Local ownership, exercise of ownership and moving from passive to active entitlement: a practice-led inquiry on a rural community network

In this paper, we aim to shed light on local ownership from a double practical and theoretical perspective, and examine its meaning as well as the factors that are bound to influence its development in community based interventions. The questions we intend to answer are: How can 'local ownership' be defined in a way that facilitates its investigation in CI practice, and enables at the same time its theoretical examination and relation with other CI key conceptual constructs? What key factors contribute to fostering local ownership in CI initiatives, taking the case of an externally initiated rural community network? To answer these questions, the paper reports on a study which assessed the development of local ownership in a rural community network in South Africa and singled out the factors found to delineate the development of a sense of ownership in local people, as well as driving the exercise of ownership towards autonomous local action. Based on a detailed analysis of the development of community ownership in this project, and in constant dialogue with the community informatics and social science literature, the paper makes three key contributions to CI theory and practice, as well as more specifically to future practice in community networks: An operational definition of local ownership and a conceptual model which highlights relations to other constructs such as responsibility, power and control and emphasises the role of local ownership in moving from passive to active entitlement towards community assets or CI interventions An empirical analysis of the development of local ownership in a community network in rural South Africa, highlighting the critical factors that led to fostering ownership An examination and critical discussion of factors that are positively related with the development of ownership, carried out in dialogue with CI scholarship and highlighting the bearing of and relations with other critical constructs in CI research, such as participation, empowerment, and capacity building These contributions come at a critical stage in community informatics development as a discipline, in which, we argue, a more solid and critical engagement with theory is required to firmly establish its place and the premises for dialogue with other sociotechnical disciplines.Web of Scienc

Communicating in designing an oral repository for rural African villages

We describe designing an asynchronous, oral repository and sharing system that we intend to suit the needs and practices of rural residents in South Africa. We aim to enable users without access to personal computers to record, store, and share information within their Xhosa community using cellphones and a tablet PC combined with their existing face-to-face oral practices. Our approach recognises that systems are more likely to be effective if the design concept and process build on existing local communication practices as well as addressing local constraints, e.g. cost. Thus, we show how the objectives for the system emerged from prolonged research locally and how we communicated insights, situated in the community, into the process of design and development in a city-based lab. We discuss how we integrated understandings about communication between situated- and localresearchers and designers and developers and note the importance of recognising and centralising subtle differences in our perception of acts of oral communication. We go on to show how the materiality of the software, the tablet form factor, and touch interaction style played into our collaborative effort in conceiving the design.Department of HE and Training approved lis

Socio-economic aspects of voice-over-IP technology in rural SA

This paper describes work in progress towards developing a business case and preliminary design for an 802.11-based mesh network in the remote rural community of Mankosi in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. Aside from the technical challenges to building the network to be sustainable in the long term, this network needs to generate some revenue. Hence, there needs to be a business model that has revenue generation potential. This study will explore the economical and social aspects of voice over Internet- Protocol as a service for this community. After talking to the village leaders, we learned that there is a demand for telecommunication services and that most of them were interested only in telephony service. Very few villagers were interested in or had any knowledge about the Internet. We also learned that most of their cellular phone calls are local within the Mankosi community. This allows us to deploy an experimental local telephony service; a perfect opportunity for a low-cost and lowcosting inverse mesh infrastructure that can easily be connected to breakout and Internet services in the future.Telkom, Cisco, Aria Technologies, THRIP, NRFDepartment of HE and Training approved lis

Towards a sustainable business model for rural telephony

This paper presents the work done thus far towards designing a sustainable business model for rural telephony in the community of Mankosi, located in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. The pillars of the model are sustainability and community ownership to design both the wireless mesh network providing the telephony service and its business model. Given the airtime consumption pattern in the community, the model is based only on the provision of calls inside the community and for using solar power to charge mobile phones. Some scenarios with different usage of the telephony services and different pricing rates are explored in order to find the break even point of the network, or in case the CAPEX was provided externally, to calculate the revenues expected. These revenues could be used for projects that benefit the community at large. Although the project is in its initial phase and the community has some particularities that make it unique, the sustainable business model presented here is intended to showcase innovative ideas that could serve similar projects in other parts of the world.Telkom, Cisco, Aria Technologies, THRI

Walking and the social life of solar charging in rural Africa

We consider practices that sustain social and physical environments beyond those dominating sustainable HCI discourse. We describe links between walking, sociality, and using resources in a case study of community-based, solar, cellphone charging in villages in South Africa’s Eastern Cape. Like 360 million rural Africans, inhabitants of these villages are poor and, like 25% and 92% of the world, respectively, do not have domestic electricity or own motor vehicles. We describe nine practices in using the charging stations we deployed. We recorded 700 people using the stations, over a year, some regularly. We suggest that the way we frame practices limits insights about them, and consider various routines in using and sharing local resources to discover relations that might also feature in charging. Specifically, walking interconnects routines in using, storing, sharing and sustaining resources, and contributes to knowing, feeling, wanting and avoiding as well as to different aspects of sociality, social order and perspectives on sustainability. Along the way, bodies acquire literacies that make certain relationalities legible. Our study shows we cannot assert what sustainable practice means a priori and, further, that detaching practices from bodies and their paths limits solutions, at least in rural Africa. Thus, we advocate a more “alongly” integrated approach to data about practices.This research was supported by CSIR-Meraka, South Africa and, partly, by an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council grant (EP/H042857/1).http://dl.acm.org/hb201

Situating Asynchronous Voice in Rural Africa

Abstract. Designing for oral users in economically poor places has intensified efforts to develop platforms for asynchronous voice. Often these aim to assist users in rural areas where literacy is lowest, but there are few empirical studies and design tends to be oriented by theory that contrasts the mental functions of oral and literate users, rather than by local practices in social situations. We describe designing an Audio Repository (AR) based on practices, priorities and phone-use in rural Africa. The AR enables users to record, store and share voice files on a shared tablet and via their own cell-phones. We deployed the AR for 10 months in rural Africa and illiterate elders, who have few ways to use free or low-cost phone services, used it to record meetings. Use of, and interactions with, the AR informed the design of a new prototype. They also sensitized us to qualities of collective sense-making that can inspire new interactions but that guidelines for oral users overlook; such as the fusion of meaning and sound and the tuning of speech and bodily movement. Thus, we claim that situating design in local ways of saying enriches the potential for asynchronous voice

Community-based solar power revenue alternative to improve sustainability of a rural wireless mesh network

Given the needs for a clean and easy way to maintain and secure powering wireless networks in rural areas and to gen- erate revenue to guarantee the sustainability of its intended goals, an innovative approach to leverage solar power to ad- dress both needs is presented herein. Results comprise em- powered locals trained to ensure local maintenance and ap- propriation; local usage and maintenance data; and a cost- ing of the solution and its maintenance after 10 months of operation. It is shown that the solution presented can be lo- cally maintained and could provide enough revenue for the wireless network to continue providing its intended goals.Telkom, Cisco, Aria Technologies, THRIP, NRFWeb of Scienc

A Comparison between the Wickström Compartment Fire Model with Experiments and other Calculation Methods

An Excel spreadsheet application has been developed for calculating pre-flashover compartment fire temperature according to the method described in the book ”Temperature Calculation in Fire Safety Engineering” written by Wickström 2016. Here called the Wickström Compartment Fire Model, WCFM, which is a model where the surrounding structure can be assumed either as lumped heat or as semi-infinite.The excel spreadsheet is user friendly and time efficient. The model has been used to calculate temperature of gas layer which is compared with results from experiments and calculations made with the alternative calculation methods MQH, FDS and CFAST. The compartment fire chosen for comparisons were performed in a normal sized room with a door opening. The walls, floor and ceiling of the room consisted of the same material but changed between the tests. Four materials were used: light weight concrete, uninsulated steel and insulated steel on inside or outside.   The results of the comparison show that the temperature calculated with WCFM follows both the experiments and FDS temperature curves well for three of the tests. The test with light weight concrete differs from the results where WCFM in the end stabilises at a lower temperature. The difference that occurred between WCFM, the experiments and FDS, for the other three tests is mainly in the beginning of the tests. WCFM predicts temperatures which are as an average 100 ℃ higher or lower than what measured depending on test setup. In the end of the test WCFM, the experiments and FDS coincide and give essentially the same final temperatures. The temperature from MQH and CFAST differ considerably from the experiments in all the tests.