The assimilation of indigenous knowledge systems (IKS) into mainstream knowledge society consisting of formal education, research paradigms, and digital knowledge repositories and learning tools has at best been a tokenism. Shifting perspectives reveal major deficiencies in education, research, and technology caused by a systemic exclusion and active destruction of IKS. This chapter promotes a deeper appreciation for IKS, illustrates tensions between digital knowledge systems and IKS, and underscores the necessity to engage indigenous people in the design of learning tools to encompass not only indigenous content but also underlying epistemologies and values. This chapter shares a viewpoint from the Global South contributing to a pluralistic knowledge society.

In recent years the evolving practice of co-design has continued to shift the roles of designers, researchers and the collection of partners formerly known as users. A growing community of researchers is pursuing this work "across borders." The greatly varied contexts of such work present distinctive challenges related to culture, power, language, etc. This SIG will convene co-design practitioners and researchers to discuss these challenges. Through attention to methods, tools and values in co-design, we will consider how co-design is traveling to new scenes around the world. We aim to form new relationships, develop themes of common interest, foster collaborations and build research infrastructure for this rapidly growing community.

Research on township hip-hop musicians in South Africa suggest that media producers in developing countries may be increasingly be combining use of mobile phones with other digital technology. This demonstrates the need for M4D designers to conceptualise apps which fit such cross-device digital media ecologies. We describe the co-design methods used to support such hybrid township hip-hop digital media ecologies. These designs emerged from an interdisciplinary collaboration, where the ethnographic work of a media studies student and her access to participants were used as a basis for a computer science student in setting up a participatory design project. Such collaboration has been fostered for some time at the ICT4D lab at our university and may provide a model for postgraduate mobile app design collaboration. The mobile application developed supports hip-hop production. We argue for the importance of such creative digital tools in M4D, as they may facilitate voice and capability in marginalised communities.

Public concern surrounding the effects video games have on players has inspired a large body of research, and policy makers in China and South Korea have even mandated systems that limit the amount of time players spend in game. The authors present an experiment that evaluates the effectiveness of such policies. They show that forcibly removing players from the game environment causes distress, potentially removing some of the benefits that games provide and producing a desire for more game time. They also show that, with an understanding of player psychology, playtime can be manipulated without significantly changing the user experience or negating the positive effects of video games.

The ubiquity of mobile phones provides an opportunity to use them as a resource for construction of programs beyond the classroom. However, limitations of mobile phones impede their use as typical programming environments. This research proposed that programming environments on mobile phones could include scaffolding techniques specifically designed for mobile phones, and designed based on learners’ needs. Experiments were conducted with 142 learners from three universities in Kenya and South Africa in order to investigate the effect on learners of using the theoretically-derived scaffolding techniques to construct Java programs on a mobile phone. The results provided empirical evidence that scaffolding techniques specifically designed for mobile phones and designed based on learners’ needs could effectively support the construction of programs on a mobile phone.

Gary Marsden established the UCT Centre in Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICT4D) in 2008. The Centre provides a space from which researchers can apply their disciplinary expertise to ICT problems experienced on the African continent and has gathered a critical mass of researchers and postgraduate students who can strengthen this aeld. It provides an important base for African and international researchers in the area of ICT4D from which to undertake research and train postgraduate students and to make a powerful statement on the signiacance of this area of research in the developing world. The Centre’s researchers demonstrate how the application of modern information technologies can be applied speciacally to solving some of the problems facing the African continent. The UCT Centre in ICT4D was founded to seek out new information technologies and new ways to use them for socioeconomic development and justice. With Gary as the driving force and lead scientist, the Centre rose to international prominence. Our location in Cape Town, South Africa makes us ideally suited for this research—and since our founding we have grown in staff, students, and anancial support. The Centre is also an exchange hub of ICT4D knowledge, with numerous international visitors each year. Our graduate body grew as did our scientiac output, with Gary personally supervising 20 of our 56 students to graduation. He also hosted both the Interact and ICTD conferences in the year of his death. Tragically, he died when the fruits of this establishment were ripening. His presence and the Centre’s reputation have attracted excellent new staff and many visitors keen to collaborate. Such are the resilience and power of his vision that we have been able to survive his loss. We were shaken, but we have pulled together in a common commitment to propel his vision of an interdisciplinary, human-centered research facility. Today, we are a core group of eight staff and more than 50 students across three departments. We have numerous ongoing projects in a wide range of application areas (digital libraries, service delivery, health, education, networking, and digital participation) and are engaged in participatory and co-design research in a number of areas across the African continent. Our students go on to teach in African universities and to continue their engagement in promoting effective uses of ICTs for development. We are grateful to Gary for his leadership and inspiration and for bringing us together to continue his work through the Centre in ICT4D at the University of Cape Town. ■

The field of research on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in the service of social development (ICTD) is ripe for reframing. The asymmetries of the world are currently mirrored in the aims, practice and outcomes of too much ICTD research. The consequence is that people who might benefit from creative use of current and emerging technologies all over the world are excluded from the social processes and benefits of innovation and knowledge production. The ICTD research community’s widespread dissatisfaction with this situation haunts ICTD gatherings. In this workshop we want to explore critical alternatives to the current practice. We intend drafting and articulating critical alternatives for future research that is emancipatory, inclusive and oriented towards globally sustainable futures. To achieve this we first want to acknowledge and expose the vastly different knowledge interests and agendas of the various stakeholders. By examining a series of questions we shall then strive for a responsive reformulation of our approaches in a way that will not easily settle into a new orthodoxy. This will mean that we need to examine not only research and action agendas, transformation, inclusiveness, and power relations, but also our own personal growth and care for ourselves as actors in transformation. It is fortuitous that the 5th decennial Aarhus conference comes on the target date for the achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. What next? We want to ensure that after 2015, the research approaches that are adopted and promoted in ICTD are actually structured in the service of development. An ICT that is for Development cannot be realised by blindly replicating global asymmetries where aims and approaches are defined by the powerful and imposed on those at the margins.

When undertaking a project in community-based co-design, students and their teachers must embrace uncertainty.

It has become increasingly clear that situated design and contextualized research needs to undergo a validation phase to determine transferability. Within our longitudinal research project in rural Namibia, we have reached a maturity of methods and product. Yet little do we know about their validity beyond the limited context in the absence of cross-contextual verification. In Erindi-roukambe, the site of our community-based co-design, we have learned to understand and include local perspectives and structures within the dialogic of a participatory action research approach. By engaging with the community over a long period of time local research findings, as well as mutual knowledge have fostered and enriched design decisions. Recognizing that indigenous rural communities in the regional and globally face similar challenges with inappropriate mainstream technology we are currently investigating the applicability of our findings, processes and prototype in other contexts. We have introduced our approach at three other rural sites, two in Namibia and one in East Malaysia. The communities responded well to the technology demonstrating intuitive use and engagement. However, although we have gained promising results we wish to caution pre-mature conclusions on transferability without a more profound understanding of the depth of community engagement, transformation, contextual similarities, and cross-contextual validation.

We present a comparative study of mobile and conventional computing technologies applied to providing access to career guidance information to high school students from marginalised communities. Reported high availability of mobile technology amongst these users would be beneficial, but our NGO partner questioned feature phones’ applicability for consuming large quantities of information. We created two systems: a text interface exposed through a mobile instant messaging service, and a website targeting conventional computers. Despite positive usability tests for the website and fears of social stigma related to mobile instant messaging, system logging over eight months of parallel deployment showed convincing advantage in engagement for the mobile system. Interviews revealed that computer infrastructure was tied to institutions where access was limited; but greater access to mobile phones (owned or borrowed) made use and advertisement to peers of the mobile system easier. Social stigma was a problem only for a minority.

Computer programming is a difficult subject for most novice learners. Providing support that complements classroom learning could contribute to tackling the difficulties. Due to the ubiquity of mobile devices, such support can be provided by scaffolding the construction of programs on a mobile device. In order to design such a mobile intervention, learners’ needs and limitations of mobile devices need to be placed at the center of the design process. This paper combines learners’ needs and limitations of mobile devices to identify scaffolding strategies. Identification of scaffolding strategies is based on a scaffolding framework. Using specific examples, this paper will then show how the scaffolding strategies have been implemented on a mobile device.

In this paper, we illustrate through a set of examples how our own conceptualisation of participatory design (PD) and associated tools and techniques transforms within the design process itself. Co-designing with African rural communities has brought to light our many assumptions and intentions underlying commonly used methods and principles of PD. While genuinely striving for user involvement these same methods can hinder a truly participatory approach to design. We have learned much through our encounters and continuous reflections in various projects with southern African rural communities and seek to share our experiences in one particular, current project which led us to interrogate and revise our existing conceptions of PD. We also aim to infuse the evolution of PD with insights from Africa and cross-cultural design so that PD can better serve diversity globally.

The paper describes the performance of the B.A.T.M.A.N daemon (Batmand) protocol in an indoor Mesh Potato (MP) testbed. The MPs are small devices used for voice communications over the wireless medium but can also support data. The MPs along with the Batmand protocol are used to bring cheap telephony to rural areas. However there are no performance tests that show the quality of the service provided by the MPs and the Batman protocols. The experiments performed in this paper look at jitter, delay, packet loss and throughput in order to understand the MPs network performance. This work is an extension on an earlier work. This work adds to the initial work by providing more results and more conclusive conclusions. This work is an extension on an earlier work. This work adds to the initial work by providing more results and more conclusive conclusions. The experiments used packets of different sizes over an increasing number of hops. The data collected is analyzed and the network performance given the scenarios we present is observed. Furthermore, comparisons are made between the data obtained from the experiments and the ITU-Recommendation G.114 to see if the results from the experiments fall within the recommended boundaries.

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) have and abundant number of routing protocols, some sources suggested that more than 70 protocols may exist. The existence of so many protocols can be attributed to the lack of standards which would define its operations. In this works we categorise and discuss the inner workings of proactive, reactive and hybrid routing protocols. Our discussions leads us to determine a few aspects that if already aren’t should part of the design paradigm for routing protocols designed for WMNs. Keywords-Routing Protocols, Metrics, Wireless mesh networks, design

As Information Security Professionals we are often thought of as the individuals who implement the necessary technologies to protect the organization. Sometime as InfoSec professionals we are too paranoid about security that we tend to bend over backwards to protect information at ANY cost. Cost is a delineating factor in the protecting the confidentially, integrity and availability of information. Therefore, why not implement technologies that would are in alignment with business strategies, meet compliance and is capable of decreasing the company total cost of ownership? This paper will conduct a thorough research on the advantages and disadvantages of developing a virtual IT infrastructure.

In this paper we examine how digital technology can be used to inspire, record and present oral stories in an African context. In particular we explore how to create technologies that are sympathetic to the cultures of the storytellers, both in the capture of stories and their retelling. Specifically, we look at: inspiring stories in District Six in Cape Town; capturing digital stories from users with low literacy levels and using virtual reality to retell indigenous and personal experience narratives.

While our cross-cultural IT research continuously strives to contribute towards the development of HCI appropriate cross-cultural models and best practices, we are aware of the specificity of each development context and the influence of each participant. Uncovering the complexity within our current project as an international team with experiences from three different continents reveals a set of challenges and opportunities for growing global design communities.