In the past few days, a few interesting ICTD papers have been
published that I wanted to share.
The first set comes from the Information Technologies & International
Development (ITID), an interdisciplinary open-access journal that
focuses on the intersection of information and communication
technologies (ICTs) with the ?other four billion?. There are a number
of great papers in the fall issue, but two stood out to me.
What Constitutes Good ICTD Research?: A few months ago in an
exchange on a mailing Jenna Burrell and Kentaro Toyama debated the
questions posed in the title. After a few rounds, they decided to come
together and formalize their discussion and it is an insightful read.
http://itidjournal.org/itid/article/view/382/178
Understanding ?Gold Farming?: Developing-Country Production for
Virtual Gameworlds: Richard Heeks posits that gold farming (the
production of virtual goods and services often for real world
currency) is a significant activity that predicts a future development
trend of outsourcing online employment.
http://itidjournal.org/itid/article/view/383/179
For the more technical crowd, Networked Systems for Developing Regions
(NSDR) just posted their papers from their upcoming workshop. Here are
two that I enjoyed.
Message Phone: A User Study and Analysis of Asynchronous Messaging
in Rural Uganda: Kurtis Heimerl, RJ Honicky, Eric Brewer, Tapan Parikh
explore the value and utility of delay tolerant voice messages for
cellular users that live in areas of poor or intermittent network
coverage. In their user study, they find that voice messages were
quite popular and uniformly preferred over text messages due to their
ease of use and the richness of voice.
http://dritte.org/nsdr09/files/nsdr09_camera/s3p1_heimerl09nsdr.pdf
Development and Implementation of a Loosely Coupled, Multi-Site,
Networked and Replicated Electronic Medical Record in Haiti: William
B. Lober, Stephen Wagner, Christina Quiles present their electronic
medical record system (iSant?) that supports individual and population
health care for HIV patients in Haiti. iSant? is used in 55 clinic
sites nationwide and tracks over 40k patients and the paper discusses
their architectural choices made in its design.
http://dritte.org/nsdr09/files/nsdr09_camera/s3p4_lober09nsdr.pdf
