Gordon's Talk at the University of Alberta

Stewarding Technology for Inclusive Innovation

LIRNEasia Colloquium: discussing the preliminary results from the ICT campaigns

Inclusive Innovation for Knowledge Mobilization in Agriculture Communities of Practice: preliminary results from the ICT campaigns

LIRNEasia Colloquium

Friday 03rd October 2014

3:30 - 5:00 PM (UTC+5:30)

SPEAKERS:: Mr. Chandana Jayathilake (PhD Candidate, Wayamba University of Sri Lanka) and

Dr. Gordon Gow (Associate Professor, University of Alberta, Canada)

PLACE:     LIRNEasia Office, 12 Balcombe Place, Colombo 08, 

                                                                       Sri Lanka

SKYPE: la_colloquiums

email ranmalee [at] lineasia [dot] to connect

A series of field pilot studies termed as “campaigns”, involving agriculture communities, were conducted in the Kurunegala, Matale, and Batticaloa Districts in Sri Lanka. Farmers identified various knowledge mobilization activities, ranging from exchanging local crop price information, to alerting on elephant attack, to disease control, general inquiries, announcements, so on and so forth. This presentation will discuss the insights gained as well as challenges faced by the research team in carrying out the campaigns, with a view to developing a better understanding of key factors of partnership development for promoting inclusive innovation among these communities of practice.

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Surveys with Farmer Communities in Batticaloa

Greetings Batticaloa lagoon and fort - a pleasant sight each morning while crossing the Kallady bridge, Batticaloa town. From May 1st, the SSHRC Sri Lankan Research Team spent 3 days in the Batticaloa District. We had to balance our work under the heat and humidity and the afternoon heavy thunder showers.

The core team comprised myself from LIRNEasia and Chandana (WUSL/LIRNEasia), Chandana was leading a team of students affiliated with the Wayamba University of Sri Lanka ICT Centre that combined with a team of local community members affiliated with Janathakshan. The Janathakshan members were facilitating and interpreting between the enumerators and the farmers. The teams surveyed the Verugal and Kathirveilli villages in Batticaloa District (neighbouring the Trincomalee District boarder). Both villages were quite devastated  by the ethnic conflict that ended in 2009.

The survey is designed to collect a baseline understanding of the farmer house use of ICTs. The survey was an adoption of LIRNEasia's 2012 Telliuse at BOP survey. The project introduced Tablet PCs and the FuidSurvey application for digitzing the data. However, poor Cellular Internet connectivity was effecting the data collection efficiencies. Web pages were slow in refreshing. Therefore, the enumerators decided to use paper and digitize later.

Answers from the farmers to the 50+ administered questions would provide insights as to how farmers may use mobile phones in their farming practices. The survey results are also a measure to understand the potential take up of technology by those communities after the short campaigns.

Janathakshana, in a previous project, has registered 300 Kathirveilli farmer households. The stratification was simply kathirveilli farmers; thus, giving us a random sample size of 75 households. Over two sessions, morning and afternoon, the team captured over 50 responses.Kathirveilli is a new village that was developed to rellocate beach resident fisher folk in land, following the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami destruction. Now they are taking up agriculture. Interestingly, in Kathirveilli we found several households to not own any kind of telephone. They would use the neighbours or their relatives' at the time of need. The farmers were no more than 1 KM from the main road, 2 KM from the nearest market, and 30 KM from the nearest town of Valachenni.

Comparatively, Verugal farmers who travelled to their plots across the Verugal river, all had a phones. Moreover, they were quite comfortable with using the phone.Janathakshan has registered 100 farmers in that community. There were 22 surveys recorded for that campaign community.

A common trait between the two villages were that each household had their own home gardens and, additionally, the Government had allocated plots on a long term lease. Non-governmental Organizations, such as janathakshan, are supplying resources to build farming infrastructure. Each family earns less than Rs. 100,000 per year. They sell more than 50% of their harvest from the leased and owned lands. 

Solar Powering the Turnkey FrontlineSMS

The turnkey solution design is such that we want the simple click of the power button to activate a pre-configured system for use. This would be for Freedom Fone, FrontlineSMS, and Ushahidi software applications as per the low cost voice, text-ing, and mapping technologies used in the project, for knowledge mobilization.

In this instance our focus was on testing a FrontlineSMS 1.6.2  installation. It was installed on a 215 x 60 x 190mm 1.5Kg Mini-PC with a Intel Atom dual-core 1.86 GHz processor, 2GB DDR RAM, 8 GB SSD ROM. The Mini-PC draws a 20W load and requires a DC 12V and 5A of power supply.

Recently we tested the turnkey to run on Solar Power. We installed a 165 x 25 x 1.4cm solar panel on top of the RDS office roof in Kaddirweli, Batticaloa district. The panel can generate up to 130W of power. We used a 12V 35A car battery (not the recommended expensive deep cell solar power battery) to store that solar panel generated electricity. A 12V 10A Charger Controller regulates the current between the solar panel, battery, and the load (i.e. Mini-PC).

Since the Charger Controller load connectors deliver 10A and the Mini-PC (load) draws only 5A the surplus 5A would charge the battery. We expect a minimum 6 hours of strong sunlight (see weatheronline for Batticaloa monthly/daily average sunlight). During that the Mini-PC will run on direct solar generated electricity, during day time. The battery would supplement that with another 8 hours during night time, which gives us a total of 14hour, according to our calculation. The next step is testing expected power consumption patterns.

Of cause it is hundred times more economical to consume power through the main grid to simply power the 20W computer, if the infrastructure is available. The solar powered Turnkey's utility is higher when we offer options to power a couple of light bulbs and providing mobile phone charging outlets through the same system. Our thinking is that the Mini-PC does not need to run 24/7. The community can decide to run it at certain hours; thus, there may be a surplus of power to use for other purposes.

We are readying for a campaign in Verugal and Kaddirvelli belonging to the war torn area in the Batticaloa District, Sri Lanka. It will involve farmers from the two villages.

In October 2013, we consulted the two communities during an expedition in determining the information needs. They were particularly interested in trying three activities:

• sharing local crop prices
• alerting elephant attacks
• flash flood warnings.

A primary reason to power the Turnkey with Solar energy was because Verugal community does not have access to the main national power grid. We realized that shortcoming, among five others, during our first visit with the community. Nevertheless, a solar powered low-cost ICT system could always be handy during a long power outage, such as one caused by a disaster.

During our field tests we realized that starting up the Turnkey FrontlineSMS should include "auto detecting" the ZTE MF637U and then connecting to the Cellular network Short Message Service.

Unfortunately FrontlineSMS could "auto detect" the dongle. That would have been the final step for a ready to use FrontlineSMS Turnkey solution. Now we are back to the drawing board to figure out how to complete that step. Otherwise, a human operator has to navigate through a computer screen to click the FrontlineSMS "Auto Detect" button.

Yet another iterative community centric development cycle: design, build, test, and re-design. However, development cycles with our low-cost Turnkey text-ing technology is quite promising - being able to fully run a FrontlineSMS installed Mini-PC with a car battery charged by a solar panel.