Determining requirements within an indigenous knowledge system of African rural communities

Abstract

Eliciting and analyzing requirements within knowledge systems, which fundamentally differ so far from technology supported systems represent particular challenges. African rural communities' life is deeply rooted in an African Indigenous knowledge system manifested in their practices such as Traditional Medicine. We describe our endeavors to elicit requirements to design a system to support the accumulation and sharing of traditional local knowledge within two rural Herero communities in Namibia. We show how our method addressed various challenges in eliciting and depicting intangible principles arising because African communities do not dichotomize theoretical and practical know-how or privilege a science of abstraction and generalization. Ethnography provided insights into etiology, or causal interrelationships between social values, spiritual elements and everyday life. Participatory methods, involving youth and elders, revealed nuances in social relations and pedagogy pertinent to the transfer of knowledge from generation to generation. Researcher and participant-recorded audio-visual media revealed that interactions prioritize speech, gesture and bodily interaction, above visual context. Analysis of the performed and narrated structures reveal some of the ways that people tacitly transfer bodily and felt-experiences and temporal patterns in storytelling. Experiments using digital and paperbased media, in situ rurally showed the ways that people in rural settings encounter and learn within their everyday experiences of the land. These analyses also demonstrate that own ontological and representational biases can constrain eliciting local meanings and analyzing transformations in meaning as we introduce media. Reflections on our method are of value to others who need to elicit requirements in communities whose literacy, social and spiritual logic and values profoundly differ from those in the knowledge systems that typify ICT design.

Respect as a Lens for the Design of AI Systems

“…Similarly, the act of representing knowledge or creating systems without the involvement of the community is fundamentally disrespectful, as what Dourish calls the 'colonial impulse' of ubiquitous computing [35] undermines the ways that people construct their own identities [9] and knowledge [106]. This can be seen also in projects such as incorporating favelas into the overarching data object of Google Maps -it fails to respect the social practices and desires of many of the people living there, or their desires for obscurity [67].…”

Disentangling participatory ICT design in socioeconomic development

“…Sociocultural preferences of communication, such as those emphasising orality, may require re-evaluation of both design and data gathering methods [4,65]. Beyond method, epistemological and ontological assumptions of researchers or designers must be questioned and alternate modes of organising knowledge should be examined [61,66,67].…”

Culture Effect on Requirements Elicitation Practice in Developing Countries

“…A lot of studies have been done in US, Europe and Japan. Requirement elicitation techniques in developed countries have been listed [26]. But there is still not a lot of research done in developing countries which has its unique social, economic and political circumstances.…”