In the past few days, a few interesting ICTD papers have been published that I wanted to share.
The first set comes from the Information Technologies & International Development (ITID), an interdisciplinary open-access journal that focuses on the intersection of information and communication technologies (ICTs) with the “other four billion”. There are a number of great papers in the fall issue, but two stood out to me.
- What Constitutes Good ICTD Research?: A few months ago in an exchange on a mailing Jenna Burrell and Kentaro Toyama debated the question posed in the title. After a few rounds, they decided to come together and formalize their discussion. It’s an insightful read.
- Understanding ‘Gold Farming’: Developing-Country Production for Virtual Gameworlds: Richard Heeks posits that gold farming (the production of virtual goods and services often for real world currency) is a significant activity that predicts a future development trend of outsourcing online employment.
For the more technical crowd, Networked Systems for Developing Regions (NSDR) just posted their papers from their upcoming workshop. Here are two that I enjoyed.
- Message Phone: A User Study and Analysis of Asynchronous Messaging in Rural Uganda: Kurtis Heimerl, RJ Honicky, Eric Brewer, Tapan Parikh explore the value and utility of delay tolerant voice messages for cellular users that live in areas of poor or intermittent network coverage. In their user study, they find that voice messages were quite popular and uniformly preferred over text messages due to their ease of use and the richness of voice.
- Development and Implementation of a Loosely Coupled, Multi-Site, Networked and Replicated Electronic Medical Record in Haiti: William B. Lober, Stephen Wagner, Christina Quiles present their electronic medical record system (iSanté) that supports individual and population health care for HIV patients in Haiti. iSanté is used in 55 clinic sites nationwide and tracks over 40k patients and the paper discusses their architectural choices made in its design.