Media For the Masses the Usage Patterns and Social Consequences of a Mobile-Phone Based Citizen Journalism Platform in Madhya-Pradesh

In a country as diverse and hierarchical as India, certain marginalized populations are bound to be excluded from the mainstream media. In particular, the adivasi and lower caste populations in rural regions receive either no representation or biased coverage. CGNet Swara, a citizen journalism initiative, seeks to remedy these disparities by utilizing cellphone technology to report and distribute news in the Central Gondwana region. Each citizen with a cellphone in his or her hand, regardless of religion, caste, age or literacy level, can disseminate information he or she sees as valuable by leaving a voice recording at a certain number. Each citizen can also receive pertinent news, free of charge, by calling and listening to the postings. This program is proven to promote demonstrable political change, but the effect on communities has yet to be determined. Through both qualitative and quantitative methods, I investigated the usage patterns and social consequences in one specific village that uses CGNet Swara through a survey, interviews, and focus groups. In doing so, I discovered that citizens’ primary motivation for using CGNet was to engage government officials and create tangible solutions. The program impacted the village by making the community stronger and more trusting, as well as empowering women. As a whole, participatory media in rural communities can give citizens more agency and control over their lives

The Contribution of Digital Technology to Citizenship, Accountability and Rights: An Evidence Review

The use of digital technologies has risen dramatically in the past century, building excitement among governments and technology experts about applying technology to improve accountability, transparency and the effectiveness of authorities. All 193 member states of the United Nations now have, for example, national websites. Among these, 101 have enabled citizens to create personal online accounts; 73 to file income taxes; and 60 to register a business. For the most common core government administrative systems, 190 member states have automated financial management, 179 have used such systems for customs processing, and 159 for tax management. This readiness is the result of a change in the dynamics of citizenship, accountability and rights (CAR), which demands a rethinking of the roles and relationship between governments and citizens. The use of technology in development, and specifically its potential to close the gap between citizen voice and state responsiveness, holds great promise. Emergent conceptions such as e-governance are considered to have the power to inspire new tools and practices for citizenship, as well as to make existing practices more effective. While the use of digital technologies has made communication with citizens much easier, an increased and empowered citizen participation, by which citizens are able to hold governments accountable, remains still a distant dream. This report is an attempt to see the extent to which digital technologies can enable citizens and state agencies to increase the flow of information, challenge powerful interests, increase levels of institutional responsiveness and protect citizens’ rights, therefore making it imperative to examine the connection between the role of citizen participation in monitoring the enforcement of rights and in demanding public scrutiny and transparency. Furthermore, the questions that this report attempts to answer are: (a) What is the contribution of digital technologies to CAR?; (b) How can the use of technology influence the structuring, restructuring, shaping and reshaping of the relationship between citizens and governments?UK Department for International Developmen

Digital activism in Asia reader

The digital turn might as well be marked as an Asian turn. From flash-mobs in Taiwan to feminist mobilisations in India, from hybrid media strategies of Syrian activists to cultural protests in Thailand, we see the emergence of political acts that transform the citizen from being a beneficiary of change to becoming an agent of change. In co-shaping these changes, what the digital shall be used for, and what its consequences will be, are both up for speculation and negotiation. Digital Activism in Asia marks a particular shift where these questions are no longer being refracted through the ICT4D logic, or the West’s attempts to save Asia from itself, but shaped by multiplicity, unevenness, and urgencies of digital sites and users in Asia. This reader crowd-sources critical tools, concepts, analyses, and annotations, self-identified by a network of change makers in Asia as important in their own practices within their own contexts

Introduction to Development Engineering

This open access textbook introduces the emerging field of Development Engineering and its constituent theories, methods, and applications. It is both a teaching text for students and a resource for researchers and practitioners engaged in the design and scaling of technologies for low-resource communities. The scope is broad, ranging from the development of mobile applications for low-literacy users to hardware and software solutions for providing electricity and water in remote settings. It is also highly interdisciplinary, drawing on methods and theory from the social sciences as well as engineering and the natural sciences. The opening section reviews the history of “technology-for-development” research, and presents a framework that formalizes this body of work and begins its transformation into an academic discipline. It identifies common challenges in development and explains the book’s iterative approach of “innovation, implementation, evaluation, adaptation.” Each of the next six thematic sections focuses on a different sector: energy and environment; market performance; education and labor; water, sanitation and health; digital governance; and connectivity. These thematic sections contain case studies from landmark research that directly integrates engineering innovation with technically rigorous methods from the social sciences. Each case study describes the design, evaluation, and/or scaling of a technology in the field and follows a single form, with common elements and discussion questions, to create continuity and pedagogical consistency. Together, they highlight successful solutions to development challenges, while also analyzing the rarely discussed failures. The book concludes by reiterating the core principles of development engineering illustrated in the case studies, highlighting common challenges that engineers and scientists will face in designing technology interventions that sustainably accelerate economic development. Development Engineering provides, for the first time, a coherent intellectual framework for attacking the challenges of poverty and global climate change through the design of better technologies. It offers the rigorous discipline needed to channel the energy of a new generation of scientists and engineers toward advancing social justice and improved living conditions in low-resource communities around the world

Introduction to Development Engineering

This open access textbook introduces the emerging field of Development Engineering and its constituent theories, methods, and applications. It is both a teaching text for students and a resource for researchers and practitioners engaged in the design and scaling of technologies for low-resource communities. The scope is broad, ranging from the development of mobile applications for low-literacy users to hardware and software solutions for providing electricity and water in remote settings. It is also highly interdisciplinary, drawing on methods and theory from the social sciences as well as engineering and the natural sciences. The opening section reviews the history of “technology-for-development” research, and presents a framework that formalizes this body of work and begins its transformation into an academic discipline. It identifies common challenges in development and explains the book’s iterative approach of “innovation, implementation, evaluation, adaptation.” Each of the next six thematic sections focuses on a different sector: energy and environment; market performance; education and labor; water, sanitation and health; digital governance; and connectivity. These thematic sections contain case studies from landmark research that directly integrates engineering innovation with technically rigorous methods from the social sciences. Each case study describes the design, evaluation, and/or scaling of a technology in the field and follows a single form, with common elements and discussion questions, to create continuity and pedagogical consistency. Together, they highlight successful solutions to development challenges, while also analyzing the rarely discussed failures. The book concludes by reiterating the core principles of development engineering illustrated in the case studies, highlighting common challenges that engineers and scientists will face in designing technology interventions that sustainably accelerate economic development. Development Engineering provides, for the first time, a coherent intellectual framework for attacking the challenges of poverty and global climate change through the design of better technologies. It offers the rigorous discipline needed to channel the energy of a new generation of scientists and engineers toward advancing social justice and improved living conditions in low-resource communities around the world

Postcolonial pandemic publics: examining social media health promotion in India during the COVID-19 crisis.

This is the final version. Available from Oxford University Press via the DOI in this record. Affordances offered by new media platforms are perceived as revolutionary instruments for removing the inequities of access to health promotion and communication. However, the production and dissemination of health promotional material on digital platforms does not necessarily translate into uniform access across diverse demographics. This article addresses the lacuna when it comes to analyzing Health Promotion initiatives in India, with a specific focus on the governmental publicity carried out on social media during the four phases of COVID-19 national lockdown between 24 March and 31 May 2020. Our intervention examines how governmental social media health promotion in India played a key role in shaping the 'outbreak narrative' during the lockdown across different levels of social and economic privilege. Through a combination of quantitative data analysis and qualitative interview methods, this article analyzes the circulation and impact of official publicity in online and offline spaces, during the COVID-19 lockdown in India. Resultant findings allow for a comprehensive assessment of whether such publicity contributed to democratized citizen science discourses: enabling social protection measures for vulnerable majorities or potentially reified the existing privileges of the economically and socially affluent minority. We find that health promotion campaigns during a pandemic must focus on reaching the widest possible audience in the most efficient manner. Specifically, in the Indian context, health promotion through mass-media like Television and Radio, and participatory media platforms needed to be implemented in tandem with new media platforms, to achieve required engagement with vulnerable communities on key health issues

The InclusiveMag Method: A Start Towards More Inclusive Software for Diverse Populations

How can software practitioners assess whether their software supports diverse users? Although there are empirical processes that can be used to find “inclusivity bugs” piecemeal, what is often needed is a systematic inspection method to assess software’s support for diverse populations. To help fill this gap, this thesis introduces InclusiveMag, a generalization of GenderMag that can be used to generate systematic inclusiveness methods for a particular dimension of diversity. We then present 1) a multicase study covering eight diversity dimensions, of eight teams’ experiences applying InclusiveMag to eight under-served populations and their “mainstream” counterparts and 2) the start of the application of InclusiveMag to making software more inclusive to individuals of low socioeconomic status, through means of a systematic mapping study