Browsing by Author "Siya, Masbulele Jay"

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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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.
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    Community-based solar power revenue alternative to improve sustainability of a rural wireless mesh network
    (ACM, 2013) Rey-Moreno, Carlos; Roro, Zukile; Tucker, William David; Siya, Masbulele Jay
    Given the needs for a clean and easy way to maintain and secure powering wireless networks in rural areas and to gen- erate revenue to guarantee the sustainability of its intended goals, an innovative approach to leverage solar power to ad- dress both needs is presented herein. Results comprise em- powered locals trained to ensure local maintenance and ap- propriation; local usage and maintenance data; and a cost- ing of the solution and its maintenance after 10 months of operation. It is shown that the solution presented can be lo- cally maintained and could provide enough revenue for the wireless network to continue providing its intended goals.
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    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.
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    Local ownership, exercise of ownership and moving from passive to active entitlement: a practice-led inquiry on a rural community network
    (CCIRDT, 2015) Rey-Moreno, Carlos; Sabiescu, Amalia; Siya, Masbulele Jay; Tucker, William David
    In this paper, we aim to shed light on local ownership from a double practical and theoretical perspective, and examine its meaning as well as the factors that are bound to influence its development in community based interventions. The questions we intend to answer are: How can 'local ownership' be defined in a way that facilitates its investigation in CI practice, and enables at the same time its theoretical examination and relation with other CI key conceptual constructs? What key factors contribute to fostering local ownership in CI initiatives, taking the case of an externally initiated rural community network? To answer these questions, the paper reports on a study which assessed the development of local ownership in a rural community network in South Africa and singled out the factors found to delineate the development of a sense of ownership in local people, as well as driving the exercise of ownership towards autonomous local action. Based on a detailed analysis of the development of community ownership in this project, and in constant dialogue with the community informatics and social science literature, the paper makes three key contributions to CI theory and practice, as well as more specifically to future practice in community networks: An operational definition of local ownership and a conceptual model which highlights relations to other constructs such as responsibility, power and control and emphasises the role of local ownership in moving from passive to active entitlement towards community assets or CI interventions An empirical analysis of the development of local ownership in a community network in rural South Africa, highlighting the critical factors that led to fostering ownership An examination and critical discussion of factors that are positively related with the development of ownership, carried out in dialogue with CI scholarship and highlighting the bearing of and relations with other critical constructs in CI research, such as participation, empowerment, and capacity building These contributions come at a critical stage in community informatics development as a discipline, in which, we argue, a more solid and critical engagement with theory is required to firmly establish its place and the premises for dialogue with other sociotechnical disciplines.
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    Socio-economic aspects of voice-over-IP technology in rural SA
    (Telkom, 2012) Roro, Zukile; Rey-Moreno, Carlos; Tucker, William David; Siya, Masbulele Jay
    This paper describes work in progress towards developing a business case and preliminary design for an 802.11-based mesh network in the remote rural community of Mankosi in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. Aside from the technical challenges to building the network to be sustainable in the long term, this network needs to generate some revenue. Hence, there needs to be a business model that has revenue generation potential. This study will explore the economical and social aspects of voice over Internet- Protocol as a service for this community. After talking to the village leaders, we learned that there is a demand for telecommunication services and that most of them were interested only in telephony service. Very few villagers were interested in or had any knowledge about the Internet. We also learned that most of their cellular phone calls are local within the Mankosi community. This allows us to deploy an experimental local telephony service; a perfect opportunity for a low-cost and lowcosting inverse mesh infrastructure that can easily be connected to breakout and Internet services in the future.
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    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.
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    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.