Hello Yaw What do you mean on measuring success in such projects? The basic answer most were prototyped, and here is an example of m-maji in use today: http://www.businessdailyafrica.com/Tech+firm+hits+on+solution+to+water+scarc... Generally the challenge is about building trust and capacity in your new collaborators. If you get false information that you work on, this could be a challenge. When in teh communities, it is good to create ownership of the projects, and i think the first needs finding helps cultivate such a relationship. In all honesty , when we started out no one had a clear idea of what ICTD was, and no one from the Kenyan side had official training on this . The ICTD portion came later though, and open communication with our collaborators helped change the learning curve Judy On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 9:49 PM, Yaw Anokwa <yanokwa@gmail.com> wrote:
Hey Judy,
It seems like this approach to ICTD projects would have a high failure rate. Of the projects that started when you were involved, did any of them go to some kind of pilot? If not, could you talk a bit about what obstacles were?
Yaw
On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 17:45, judy wawira <judywawira@gmail.com> wrote:
Hello all
I had the opportunity of working on the designing liberation course as a supervisor/teaching assistant the very first year when Josh and Terry came to Nairobi to launch the project.
I had little perspective of what ICT4D meant(probably still do) but i learnt a lot from working with the team.
Like any academic process, most of the things you do for school work are never completely used, and i still have the original needs finding documents that we used for the course.
As we know the focus in Africa by mobile manufacturers like Nokia has been to improve content available to their subscribers, and hopefully build a business around these, this was a good example of a north to south, private public partnership.
The students from Kenya were purely limited to computer science, while Stanford were mixed from all disciplines.
I identified the key staekholders, at that point the broad challenge was " Mobile tools to improve access to health care in slum areas"
Through a collaboration, both teams of students engaged each other in understanding the problem, and feedback on where the solution was appropriate.
After the summer, the Stanford students came to Kenya to test the mobile prototypes, and a few Kenyan students had a chance to visit silicon valley
Back in Kenya during the summer, i am working to focus on young enterrenuership mobile for people intrested in mhealth and ehealth. I think the university of washington is able to do this effectively , producing researchers and innovators in business as seen in the ICT space worldwide
It will be interesting to watch how the ICTD space evolves
Judy
Ps: here is a link that holds some of the class activities: http://liberationtechnologydcourse.pbworks.com/w/page/24948376/Welcome!
On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 4:27 PM, Batya Friedman <batya@uw.edu> wrote:
I think this is a really neat idea. I've talked with Terry about the course a couple of times over the last year or so. I also think
there's a
possibility to do some interesting capacity building with faculty as part of the process. If others are interested, this is a model I would like to explore further. I have some contacts in Rwanda that might be interested.
Cheers, Bat
On 3/23/12 11:14 AM, "Gaetano Borriello" <gaetano@cs.washington.edu> wrote:
What do you think about this approach to ICTD courses?
Harnessing Mobile Tech and Students to Promote Development in Kenya Stanford University (03/19/12)
Stanford University professors Joshua Cohen and Terry Winograd teach a course that brings interdisciplinary teams of Stanford students together with students from the University of Nairobi and local nongovernmental organizations to design new uses for mobile platforms that promote human development in Nairobi's informal settlements. Cohen says the course, called Designing Liberation Technologies, is premised on the idea that mobile tech is a promising means for providing jumpstarts in human welfare. He says the reason the class focuses on using mobile applications in areas of health, education, and economic development is because mobile is the most rapidly growing technology, especially in the developing world. The students use a problem-solving process that involves starting with the potential users themselves, and then developing insights about how their needs can be solved with mobile applications, Cohen notes. The projects have involved locating malaria drugs and checking them for counterfeiting, helping health workers collect patient information and control patient workflow, and helping pregnant women save money for prenatal care. The group is readying the launch of a six-month pilot for the M-Maji project in five villages in Kibera, which is designed to help people find clean water, especially during water shortages.
http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/headlines/cohen-mobile-kenya.html _______________________________________________ change mailing list change@change.washington.edu http://changemm.cs.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/change
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-- Judy
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