Drew Cogbill | Thesis Blog

Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICT4D)

SIM App via Nathan Eagle
Tools for doing this:
SIM Toolkit
Symbian SIM Application Toolkit
I want to do more research on this.  Looks like apps might be built with C++.  Eagle asks some good questions on his post that were never fully answered.

Nathan Eagle’s mobility
“mobility is a collaborative project which brings together some of the leading academics, technicians, educators and practitioners in the IT and mobile fields with the common goal of developing an exciting and empowering range of tools and resources to unlock  the power of mobile applications development for users in the developing world”

The main brick column here is about 6 feet tall.  I assumed that the top of it was closed off, so I set my wallet and two sets of keys on it, which promptly fell into a crevice.  It took the hotel staff about 30 minutes to help me fish out my belongings with wire hangers.  The builder of the building happened to be eating dinner at a table about 10 feet from the column during the event.

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The San Ignacio market has about 10 vendors on weekdays, but on Saturdays the market area is flooded with a huge number of merchants.  In the last year, a new, large structure was built for the market to house the everyday vendors and a new concrete slab was laid for the weekend merchants to set up temporary tents on.

I think it’s great that there is investment being put into infrastructure for something so obviously important to the local economy, but I think there are a few major oversights in the design of the site.  The most major one is that the majority of the vendors are on a north-south axis and the east to west brightly shining sun blasts in on the vendors and their products essentially all day every day.  To deal with this, all of the vendors have strung up tarps or sheets to block out the sun.

Additionally, the design of the stalls just doesn’t seem to consider what will happen in them.  Every stall has added a system of ropes and pipes to hang bananas and other good off for selling.  They are making the most of their space, but the design of the stall could have anticipated and assisted in this and other produce selling needs.

Also:

The standard way to serve silverware, either metal or plastic, at a restaurant or take away is wrapped in a paper napkin:

Beers and sodas in glass bottles are always served with a napkin on top of the bottle:

BarCamp Nairobi was a “unconference” held 21 June 2008, where bloggers, programmers, and other techy folk in and around Nairobi met up to “share and learn in an open environment”.

White African has a few videos from the event.

O’reilly had a survey carried out at BarCamp with the following results:

Anthropology’s Technology-driven Renaissance, a article for PC World by Ken Banks of kiwanja.net, emphasizes the importance of observation and understanding of human behavior within a particular context (anthropology) in development design.  This importance certainly extends to design in general.

This is the method I’m trying to employ in my process at the moment.  In talking to Colleen, she recommended that I think of mapping and observation, esentially anthropological research and analysis, as prototypes and to not be so concerned with my end product.  I’m going to try and actively pursue such activities in my remaining time in Belize.

“In order for the mobile phone to reach its full potential, we’re going to need to understand what people in developing countries need from their mobile devices and how they can be applied in a way that positively impacts their lives. Sounds like the perfect job for an anthropologist to me.”

I listened in on a conversation between a group of teachers where the cheaper you got your cell phone credit for, the higher your standing in the conversation was:

(Double up is when you buy a certain amount of credit over $20, and you get double the amount of credit you purchased.  It’s been happening the last few weekends.)

Also yesterday, we had show and tell.  Kids brought dolls, stuffed animals, and jewelery.  Almost everything brought was a gift.  One of the kids brought a cell phone, which was a present from an aunt.  It was a red Rarz.  Though the student didn’t have credit on the phone, he still carried it around, and this made him look cool.  Several adults have told me about kids doing this.

Today, I was called “a darling and a bunch of plantains,” when I brought a lunch plate to one of the teacher at the school where my group is working this week.

Another Nathan Eagle project is txteagle.  txteagle leverages the power of vast numbers of SMS users, paying them small fees for creating an ‘artifical artifical intellegence’.  The system can help check for search relevancy, translation accuracy, and blog sentiment.