I’ve spent the past week at the iLab in Liberia and got what I came for: an updated reality check on the limitations of technology adoption in developing countries. Below are some of the assumptions that I took for granted. They’re perfectly obvious in hindsight and I’m annoyed at myself for not having realized their obviousness sooner. I’d be very interested in hearing from others about these and reading their lists. This need not be limited to one particular sector like ICT for Development (ICT4D) or Mobile Health (mHealth). Many of these assumptions have repercussions across multiple disciplines.

The following examples come from conversations with my colleague Kate Cummings who directs Ushahidi Liberia and the iLab here in Monrovia. She and her truly outstanding team—Kpetermeni Siakor, Carter Draper, Luther Jeke and Anthony Kamah—spearheaded a number of excellent training workshops over the past few days. At one point we began discussing the reasons for the limited use of SMS in Liberia. There are the usual and obvious reasons. But the one hurdle I had not expected to hear was Nokia’s predictive text functionality. This feature is incredibly helpful since the mobile phone basically guesses which words you’re trying to write so you don’t have to type every single letter.

But as soon as she pointed out how confusing this can be, I immediately understood what she meant. If I had never seen or been warned about this feature before, I’d honestly think the phone was broken. It would really be impossible to type with. I’d get frustrated and give up (the tiny screen further adds to the frustration). And if I was new to mobile phones, it wouldn’t be obvious how to switch that feature off either. (There are several tutorials online on how to use the predictive text feature and how to turn it off, which clearly proves they’re not intuitive).

In one of the training workshops we just had, I was explaining what Walking Papers was about and how it might be useful in Liberia. So I showed the example below and continued talking. But Kate jumped in and asked participants: “What do you see in this picture? Do you see the trees, the little roads?” She pointed at the features as she described the individual shapes. This is when it finally dawned on me that there is absolutely nothing inherently intuitive about satellite images. Most people on this planet have not been on an airplane or a tall building. So why would a bird’s eye view of their village be anything remotely recognizable? I really kicked myself on that one. So I’ll write it again: there is nothing intuitive about satellite imagery. Nor is there anything intuitive about GPS and the existence of a latitude and longitude coordinate system.

Kate went on to explain that this kind of picture is what you would see if you were flying high like a bird. That was the way I should have introduced the image but I had taken it completely for granted that satellite imagery was self-explanatory when it simply isn’t. I really kicked myself on that one. In further conversations with Kate, she explained that they too had made that assumption early on when trying to introduce the in’s and out’s of the Ushahidi platform. They quickly realized that they had to rethink their approach and decided to provide introductory courses on Google Maps instead.

More wrong assumptions revealed themselves during these courses. For example, the “+” and “-” markers on the map are not intuitive either nor is the concept of zooming in and out. How are you supposed to understand that pressing these buttons still shows the same map but at a different scale and not an entirely different picture instead? Again, when I took a moment to think about this, I realized again how completely confusing that could be. And again I kicked myself. But contrast this to an entirely different setting, San Francisco, where some friends recently told me how their five year old went up to a framed picture in their living room and started pinching at it with his fingers, the exact same gestures one would use on an iPhone to zoom in and out of a picture. “Broken, broken” is all the five year old said after that disappointing experience.

The final example actually comes from Haiti where my colleague Chrissy Martin is one of the main drivers behind the Digicel Group’s mobile banking efforts in the country. There were of course a number of expected challenges on the road to launching Haiti’s first successful mobile banking service, TchoTcho Mobile. The hurdle that I had not expected, however, had to do with the pin code. To use the service, you would enter your own personal pin number on your mobile phone in order to access your account. Seems perfectly straight forward. But it really isn’t.

The concept of a pin number is one that many of us take completely for granted. But the idea is often foreign to many would-be users of mobile banking services and not just in Haiti. Just think about it: all one has to do to access my money is to simply enter four numbers on my phone. That does genuinely sound crazy to me at a certain level. Granted, if you guess the pin wrong three times, the phone gets blocked and you have to call TchoTcho’s customer service. But still, I can understand the initial hesitation that many users had. When I asked Chrissy how they overcame the hurdle, her answer was simply this: training. It takes time for users to begin trusting a completely new technology.

So those are some of the assumptions I’ve gotten wrong. I’d be grateful if readers could share theirs as there must be plenty of other assumptions I’m making which don’t fit reality. Incidentally, I realize that emerging economies vary widely in technology diffusion and adoption—not to mention sub-nationally as well. This is why having the iLab in Liberia is so important. Identifying which assumptions are wrong in more challenging environments is really important if our goal is to use technology to help contribute meaningfully to a community’s empowerment, development and independence.

The Drawing Together Campaign

(Thanks to Nathan Felde for these banners and buttons to be used to help spread the word about the mapping campaigns and get this data out and open)

“Drawing Together” seeks to enlist a community of interest for Haiti, to create maps, of the people, by the people and for the people, using the tools and resources of ushahidi.com and azarask.in/projects/haiti.

Challenge

Prior to the earthquake Haiti was already in dire need of vital information about its people and resources to better govern itself and plan its future. Adequate maps of school and clinic locations were not readily available, even to policy makers.

An atlas / catalog / directory of information, services and resources is needed; a shared reference document with which to mediate a common understanding of local and national goals, activities and priorities.

Response

Our belief is that maps with immediate value to relief workers can be enhanced, improved and enriched to have an ongoing and increasing value across a broader scope of Haitian interests.

Lessons drawn from the conversations this mapping generates can inform and enable collaborative work for years to come in building a just and sustainable society, culture, economy and ecology in Haiti and beyond.

Need

The initial and growing community mapping the crisis created by the January 2010 earthquake is a valuable resource for this continued mapping of the needs and resources of Haiti.

Just as this recent crisis has drawn people quickly together to share in drawing a map of an epic calamity, our hope is that many more people will draw inspiration from that work and continue to enrich these maps to increase our shared awareness of Haiti’s longer term needs and resources.

Call to Action

We solicit engagement from all interested in Haiti’s success to join in community with this nation and its diaspora to begin this important task.

More graphics:

What Google has done, instead of just building another social network, is use their existing “My Location” and other tools to enable people on Maps for Mobile to share their location with a selective group of contacts — those who opt-in to participate.

This is more innovative and will have a larger impact than most people understand just yet. It’s big, primarily because it’s not a “specialized for humanitarian efforts” application – it’s made for everyone, all the time, which means it is more likely to be used when an emergency strikes.

As Sanjana Hattotuwa says:

“Potential uses for this for real time election violence monitoring, IDPs and refugee movement tracking, Human Rights and Ceasefire monitoring, peacekeeping, humanitarian relief and disaster management are impressive and beg to be explored.”

Just today, Google announced that they already have 1 million users in 27 countries. That’s fairly impressive, and it will grow as they have specific communities that adopt the service. It will also grow when an emergency strikes and people “turn it on” for their Google account. Basically, a million people have turned it on out of curiosity, what happens when you give the rest a real reason?

Make no mistake, this is Google’s quiet “Ace” and it’s a killer app. Nokia, Facebook, Twitter and the rest would do well not to ignore it.

My question: can outside services play with this? Is there going to be an API or web service?

Instructions from Riyaad on the Al Jazeera team:
“If you’re anywhere in the world and an event is taking place to do with #gaza #israel send a text to: +45609910303 – Start it with GAZA.” You can also, SMS 37191 / +45609910303 – Twitter: @ajgaza

Al Jazeera is estimated to be the second largest international news/media house, reaching 100 million households. That kind of organization testing Ushahidi gives us a lot of insight into what we need to do in the future for enterprise-level deployments. This is our first Arabic language deployment, which the Al Jazeera new media team has been working on in the last week – more to come on that soon.

Benjamin Doherty has also played a role in helping get the site up. He also brought up an interesting point that he’s helping us figure out how to work into the system. How do you deal with synonymous names of locations? That’s an especially good question to ask in Gaza, as there are multiple names for the same place used by different groups.

Lastly, this is also the first time that Google Maps was not chosen as the default map, but Microsoft Virtual Earth Maps were instead. We can already see some areas there where we need to fine tune the clustering at the higher elevation levels (as you drill down closer you see that the reports are in the right spot on the map).

So, a big thanks to Riyaad at Al Jazeera New Media Labs for giving it a try. We’ve already learned a great deal from just one week on this, and we’re looking forward to seeing what they do in the future.

A video from Al Jazeera TV: