Rural communities are often underserved by the mainstream media. While there is a public discourse surrounding the issues they face, this dialogue typically takes place on television, in newspaper editorials, and on the Internet. Unfortunately, participation in such forums is limited to the most privileged members of society, excluding those individuals who have the largest stake in the conversation. For several years, our group has worked to foster a more inclusive dialogue by means of a simple technology: an interactive voice forum. Our system enables anyone with access to a mobile phone to call and record messages of local interest, and to listen to messages that others have recorded. Messages are also posted on the Internet, as a supplement to an existing discussion forum.
Our deployments in India and Somaliland have logged over 150,000 phone calls and published over 2,500 messages. Recordings have had a documented impact on the livelihoods of end users, as well as policymakers and members of the media. To enable other organizations to replicate our systems, we have released IVR Junction, an open-source platform for building voice forums. We are currently in touch with over 20 organizations around the world who want to use IVR Junction in local contexts. In this talk, we will describe our experience across these projects, as well as future opportunities for civic-oriented social platforms in the developing world. Aditya Vashistha works in the Technology for Emerging Markets group at Microsoft Research where he designs and builds technologies for underserved rural and urban communities to improve their access to information, healthcare and education. His research interests are at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction, and Information and Communication Technologies for Development. He is investigating how Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems can be used for providing information to and collecting data from marginalized communities. Some of his current research projects (IVR Junction <http://research.microsoft.com/ivrjunction>, Talent Hunt<http://research.microsoft.com/talenthunt>) attempts to make IVR systems more usable, crowd-centric, sustainable and integrated with Internet. What: Aditya Vashistha on Building and Deploying Voice Forums for Information Access and Transparency When: Tuesday, March 5th at 12 noon Where: The Allen Center, room CSE 203
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