Location via proxy:   [ UP ]  
[Report a bug]   [Manage cookies]                
skip to main content
10.1145/3240167.3240225acmotherconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesnordichiConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Krishi Kontho: an agricultural information service in Bangladesh

Published: 29 September 2018 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper, we present Krishi Kontho (literally, "agricultural voices"), which is an agricultural information service that utilises pre-recorded voice messages, and SMS, that are pushed to smallholder farmers mobile phones at intervals carefully choreographed with the life cycles of their crops. We present the design of the service, and we present the result of an eleven-month field trial in rural Bangladesh. Findings indicate that this type of service, that synchronises messages with cultivation practice, may improve crop yields while reducing the use of agricultural inputs such as fertiliser and pesticides. We find that the farmers in the field trial deemed the service to be of value to them in regard to improving their agricultural practices. We conclude by discussing our findings and their implications for the design of agricultural information services, including the challenge of designing for specific temporalities, or rhythms of practice, in rural Bangladesh and elsewhere.

References

[1]
Jenny C Aker, Dial "A" for agriculture: a review of information and communication technologies for agricultural extension in developing countries. Agricultural Economics, 2011. 42(6): p. 631--647.
[2]
Jenny C Aker, Ishita Ghosh, and Jenna Burrell, The promise (and pitfalls) of ICT for agriculture initiatives. Agricultural Economics, 2016. 47(S1): p. 35--48.
[3]
Jakob E Bardram, Temporal Coordination. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): An International Journal, 2000. 9: p. 157--187.
[4]
BBS, Literacy Assessment Survey. 2013, Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS): Dhaka, Bangladesh.
[5]
James "Bo" Begole, John C. Tang, Randall B. Smith, and Nicole Yankelovich, Work rhythms: analyzing visualizations of awareness histories of distributed groups, in Proceedings of the 2002 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work. 2002, ACM: New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. p. 334--343.
[6]
Tracy. Carty, A Climate in Crisis: How climate change is making drought and humanitarian disaster worse in East Africa. 2017, Oxfam.
[7]
Robert Chapman, Roger Blench, Gordana Kranjac-Berisavljevic, and ABT Zakariah, Rural radio in agricultural extension: the example of vernacular radio programmes on soil and water conservation in N. Ghana. AgREN Network Paper, 2003. 127: p. 2.
[8]
Lars Rune Christensen, Coordinative Practices in the Building Process: An Ethnographic Perspective. 2013, London: Springer.
[9]
Lars Rune Christensen, Techno-anthropology for Design, in What is Techno-anthropology?, T. Børsen and L. Botin, Editors. 2014, Aalborg University Press: Aalborg.
[10]
Lars Rune Christensen and Pernille Bjorn, Documentscape: intertextuality, sequentiality, & autonomy at work, in Proceedings of the 32nd annual ACM conference on Human factors in computing systems, A. Schmidt and T. Grossman, Editors. 2014, ACM Press: Toronto, Ontario, Canada. p. 2451--2460.
[11]
Lars Rune Christensen and Richard Harper, H.R., The Many Faces of Computational Artifacts, in COOP 2016: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems, A. De Angeli, et al., Editors. 2016, Springer International Publishing. p. 93--106.
[12]
Lars Rune Christensen, Practices of Stigmergy in the Building Process. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 2014. 23(1): p. 1--19.
[13]
Harsha De Silva and Dimuthu Ratnadiwakara, Using ICT to reduce transaction costs in agriculture through better communication: A case-study from Sri Lanka. LIRNEasia, Colombo, Sri Lanka, Nov, 2008.
[14]
Government of India Department of Agriculture. http://farmer.gov.in/FarmerHome.aspx. Accessed September 15th 2017. {cited 2017 15th September 2017}.
[15]
Harold. Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology. 1967, NY: Englewood Cliffs.
[16]
Madhur Gautam and Rashid Faruqee, Dynamics of Rural Growth in Bangladesh: Sustaining Poverty Reduction. 2016: World Bank Publications.
[17]
Robert Glennon, The Unfolding Tragedy of Climate Change in Bangladesh https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/the-unfolding-tragedy-of-climate-change-in-bangladesh/. 2017.
[18]
Richard Heeks, Information and Communication Technology for Development (ITC4D). 2018, London: Routledge.
[19]
ITU. International Telecommunication Union, Bangladesh Profile https://www.itu.int/net4/itu-d/icteye/CountryProfileReport.aspx?countryID=34. 2017 {cited 2017 September 15th }; Available from: https://www.itu.int/net4/itu-d/icteye/CountryProfileReport.aspx?countryID=34
[20]
Steven J. Jackson, David Ribes, Ayse Buyuktur, and Geoffrey C. Bowker, Collaborative rhythm: temporal dissonance and alignment in collaborative scientific work, in Proceedings of the ACM 2011 conference on Computer supported cooperative work. 2011, ACM: Hangzhou, China. p. 245--254.
[21]
Renee Kuriyan, Isha Ray, and Kentaro Toyama, Information and communication technologies for development: The bottom of the pyramid model in practice. The Information Society, 2008. 24(2): p. 93--104.
[22]
H. Lee and S. Sawyer, Conceptualizing time. space and computing for work and organizing. Time and Society, 2010. 19(3): p. 293--217.
[23]
Sian E. Lindley, Making Time, in Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing. 2015, ACM: Vancouver, BC, Canada. p. 1442--1452.
[24]
Edda Tandi Lwoga, Bridging the agricultural knowledge and information divide: The case of selected telecenters and rural radio in Tanzania. The Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing Countries, 2010. 43.
[25]
Melissa Mazmanian, Ingrid Erickson, and Ellie Harmon, Circumscribed Time and Porous Time: Logics as a Way of Studying Temporality, in Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing. 2015, ACM: Vancouver, BC, Canada. p. 1453--1464.
[26]
Surabhi Mittal, Sanjay Gandhi, and Gaurav Tripathi, Socio-economic impact of mobile phones on Indian agriculture. 2010: Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations New Delhi.
[27]
Naja L. Holten Møller and Pernille Bjørn. In Due Time: Decision-Making in Architectural Design of Hospitals. 2016. Cham: Springer International Publishing.
[28]
Magnus Nilsson and Morten Hertzum, Negotiated rhythms of mobile work: time, place, and work schedules, in Proceedings of the 2005 international ACM SIGGROUP conference on Supporting group work. 2005, ACM: Sanibel Island, Florida, USA. p. 148--157.
[29]
Sailas Nyareza and Archie L Dick. Use of community radio to communicate agricultural information to Zimbabwe's peasant farmers. in Aslib Proceedings. 2012. Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
[30]
OJ Okwu, AA Kuku, and JI Aba, An assessment of use of radio in agricultural information dissemination: a case study of radio Benue in Nigeria. African Journal of Agricultural Research, 2007. 2(1): p. 14--18.
[31]
A.V. Ospina and R. Heeks, Unveiling the links between ICT and climate change in developing countries, in ICTs. Climate Change and Development, A.V. Ospina and R. Heeks, Editors. 2012, Centre for Development Informatics, University of Manchester: Manchester, U.K.
[32]
Neil Patel, Deepti Chittamuru, Anupam Jain, Paresh Dave, and Tapan S Parikh, Avaaj otalo: a field study of an interactive voice forum for small farmers in rural india, in SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2010, ACM: Atlanta, USA. p. 733--742.
[33]
L. Perlow, Boundary Control: The Social Ordering of Work and Family Time in a High-Tech Cooperation. Administrative Science Quaterly., 1998. 43(2): p. 328--357.
[34]
L. Perlow, The Time Famine: Towards a Sociology of Work Time. Administrative Science Quarterly, 1999. 44(57): p. 57--81.
[35]
Madelaine Plauché and Madhu Prabaker. Tamil market: a spoken dialog system for rural india. in CHI'06 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems. 2006. ACM.
[36]
D. Randall, R. Harper, and M. Rouncefield, Fieldwork for Design - Theory and Practice. Computer Supported Cooperative Work, ed. R. Harper. 2007, London: Springer.
[37]
Madhu Reddy and Paul Dourish. A Finger on the Pulse: Temporal Rhythms and Information Seeking in Medical Work. in Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) Conference. 2002. New Orleans, Louisiana, USA: ACM.
[38]
Kjeld. Schmidt, Practice and Technology: On the Conceptual Foundations of Practice-Centered Computing, in Socio-informatics: A Practice-based Perspective on the Design and Use of IT Artefacts, V. Wulf, et al., Editors. 2018, Oxford University Press: Oxford. p. 47--104.
[39]
Benjamin H. Snyder, From Vigilance to Busyness: A Neo-Weberian Approach to Clock Time. Sociological Theory, 2013. 31(3): p. 243--266.
[40]
Aditya Vashistha, Edward Cutrell, Gaetano Borriello, and William Thies, Sangeet swara: A community-moderated voice forum in rural india, in ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2015, ACM: Seoul, Korea p. 417--426.
[41]
S. Wilkinson, Focus group methodology: A review. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 1998. 1(3): p. 181--203.
[42]
Volker. Wulf, Volkmar. Pipek, David. Randall, Markus. Rohde, Kjeld. Schmidt, and Markus. Stevens, Socio-informatics: A Practice-based Perspective on the Design and Use of IT Artefacts. 2018, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Digital Farming: A Framework to Reduce Gender Divides in AgricultureProceedings of the Central and Eastern European eDem and eGov Days 202410.1145/3670243.3670254(13-19)Online publication date: 12-Sep-2024
  • (2024)Hearing Community Voices in HCI4D: Establishing Safe Places to Co-Create Counter-Collective Narratives with Women Farmers in BangladeshProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642532(1-17)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2024)Digital Mental Health in Humanitarian Crisis in BangladeshImplications of Information and Digital Technologies for Development10.1007/978-3-031-66982-8_20(286-302)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2024
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences
NordiCHI '18: Proceedings of the 10th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction
September 2018
1002 pages
ISBN:9781450364379
DOI:10.1145/3240167
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 29 September 2018

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. Bangladesh
  2. HCI4D
  3. ICT4D
  4. agricultural information service
  5. crop cycles
  6. mobile
  7. temporality
  8. voice

Qualifiers

  • Research-article

Conference

NordiCHI'18
NordiCHI'18: Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction
September 29 - October 3, 2018
Oslo, Norway

Acceptance Rates

NordiCHI '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 59 of 240 submissions, 25%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 379 of 1,572 submissions, 24%

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)9
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
Reflects downloads up to 21 Sep 2024

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Digital Farming: A Framework to Reduce Gender Divides in AgricultureProceedings of the Central and Eastern European eDem and eGov Days 202410.1145/3670243.3670254(13-19)Online publication date: 12-Sep-2024
  • (2024)Hearing Community Voices in HCI4D: Establishing Safe Places to Co-Create Counter-Collective Narratives with Women Farmers in BangladeshProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642532(1-17)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2024)Digital Mental Health in Humanitarian Crisis in BangladeshImplications of Information and Digital Technologies for Development10.1007/978-3-031-66982-8_20(286-302)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2024
  • (2023)HCI Research on Agriculture: Competing Sociotechnical Imaginaries, Definitions, and OpportunitiesProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581081(1-24)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
  • (2022)The Reordering of Everyday Life through Digital technologies During the Covid-19 PandemicProceedings of the 2022 International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development10.1145/3572334.3572375(1-7)Online publication date: 27-Jun-2022
  • (2022)"A Reasonable Life"Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35555776:CSCW2(1-22)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2022
  • (2022)Social Agriculture: Examining the Affordances of Social Media for Agricultural PracticesProceedings of the 5th ACM SIGCAS/SIGCHI Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies10.1145/3530190.3534806(476-489)Online publication date: 29-Jun-2022
  • (2022)Supporting Real-time Peer-Mentoring of Rural VolunteersProceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491102.3517598(1-13)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2022
  • (2021)Agribuddy: Infrastructuring for Smallholder Farming in CambodiaProceedings of the 10th International Conference on Communities & Technologies - Wicked Problems in the Age of Tech10.1145/3461564.3461576(309-318)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2021
  • (2020)Collaboration without consensus: Building resilience in sustainable agriculture through ICTsThe Information Society10.1080/01972243.2020.184482837:1(1-19)Online publication date: 8-Dec-2020
  • Show More Cited By

View Options

Get Access

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media