Please join us for the Change Seminar this week on *Tuesday 10/10/2017 in HUB 214 at 12-1 pm*.
*Who:* Esther Jang (UW CSE) *What: **Crowdsourcing Rural Network Maintenance and Repair via Network Messaging* *When: *Tuesday Oct 10 *Where:* 12pm in HUB 214 *Abstract: * Repair and maintenance requirements limit the successful operation of rural network infrastructure. Current best practices are centralized management, which requires travel from urban areas and is prohibitively expensive, or intensively training community members, which limits scaling. We explore an alternative model: crowdsourcing repair from the community itself. At a Community Cellular Network deployment site in a rural town in the Philippines, we sent SMS to all active network subscribers (n = 63) requesting technical support. From the pool of physical respondents, we explored their ability to repair through mock failures and conducted semi-structured interviews to learn about their experiences with repair. We learned that community members would be eager to practice repair if allowed, would network to recruit more expertise, and seemingly have the collective capacity to resolve some common failures. They are most successful when repairs map directly to their lived experiences. Using these interviews, we suggest infrastructure design considerations that could make repairs more tractable and argue for an inclusive approach to infrastructure maintenance. *Bio: *I'm a second-year PhD student in the ICTD lab <http://ictd.cs.washington.edu/> at UW CSE interested in connectivity and appropriate technology for developing regions. I spent the summer in the Philippines working on network deployments with the Wireless Communications Engineering Laboratory (WCEL <https://www.eee.upd.edu.ph/research/research-laboratories/wireless-communications-engineering-laboratory>) at the University of the Philippines, and performed this study with the members of the lab along with my PhD advisor Kurtis Heimerl <http://kurti.sh/>. *Subscribe to the Change mailing list:* http://changemm.cs.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/change *Google Calendar link: * https://calendar.google.com/calendar/ical/uwchange% 40gmail.com/public/basic.ics
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