With the wide penetration of mobile internet, social networking (SN) systems are becoming increasingly popular in the developing world. However, most SN sites are text heavy, and are therefore unusable by low-literate populations. Here we ask what would an SN application for low-literate users look like and how would it be used? We designed and deployed KrishiPustak, an audio-visual SN mobile application for low-literate farming populations in rural India. Over a four month deployment, 306 farmers registered through the phones of eight agricultural mediators making 514 posts and 180 replies. We conducted interviews with farmers and mediators and analyzed the content to understand system usage and to drive iterative design. The context of mediated use and agricultural framing had a powerful impact on system understanding (what it was for) and usage. Overall, KrishiPustak was useful and usable, but none-the-less we identify a number of design recommendations for similar SN systems.

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Affordable mobile handsets and easier access to mobile internet has popularized the usage of existing social networking systems (SNSes) in the developing world. Most of these (E.g. Facebook, Twitter etc.) are textheavy and do not work well for low-literate populations in resource constrained settings. We designed and deployed KrishiPustak, an audio-visual SN mobile application for low-literate farming populations in rural India. KrishiPustak has a text-free design, with all functionality represented by graphical icons. To support poor internet connectivity it also works in an offline mode. In this demo paper we discuss the motivations behind KrishiPustak, the design decisions we took and the development of the actual application. This demo is an abbreviated companion for a separate CSCW paper published in this conference [4].