Extending DSR with sub cycles to develop a digital knowledge ecosystem for coordinating agriculture domain in developing countries

Still a large percentage of the world population, especially in developing countries are depending on agriculture for their livelihood. The agriculture domain in many developing countries is not well coordinated leading to over and under production of crops resulting in widely fluctuating market prices, waste and economic hardship for farmers. Rapidly growing Smartphone usage among farming community has opened new possibilities to develop a mobile based artefact to coordinate the agriculture production. We have developed an overall artefact; a Digital Knowledge Ecosystem using Design Science Research (DSR) methodology to solve this complex problem. The main project had many research challenges to solve and they were assigned to several sub-projects to address. The outputs of sub-projects created several artefacts. They were integrated to develop the overall artefact to achieve the main goal of the overall project. Managing the complexity of the overall project was a challenge. For this, we had to split three main cycles of DSR: Relevance, Design and Rigor into 6 DSR sub-cycles; Relevance – Problem Understanding and Relevance – Suitability Validation, Rigor – Learning and Rigor –Contribution, Design - Heuristic Search and Design - Functional Validation. This split enabled us to better coordinate the activities to address different aspects of the problem performed by different researchers, often in parallel at multiple geographical locations. The resulted mobile based Digital Knowledge Ecosystem initially developed for farmers in Sri Lanka is now being trialled in India and adapted to develop a Mobile based Information System for Nutrition Driven Agriculture for African Countries

Design for Empowerment: Empowering Sri Lankan Farmers through Mobile-based Information System

We developed a mobile-based information system (MBIS) to empower users to improve their livelihood activities. To do so, we first developed an empowerment framework (since one does not exist) as a basis to develop the MBIS. In particular, we conducted this research to solve an agriculture over-production problem in Sri Lanka where farmers remain trapped in a poverty cycle. They cannot make informed decisions due to lack of access to timely, context-based actionable information to achieve a good revenue. We had to generate some essential information such as current production level in real-time by capturing farmers’ decisions such as what and how much to grow. For this purpose, we needed to empower farmers to actively engage them in informed decision-making process through the MBIS. In evaluating the impact of the MBIS, we found a statistically significant positive change in farmers’ empowerment levels based on measuring self-efficacy, sense of control, and motivation before and after they used the application. Commercial organizations have since adopted this mobile-based system in India and Sri Lanka to solve agricultural problems, in universities Africa to mitigate hidden hunger, and the Corporative Research Center in Australia to develop digital health applications to manage chronic diseases, which indicates the approach’s wide adoptability