Showboater: Insight into sustainable rural community display networks from a longitudinal study

Abstract

This paper describes Showboater, a simple system architecture for rural community display networks. We outline the context of our 2-year longitudinal study and outline five design goals: a functional, sustainable, scalable, resilient networked display solution which affords roles for the distribution of governance. We describe the design and implementation of Showboater and how it aligns to the design goals, as well as describing two separate deployments. We reflect on evaluation feedback and provide insight into the implications of deploying Showboater as rural community display system, respective of the initial design goals, and present our recommendations for future improvements