Sangeet Swara

Abstract

Interactive voice forums have emerged as a promising platform for people in developing regions to record and share audio messages using low-end mobile phones. However, one of the barriers to the scalability of voice forums is the process of screening and categorizing content, often done by a dedicated team of moderators. We present Sangeet Swara, a voice forum for songs and cultural content that relies on the community of callers to curate high-quality posts that are prioritized for playback to others. An 11-week deployment of Sangeet Swara found broad and impassioned usage, especially among visually impaired users. We also conducted a follow-up experiment, called Talent Hunt, that sought to reduce reliance on toll-free telephone lines. Together, our deployments span about 53,000 calls from 13,000 callers, who submitted 6,000 posts and 150,000 judgments of other content. Using a mixed-methods analysis of call logs, audio content, comparison with outside judges, and 204 automated phone surveys, we evaluate the user experience, the strengths and weaknesses of community moderation, financial sustainability, and the implications for future systems.

Disentangling participatory ICT design in socioeconomic development

“…Where the initiative is successful, lack of local technical skills and/or resources may mean that the community becomes dependent on outside resources to maintain it. The introduction and subsequent withdrawal of technical resources and new ways of interacting can cause considerable pain for already vulnerable communities [62]. Other source of failure includes aforementioned bungee-research and ensuing design-reality gaps [16,27,42]; adoption of technology-focused positions [59]; ignoring the community's ability to absorb and make use of technology; or insufficient attention to political, social and economic dynamics which may stand in the way of intended impacts [18].…”

Examining Security and Privacy Research in Developing Regions

“…Religious values also shape privacy behaviors that in turn could influence the technology adoption and use. For example, while Sangeet Swara, a voice forum dedicated to songs, jokes, and poems, received instant adoption by low-income people in rural India [142], Songline-a similar system in Pakistan-failed to attract enough interest because users were worried about the confidentiality of songs that anyone could access [120], probably due to controversial religious views towards certain types of music [132].…”

The Space of Possibilities

“…Telco partnerships are difficult, however-an issue that is rarely addressed fully in research pilots [2,6,25,26,36,37,40,41,48,49]. In fact only two or three of our dozens of interviewees reported positive stories about relationships between telcos and social technology startup initiatives.…”

“…Systems that have been proposed in CHI and alternative arenas based on these technologies [3,6,25,26,36,37,40,41,48,49] carry, in most of sub-Saharan Africa, an implementation burden to release or maintain at scale that often eclipses usability constraints. The debate from the first decade of this century about whether SMS or IP would be more empowering has no winner: both approaches are accessible primarily to the most powerful actors.…”