes. We reflect on the implications of these phenomena for the design of future programs that use computing as a backbone for intercultural learning or diversity and inclusion efforts in CSCW, ICTD, and allied fields of work.

Researchers and agricultural advisory services often use data-driven approaches to target content to farmers. We demonstrate that allowing farmers to direct targeting procedures on their own is a more efficient way of scaling educational content than targeting based on demographic and agronomic indicators. Within the Khedut Saathi mobile message forwarding system, farmers received audio content on their phones, and could anonymously forward messages to up to five other phone numbers. Using Ordinary Least Squares regressions, we find that relative to targeting based on simple demographic and agronomic indicators, farmers are significantly more effective in identifying and targeting farmers most likely to be interested in messages -- based on how long farmers listen, and how likely they are to listen to complete messages before hanging up. Significant volumes of incoming calls were also made to our service from unrecognized phone numbers, implying a diffusion of the service offline by farmers. These results demonstrate the importance of farmers' own social connections for targeting and scaling educational content.

Illiteracy is one of the biggest development challenges, especially in the developing regions. There are 785M adult illiterates in the world; one in every five people has little or no basic reading skills. Illiteracy poses the following challenges: It limits the ability to understand essential information, it increases unemployment, poverty and it has a negative impact on health.

The smartphone has been touted as the technology of the 21st century. Global smartphone adoption rates are growing rapidly, up to over 24% in 2014, with usage increasing 25% in the last year. However, rural areas are often the last places to benefit from these technological trends. Utilizing cellular network registration logs, we explore the adoption and usage of smartphones in an extremely remote community in Indonesia. We found that 16% of the phones in the area were smartphones (compared to between 14--24% in Indonesia). This shows that smartphone adoption in rural Indonesia is similar to the rest of the country. We also explored usage in the network, and found that smartphone users were more likely to text, especially to other smartphone users.

In this paper, we describe a twelve-week Apps for Social Justice course that we taught at an after-school program. Students read social justice literature, identified local community needs, and went through a design process to create fully functional mobile applications to address these needs. Using Nasir and Hand's concept of practice-linked identities, we argue that an integrative approach to introducing computer science -- where CS principles are used in pursuit of meaningful community goals -- provides multiple opportunities for students to participate in software development while connecting these skills and dispositions to their own experiences and to larger social issues. Unlike a concepts-first approach, which introduces computer science ideas using small, often decontextualized examples, a practiced-based approach that builds on student experiences may foster a more motivating and meaningful learning environment.

Building on recent HCI contributions that assert the materiality of digital information, we examine the material nature of digital media and information technology in the context of mobile music production, reproduction, and reception in rural and semi-urban India. We use ethnographic methods to study the recent adoption and use of mobile technology and discuss our findings in relation to the evolving materiality of music. We also investigate the sociotechnical configurations that emerge as a consequence of this materiality. Thus we contribute to HCI research by showing how the material representations of digital media affect the interactions of humans with technology.

Over five billion people are active cellular subscribers, spending over a trillion dollars a year on communications. Despite this, hundreds of millions of people are still not connected.

ICTD researchers have employed several technology interventions to help combat the HIV/AIDS epidemic in developing regions. These interventions address medication compliance, decision-making support for health care workers, and awareness campaigns. A majority of these interventions focus on dissemination of information on HIV prevention, testing and treatment. Our research surfaces the situated knowledge of HIV positive women to examine how heterosexual married couples in Chennai (India) manage knowledge of an HIV-positive status, illustrating why dissemination models often fail to lead to safer health practices. Timely disclosure to sexual partners is critical for preventing transmission and ensuring effective treatment. However, voluntary disclosure between married couples can take up to eight years. Patients often valued maintenance of social connections over longer life spans and health. We describe these sites of dissonance and articulate the conflicting needs and conditions that determine concealment of HIV status. We discuss how socio-cultural factors such as gender structures in intimate relationships determine access, understanding and use of information critical to prevention of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. We ask how the ICTD prioritization of efficiency, standardization and measurement neglect the affective and relational experiences that determine the spread of the largest global health crisis. Finally, we provide a set of design considerations and provocations for ICTD researchers to begin addressing the underlying socio-cultural factors that could ensure greater use of beneficial health information by individuals at risk.

Online labor markets, such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk, have been used to crowdsource simple, short tasks like image labeling and transcription. However, expert knowledge is often lacking in such markets, making it impossible to complete certain classes of tasks. In this work we introduce an alternative mechanism for crowdsourcing tasks that require specialized knowledge or skill: communitysourcing --- the use of physical kiosks to elicit work from specific populations. We investigate the potential of communitysourcing by designing, implementing and evaluating Umati: the communitysourcing vending machine. Umati allows users to earn credits by performing tasks using a touchscreen attached to the machine. Physical rewards (in this case, snacks) are dispensed through traditional vending mechanics. We evaluated whether communitysourcing can accomplish expert work by using Umati to grade Computer Science exams. We placed Umati in a university Computer Science building, targeting students with grading tasks for snacks. Over one week, 328 unique users (302 of whom were students) completed 7771 tasks (7240 by students). 80% of users had never participated in a crowdsourcing market before. We found that Umati was able to grade exams with 2% higher accuracy (at the same price) or at 33% lower cost (at equivalent accuracy) than traditional single-expert grading. Mechanical Turk workers had no success grading the same exams. These results indicate that communitysourcing can successfully elicit high-quality expert work from specific communities.

While previous work has shown that clinical decision support systems (CDSS) improve patient care in resource-limited settings, there is little access to such systems at the point of care. Moreover, even when CDSS are available, compliance with care suggestions remain low. In this paper, we use a multi-method approach to document four failure modes that can affect CDSS implementations. Building from six iteratively derived design principles, we describe a phone-based system designed to address these failure modes. Through a formal usability evaluation, we discover six core findings that are important for implementers of mobile systems for health care providers in resource-limited settings.

Community health workers (CHWs) have been shown to be an effective and powerful intervention for improving community health. Routine visits, for example, can lower maternal and neonatal mortality rates. Despite these benefits, many challenges, including supervision and support, make CHW programs difficult to maintain. An increasing number of mHealth projects are providing CHWs with mobile phones to support their work, which opens up opportunities for real-time supervision of the program. Taking advantage of this potential, we evaluated the impact of SMS reminders to improve the promptness of routine CHW visits, first in a pilot study in Dodoma, Tanzania, followed by two larger studies with 87 CHWs in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The first Dar es Salaam study evaluated an escalating reminder system that sent SMS reminders directly to the CHW before notifying the CHW's supervisor after several overdue days. The reminders resulted in an 86% reduction in the average number of days a CHW's clients were overdue (9.7 to 1.4 days), with only a small number of cases ever escalating to the supervisor. However, when the step of escalating to the supervisor was removed in the second study, CHW performance significantly decreased.

Online communities enable people to easily connect and share knowledge across geographies. Mobile phones can enable billions of new users in emerging countries to participate in these online communities. In India, where social hierarchy is important, users may over-value institutionally-recognized authorities relative to peer-sourced content. We tested this hypothesis through a controlled experiment of source authority effects on a voice-based agricultural information service for farmers in Gujarat, India. 305 farmers were sent seven agricultural tips via automated phone calls over a two-week period. The same seven tips were each voice-recorded by two university scientists and two peer farmers. Participants received a preview of the tip from a randomly assigned source via the automated call, and played the remainder of the tip by calling a dedicated phone number. Participants called the follow-up number significantly more often when the tip preview was recorded by a peer than a scientist. On the other hand, in interviews conducted both before and after the experiment, a majority of farmers maintained that they preferred receiving information from scientists. This stated preference may have been expressing the more socially acceptable response. We interpret our experimental results as a demonstration of the demand for peer-based agricultural information dissemination. We conclude with design implications for peer-to-peer information services for rural communities in India.

Folk music forms in India are rich and diverse, varying from region to region across the Indian landscape. The recent explosion of new media technologies (e.g. DVDs, CDs, mobile phones) in both rural and urban India is changing how oral folk music is being performed, produced, distributed, and shared. To further understand this impact, we conducted an extended field study across four field sites in India that are rich in folk music tradition and activity. Through a process of interviews, participant observation, focus group discussion, and content analysis with a varied group of stakeholders - including folk musicians, listeners, retailers, and radio show producers - we found that 1) there are a diverse set of motivations for performing and listening to folk music, 2) new media technologies are helping folk musicians become more popular, while reducing some streams of revenue, particularly for businesses engaged only in music production and distribution, and 3) as expected, piracy is widely tolerated by musicians, both out of apathy, and an interest in reaching new audiences with their message, while increasing their own fame and associated patronage. Based on these findings, we propose some implications for the design of an appropriate folk music sharing and distribution service that addresses these various motivations of the musicians and listeners.

Data quality is a critical problem in modern databases. data-entry forms present the first and arguably best opportunity for detecting and mitigating errors, but there has been little research into automatic methods for improving data quality at entry time. In this paper, we propose Usher, an end-to-end system for form design, entry, and data quality assurance. Using previous form submissions, Usher learns a probabilistic model over the questions of the form. Usher then applies this model at every step of the data-entry process to improve data quality. Before entry, it induces a form layout that captures the most important data values of a form instance as quickly as possible and reduces the complexity of error-prone questions. During entry, it dynamically adapts the form to the values being entered by providing real-time interface feedback, reasking questions with dubious responses, and simplifying questions by reformulating them. After entry, it revisits question responses that it deems likely to have been entered incorrectly by reasking the question or a reformulation thereof. We evaluate these components of Usher using two real-world data sets. Our results demonstrate that Usher can improve data quality considerably at a reduced cost when compared to current practice.

In this paper we present the results of a field study of Avaaj Otalo (literally, "voice stoop"), an interactive voice application for small-scale farmers in Gujarat, India. Through usage data and interviews, we describe how 51 farmers used the system over a seven month pilot deployment. The most popular feature of Avaaj Otalo was a forum for asking questions and browsing others' questions and responses on a range of agricultural topics. The forum developed into a lively social space with the emergence of norms, persistent moderation, and a desire for both structured interaction with institutionally sanctioned authorities and open discussion with peers. For all 51 users this was the first experience participating in an online community of any sort. In terms of usability, simple menu-based navigation was readily learned, with users preferring numeric input over speech. We conclude by discussing implications of our findings for designing voice-based social media serving rural communities in India and elsewhere.

Data quality is a critical problem in modern databases. Data entry forms present the first and arguably best opportunity for detecting and mitigating errors, but there has been little research into automatic methods for improving data quality at entry time. In this paper, we propose USHER, an end-to-end system for form design, entry, and data quality assurance. Using previous form submissions, USHER learns a probabilistic model over the questions of the form. USHER then applies this model at every step of the data entry process to improve data quality. Before entry, it induces a form layout that captures the most important data values of a form instance as quickly as possible. During entry, it dynamically adapts the form to the values being entered, and enables real-time feedback to guide the data enterer toward their intended values. After entry, it re-asks questions that it deems likely to have been entered incorrectly. We evaluate all three components of USHER using two real-world data sets. Our results demonstrate that each component has the potential to improve data quality considerably, at a reduced cost when compared to current practice.

Many children, especially in the developing world, must share a computer at school. Often, more advanced or aggressive students dominate, leaving others frustrated and disengaged. One promising approach is to provide each student with their own input device, usually a mouse, while sharing a common computer and display. Previous multiple mouse sharing efforts for education have relied on developing custom applications that encourage collaboration --- for example, by requiring that all users click on an icon or option to proceed. Implementing this requires access to application source code, which is unlikely to be available, and would require significant engineering effort to adapt even if it was. To address these limitations, we developed Metamouse. Metamouse only conveys clicks to the application when users have already agreed on a screen location, within a pre-defined tolerance (a novel sharing technique that we call "location-voting") and requires no access to the application source code. We have implemented two versions of location-voting --- one that requires all users to agree ("Consensus"), and another where only a majority is required ("Majority"). To evaluate Metamouse, we conducted a user study with 24 fifth-grade students in a low-income school in Bangalore, India. Our results demonstrate that Metamouse is intuitive, usable and has the potential to outperform other sharing strategies in terms of user engagement, generating discussion, and overall satisfaction. We also show that the Majority approach provides all of these benefits as effectively as Consensus with less frustration for faster users and less embarrassment for slower ones.

Data quality is critical for many information-intensive applications. One of the best opportunities to improve data quality is during entry. Usher provides a theoretical, data-driven foundation for improving data quality during entry. Based on prior data, Usher learns a probabilistic model of the dependencies between form questions and values. Using this information, Usher maximizes information gain. By asking the most unpredictable questions first, Usher is better able to predict answers for the remaining questions. In this paper, we use Usher's predictive ability to design a number of intelligent user interface adaptations that improve data entry accuracy and efficiency. Based on an underlying cognitive model of data entry, we apply these modifications before, during and after committing an answer. We evaluated these mechanisms with professional data entry clerks working with real patient data from six clinics in rural Uganda. The results show that our adaptations have the potential to reduce error (by up to 78%), with limited effect on entry time (varying between -14% and +6%). We believe this approach has wide applicability for improving the quality and availability of data, which is increasingly important for decision-making and resource allocation.

In this paper we present a study comparing speech and dialed input voice user interfaces for farmers in Gujarat, India. We ran a controlled, between-subjects experiment with 45 participants. We found that the task completion rates were significantly higher with dialed input, particularly for subjects under age 30 and those with less than an eighth grade education. Additionally, participants using dialed input demonstrated a significantly greater performance improvement from the first to final task, and reported less difficulty providing input to the system.

Organizations in developing regions want to efficiently collect digital data, but standard data gathering practices from the developed world are often inappropriate. Traditional techniques for form design and data quality are expensive and labour-intensive. We propose a new data-driven approach to form design, execution (filling) and quality assurance. We demonstrate USHER, an end-to-end system that automatically generates data entry forms that enforce and maintain data quality constraints during execution. The system features a probabilistic engine that drives form-user interactions to encourage correct answers.

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.

Every year almost 10 million children die before reaching the age of five despite the fact that two-thirds of these deaths could be prevented by effective low-cost interventions. To combat this, the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF developed the Integrated Management of Childhood Illness (IMCI) treatment algorithms.

In this paper we describe our experiences designing a voice interface in rural India. We outline our design process from initial contextual inquiry to a formal user evaluation, and use this discussion to motivate research guidelines for others designing voice interfaces in developing regions. Our three guidelines are to build around existing information systems, to iterate on the design through user testing, and to explore design alternatives through empirical analysis. We also share some practical lessons learned in designing, implementing, and evaluating information systems for developing regions in general.

Smallholder farmers face many challenges competing in the global marketplace. One major constraint is the lack of access to information and communications, which could be used to make decisions and reach new markets. In this paper, drawing from our experiences designing agricultural information systems in India and Central America, we provide a framework for understanding inter-stakeholder communications within agricultural value chains, focusing on the needs of small producers. First, we outline the major types of stakeholders - including farmers, consumers, intermediaries and various supporting organizations. Then, we survey the major categories of information systems supporting communication between stakeholders, focusing on those reaching small farmers. Based on this survey, we provide the following categorization of information flows within agricultural value chains: 1) link-to-link (L2L): those information flows required to coordinate the sale, movement, and distribution of produce along the value chain, 2) peer-to-peer (P2P): communications required to share knowledge and experiences between members of the same stakeholder group, and the expert community serving that stakeholder group and 3) end-to-end (E2E): communications between producers and consumers, for example, to facilitate exchange of non-economic values to be used as external inputs to market pricing (e.g, certification). We outline some reasons why current information systems have had difficulty in reaching small producers, and highlight a few technology trends that could contribute to increasing the fidelity and accessibility of communications, both between producers and consumers, as well as within their respective stakeholder communities.

CAM is a user interface toolkit that allows a camera-equipped mobile phone to interact with paper documents. It is designed to automate inefficient, paper-intensive information processes in the developing world. In this paper we present a usability evaluation of an application built using CAM for collecting data from microfinance groups in rural India. This application serves an important and immediate need in the microfinance industry. Our quantitative results show that the user interface is efficient, accurate and can quickly be learned by rural users. The results were competitive with an equivalent PC-based UI. Qualitatively, the interface was found easy to use by almost all users. This shows that, with a properly designed user interface, mobile phones can be a preferred platform for many rural computing applications. Voice feedback and numeric data entry were particularly well-received by users. We are conducting a pilot of this application with 400 microfinance groups in India.

In recent years, there has been increased interest in the market potential of rural communities in the developing world. In the developing world, the lack of information and communications infrastructure has left companies with manual paper-based information methods as the only means of analyzing and aggregating data. This primitive approach to rural supply chain management creates a barrier to efficiency and a barrier to entry for many companies. In this paper we discuss a field study conducted with a company involved in the marketing, sale, and distribution of products in rural India. We describe the participants in this company's rural supply chain, highlighting inefficiencies in the information and material flow. We show how a technology-based solution could help optimize distribution routes and reduce inefficiency. By knowing the location and details of transactions, the company can better direct rural marketing strategies and manage human and material resources. We present the high-level design of this system and enumerate the possible technologies that can be used to determine a user's location via a mobile device, including GPS, GSM triangulation and Placelab using GSM (LaMarca et al., 1999). To assess the potential of GSM-based methods, we describe the results of an experiment we conducted to determine the extent of GSM coverage along common rural sales routes. Our results indicate that GSM-based methods are sufficient for some purposes, but can not be used to determine the exact position of all rural transactions, especially those that occur in rural villages. We discuss scanning location-specific barcodes as a possible way of localizing transactions to individual villages and customers

Microfinance, the provision of financial services to poor and under-served communities, has emerged as one of the most promising avenues for stimulating rural economic development through local enterprise. In this paper we will discuss some of the major technology gaps faced by rural microfinance institutions, focusing on areas that are most important for the future growth of the industry. This work builds upon six months of field research, including field studies with eight different microfinance organizations located across Latin America and Asia, and discussions with many other organizations worldwide. Historically it has proved difficult to provide sustainable micro-financial services to remote rural clients. As formal financial institutions begin to look seriously at this market, the microfinance industry faces significant challenges in maturing and scaling to sustainability. We will look at three of the major tasks faced by rural microfinance service providers today - 1) the exchange of information with remote clients, 2) management and processing of data at the institutional level and 3) the collection and delivery of money to remote rural areas. Each of these has been a difficult problem to solve for microfinance institutions worldwide, and may offer opportunities for information technology-based solutions. For each of these "gaps" we will look at current best practices, examine the role information technology has (or has not) played in overcoming these obstacles, and discuss promising future directions. In this context, we will discuss the use of handheld technologies for rural data collection, experiences in the implementation of MIS systems at the institutional level and current strategies for introducing electronic banking to remote rural areas. For each of these, we will look at the results obtained thus far and the potential ramifications for the long-term growth and sustainability of the sector

Implementing successful rural computing applications requires addressing a number of significant challenges. Recent advances in mobile phone computing capabilities make this device a likely candidate to address the client hardware constraints. Long battery life, wireless connectivity, solid-state memory, low price and immediate utility all make it better suited to rural conditions than a PC. However, current mobile software platforms are not as appropriate. Web-based mobile applications are hard to use, do not take advantage of the mobile phone's media capabilities and require an online connection. Custom mobile applications are difficult to develop and distribute. To address these limitations we present CAM - a new framework for developing and deploying mobile computing applications in the rural developing world. CAM applications are accessed by capturing barcodes using the mobile phone camera, or entering numeric strings with the keypad. Supporting minimal navigation, direct linkage to paper practices and offline multi-media interaction, CAM is uniquely adapted to rural device, user and infrastructure constraints. To illustrate the breadth of the framework, we list a number of CAM-based applications that we have implemented or are planning. These include processing microfinance loans, facilitating rural supply chains, documenting grassroots innovation and accessing electronic medical histories.

During our work with microfinance groups in rural India, we found that paper plays a crucial role in many local information practices. However, paper-based record keeping can be inefficient, so we need to link paper with the flexibility of modern information tools. A mobile phone can be the perfect bridging device. Here we present the CAM mobile document processing system, in which a camera-equipped mobile phone is used as an image capture and data entry device. Our system is able to process paper forms that contain CAMShell programs - embedded instructions that are decoded from an electronic image. By combining 1) paper, 2) audio, 3) numeric-data entry, 4) narrative scripted execution and 5) asynchronous connectivity, we have synthesized five years of design experience into a usable and locally harmonious system that has the potential to impact billions of people.