UID Teatime Blog

Tea Today was full of reports from the CSCW conference and the OMC meetings from last week, both of which touched on the use of cell phones for gathering information.

At CSCW, The Georgia Institute of Technology presented a system called EatWell. EatWell provides a shared diary of experiences that people can use to report, or listen to reports about, different places to eat or buy food in a community. Since the system was intended to be usable by low-income communities, it uses a voice interface that can be used by any phone.

At OMC, a number of systems were presented leveraging the availability of mobile devices to gather information in infrastructure-poor areas. Ushahidi allows individuals to report information in crisises using SMS messages. The pilot was used to track post-election violence in Kenya earlier this year.

Gathering information using calls and text messages on mobile phones presents interesting usability challenges. Voice messages can provide large quantities of data, but in largely unstructured ways that are difficult to scale. It seems implausible that EatWell could be scaled to serve hundreds or thousands of messages in a usable way.

Satisfaction and community seems to be one of the real victories of systems like EatWell. Many of the participants in the study said that they enjoyed sharing the information together.

Text messages present their own difficulties for usability. One difficulty is simply the encoding of data. Some systems, like Unicef’s RapidSMS, rely largely on the encoding of messages at the user-level. This can potentially allow systems to scale, but causes a dillema for improperly formatted messages.

The group proposed crowd-sourcing and AI algorithms to help remedy these difficulties, seeing as the cost of a three SMS POST-ERROR-REPOST interaction can begin to cause problems for users of a system designed to be used in developing nations.

What other novel ways could already existing, but poorly structured, data channels in our infrastructure be leveraged in interesting ways?

- ctsims