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Online social networks have enjoyed signi cant growth over the past several years. With improvements in mobile and Internet penetration, developing countries are participating in increasing numbers in online communities. is paper provides the rst large scale and detailed analysis of social networking usage in developing country contexts. e analysis is based on data from LinkedIn, a professional social network with over  million members worldwide. LinkedIn has members from every country in the world, including millions in Africa, Asia, and South America. e goal of this paper is to provide researchers a detailed look at the growth, adoption, and other characteristics of social networking usage in developing countries compared to the developed world. To this end, we discuss several themes that illustrate di erent dimensions of social networking use, ranging from interconnectedness of members in geographic regions to the impact of local languages on social network participation.

Tracking attendance is an important consideration for many developing world interventions. In many cases, these interventions are located in remote areas where its not always feasible to deploy expensive attendance tracking systems. In addition, since many existing systems focus on tracking participants (such as patients or students), rather than agents (such as teachers or health workers), they assume a trusted administrative staff on-site to record attendance. In this paper, we present the design of Hyke, a system for remote and cost effective attendance tracking in developing regions. Hyke combines voice-biometrics with accurate location tagging for tracking attendance in remote locations without the need for a trusted mediator on-site. Hyke was designed based on our observation of a currently deployed teacher attendance tracking system in rural Rajasthan, India. We have implemented some of the key components in Hyke, and discuss some of the security concerns in the system. The Hyke biometric stack for voice recognition is built atop several open source technologies, and provides a simple interface for non-expert users. Our evaluations with Indian speakers over telephone audio suggests the biometric stack is at par with the current state of the art. We believe this will be a useful tool for researchers who would like to incorporate voice technologies in their developing world projects.

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