Prof. William Tucker

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/10566/1723

Position: Associate Professor Department: Computer Science Faculty: Faculty of Natural Science Qualifications: BA (Trinity University, USA), MS (Arizona State University, USA), PhD (UCT) Research publications in this repository ORICD iD 0000-0001-8636-7281 More about me: here, here and here Tel: 021 959 2516 Fax: 021 959 1274 Email: btucker@uwc.ac.za

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Communicating in designing an oral repository for rural African villages
(IIMC International Information Management Corporation, 2012) Reitmaier, Thomas; Bidwell, Nicola J.; Siya, Masbulele Jay; Marsden, Gary; Tucker, William David
We describe designing an asynchronous, oral repository and sharing system that we intend to suit the needs and practices of rural residents in South Africa. We aim to enable users without access to personal computers to record, store, and share information within their Xhosa community using cellphones and a tablet PC combined with their existing face-to-face oral practices. Our approach recognises that systems are more likely to be effective if the design concept and process build on existing local communication practices as well as addressing local constraints, e.g. cost. Thus, we show how the objectives for the system emerged from prolonged research locally and how we communicated insights, situated in the community, into the process of design and development in a city-based lab. We discuss how we integrated understandings about communication between situated- and localresearchers and designers and developers and note the importance of recognising and centralising subtle differences in our perception of acts of oral communication. We go on to show how the materiality of the software, the tablet form factor, and touch interaction style played into our collaborative effort in conceiving the design.
Experiences, challenges and lessons from rolling out a rural WiFi mesh network
(ACM, 2013) Rey-Moreno, Carlos; Tucker, William David; Bidwell, Nicola J.; Roro, Zukile; Siya, Masbulele Jay; Simo-Reigadas, Javier
The DEV community knows that technology interventions involve consideration of social and environmental factors as much as technical ones. This is particularly true for the introduction of communications infrastructure in rural im- poverished areas. Research into WiFi solutions has fallen o as ubiquitous mobile solutions penetrate even the deepest rural communities worldwide. This paper argues that mo- bile penetration su ers from two signi cant problems such that the latest wave of WiFi mesh networks o ers bene- ts that traditional top-down WiFi, and mobile, networks do not. In addition, we propose ethnographic and partici- patory methods to aid the e ective rollout of mesh inverse infrastructure with and for a given community. This paper describes and then analyzes a mesh for voice rollout within a situated context. We explain how to conduct informed com- munity co-design and how to factor in local socio-political concerns that can strongly impact on the design, rollout and subsequent maintenance of community-based wireless mesh networks. While we have not yet analyzed baseline and ini- tial usage data, as the mesh rollout is still very fresh, we do have new lessons to o er the DEV community that we have learned while establishing this baseline study.
Please call ME.N.U.4EVER: designing for “Callback” in rural Africa
(Product & Systems Internationalisation, Inc, 2011) Bidwell, Nicola J.; Lalmas, Mounia; Marsden, Gary; Dlutu, Bongiwe; Ntlangano, Senzo; Manjingolo, Azola; Tucker, William David; Jones, Matt; Robinson, Simon; Vartiainen, Elina; Klampanos, Iraklis
Designers and developers are naïve about the ways impoverished people in rural Africa innovate new uses of mobile technology to circumvent access difficulties. Here, we report on the local appropriation of an USSD ‘Callback’ service in a rural community in South Africa’s Eastern Cape which enables people to send free text messages and includes strategies that respond to severe constraints on message length and local communication protocols. This report shows that a participative approach, in which community members co-generate methods and interpret data, elicits major and formerly unreported findings. We describe the results of two sets of interviews about the use of cell-phones and Callback locally and the implications of this use for designing and realizing a media-sharing system. Our findings indicate that the community needs a system to charge phones and share media without consuming airtime and functionality for the 70-80% of people who do not own high-end phones. Use of Callback suggests people will manage a system to create, store and share content at a local ‘station’ but notify others about content using separate networks. Callback-use reveals local priorities that shape: the meaning of usability and utility; the ways people manage sequences of communication; and, the ‘rules’ that enable people to use Callback for multiple purposes and make sense of Callbacks despite ambiguity. These priorities inform introducing prototypes and contribute to exploring the communication patterns that might, subsequently, emerge.
Towards a sustainable business model for rural telephony
(Telkom, 2012) Rey-Moreno, Carlos; Roro, Zukile; Siya, Masbulele Jay; Simo-Reigadas, Javier; Bidwell, Nicola J.; Tucker, William David
This paper presents the work done thus far towards designing a sustainable business model for rural telephony in the community of Mankosi, located in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. The pillars of the model are sustainability and community ownership to design both the wireless mesh network providing the telephony service and its business model. Given the airtime consumption pattern in the community, the model is based only on the provision of calls inside the community and for using solar power to charge mobile phones. Some scenarios with different usage of the telephony services and different pricing rates are explored in order to find the break even point of the network, or in case the CAPEX was provided externally, to calculate the revenues expected. These revenues could be used for projects that benefit the community at large. Although the project is in its initial phase and the community has some particularities that make it unique, the sustainable business model presented here is intended to showcase innovative ideas that could serve similar projects in other parts of the world.
Walking and the social life of solar charging in rural Africa
(Association for Computing Machinery, 2013) Bidwell, Nicola J.; Siya, Masbulele Jay; Marsden, Gary; Tucker, William David; Tshemese, M.; Gaven, N.; Ntlangano, Senzo; Robinson, Simon; Eglinton, Kristen Ali
We consider practices that sustain social and physical environments beyond those dominating sustainable HCI discourse. We describe links between walking, sociality, and using resources in a case study of community-based, solar, cellphone charging in villages in South Africa’s Eastern Cape. Like 360 million rural Africans, inhabitants of these villages are poor and, like 25% and 92% of the world, respectively, do not have domestic electricity or own motor vehicles. We describe nine practices in using the charging stations we deployed. We recorded 700 people using the stations, over a year, some regularly. We suggest that the way we frame practices limits insights about them, and consider various routines in using and sharing local resources to discover relations that might also feature in charging. Specifically, walking interconnects routines in using, storing, sharing and sustaining resources, and contributes to knowing, feeling, wanting and avoiding as well as to different aspects of sociality, social order and perspectives on sustainability. Along the way, bodies acquire literacies that make certain relationalities legible. Our study shows we cannot assert what sustainable practice means a priori and, further, that detaching practices from bodies and their paths limits solutions, at least in rural Africa. Thus, we advocate a more “alongly” integrated approach to data about practices.

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