Project presentation at IAMCR 2015 in Montreal

I was pleased to debut a short film about our partnership development project at the International Association of Media and Communication Researchers (IAMCR) Conference in Montreal, on July 16.  We had a small but interested group at the presentation with lots of good questions about the role of the technology stewards in the project.

I'd like to extend my thanks to Ranmalee Gamage and the Dinesh Gunaratne from Skitworks for their contributions to the video.  Nuwan Waidyanatha also played an important role in coordinating the conversation as we planned and edited the video.

Scanvenger Hunts in Techology Steward Training

Gonzales, Fiesler, and Bruckman [1] had studied the choice of technology with communities engaging in a scavenger hunt. Spreadsheets and Word documents were favoured over specialized applications. Simple low-cost solutions are easier to replicate.

Gordon and I had discussed this concept a while back - leveraging scavenger hunts as means for Technology Stewards to train with the community. The FrontlineSMS, Freedom Fone, and Ushahidi tools can be combined to exchange clues and information.

[1] Joseph A. Gonzales, Casey Fiesler, Amy S. Bruckman (2015). Towards an Appropriate CSCW Tool Ecology: Lessons from the Greatest International Scavenger Hunt the World Has Ever Seen, Computer Supported Collaborative Work (#cscw205), Vancouver, Canada.

Work-in-Progress Paper presented at 7th International Conference on Communities and Technologies in Limerick

Today, team member Tim Barlott will present a work-in-progress paper at the 7th International Conference on Communities and Technologies in Limerick, Ireland.

We wish Tim lots of luck at the conference!

A copy of the paper is available here.

Poster Presentation @ CSCW2015

The 18th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2015) was held at the Westin Bayshore hotel in Vancouver, BC, Canada from 14^th -18^th March 2015. We presented our poster titled “Technology Stewardship, Text Messaging, and Collaboration in Agricultural Work: Preliminary Results from an Action Research Study in Sri Lanka” on 16^th March on this conference. 

Many conference participants were interested in our work carried out in this project. Some  of them were very keen on our technology use and the concept of technology stewardship. They were surprised as to how this much of collaborations was possible in this project.  (because several Canadian Universities, Sri Lankan Institutes and University and NGOs involvement) we described them how this was possible. Another question they had was on how the Sri Lankan partners collaborate and how they run the campaigns. We elaborated the process from end-to-end. 

1. Held a National Workshop - conducted in Peradeniya and invited all the agricultural institute and NGOs )
2. Community Rapid Prototyping - We identified several potential Sponsors from the workshop to follow up with Community Rapid Prototyping
3. Technology Stewardship Training - Tech-savvy individuals from communities were given hands-on experience on the technologies practiced in the campaign
4. A series of field experiment termed as " Campaign"- this was short duration (2-3 months) activity specifically-designed to characterize the geography and communities belong to agriculture