Tapan Parikh, of UC Berkeley School of Information, spoke about a number of projects that are using mobile phone based technology to give small businesses the information they need to improve productivity. He argued that voice technology has distinct advantages over text, because it overcomes challenges of illiteracy while responding to a strong need people feel to be heard. 

Information is key for economic development and empowerment. But information is worthless unless it is also useable (leads to decisions the business owner can actually take), trusted (comes from a source he respects) and relevant (speaks about the issues he is facing). For information to be really empowering, it must also be two way: there must be ways for individuals to create content themselves.

Tapan described three current projects he is involved in:

Hisaab: Microfinance groups in India often suffer from poor paper based record keeping, making it difficult for the group to track loans and repayments. The Hissab software was designed with an interface suitable for those who may be illiterate and/or new to computing. The use of voice commands and responses in the local language, Tamil, prevented the software from feeling remote and inaccessible and contributed to the success of this initiative. 

Avaaj Otalo: Agricultural extension workers provide advice to farmers on pests, new techniques etc to help improve yields. But often they have limited reach, visiting areas only rarely, or perhaps lacking the expertise to respond to all the problems they encounter. Avaaj Otalo is a system for farmers to access relevant and timely agricultural information over the phone. By dialing a phone number and navigating through simple audio prompts, farmers can record questions, respond to others, or access content published by agricultural experts and institutions. The service has been hugely popular, with farmers willing to spend time listening to large amounts of material to find what they want. The opportunity to be broadcast was a major attraction, reflecting the desire to be heard and to create media rather than be a passive consumer of it.

Digital ICS: Smallholders' compliance with organic, fair-trade and quality requirements is usually measured via paper based internal inspections. The data uncovered by these is vital but often lost. Digital ICS is a mobile phone based application that allows inspectors to fill out the survey digitally, enhance it with visual evidence (e.g. from camera phones) and upload it onto a web application. This is being piloted with coffee farmers in Mexico. A key finding from the work is that farmers want to know who ends up drinking their coffee, what they pay for it and what they think about it. Greater links between producers and consumers may therefore be another area for this project to investigate.  

Jonathan Zittrain is a Visiting Professor at the Stanford School of Law. In his presentation he raised a number of concerns about current trends in online behavior. He suggested that these developments may undermine the practice of ‘civic technologies’, where unconnected individuals voluntarily come together to achieve something they could not do individually. 

The web is now full of opportunities to engage in tasks that somehow benefit a company or organization. At the most skilled end of the spectrum, there are sites such as Innocentive, a market place that organizations use to post specific problems they need solved; anyone can respond with their solution to win a cash prize. Then there are companies like LiveOps which draw their entire workforce from internet users who engage in call-centre tasks from home. There are also unskilled tasks available in exchange for extremely small amounts of pay; for example, Mechanical Turk gets workers to complete Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) such as labeling photos. ESP Game offers no pay at all but gets users to participate in its goal to label web images by turning this into a competitive game. Then there are activities we might not even realize could be beneficial to someone else – for example, creating hyperlinks in material you put online helps search engines to rank pages effectively.

Jonathan posited two kinds of concerns about these activities. Relating to participants themselves he is concerned about:

• Alienation: participants do not get to see the outcome of their work, but view a tiny part of the whole
• Moral valence: participants often have no idea who is hiring them and for what purpose
• Misappropriation: participants have no say in how their work is used
• Lack of rights: there is no protection for online workers – an individual can get laid off from LiveOps at any time, regardless of their time investment

He also set out some systemic concerns:

• Given the conditions of moral valence and misappropriation, the door is open for online users to be complicit in totalitarian government efforts to use the net to monitor and suppress (imagine Mechanical Turk being used to match protestor photos with citizen databases)
• There is likely to be a ‘race to the bottom’ – companies wanting to get tasks done in this way will operate wherever regulation protecting ‘workers’ is most lax
• Monetization of online tasks could mean the crowding out of voluntary contributions to the internet. Would so many people have freely devoted time to Wikipedia had there been a rival site offering pay for each entry?

Jonathan acknowledged that these are tough issues to address, but suggested a number of responses including: finding ways to apply labor standards so that those who invest a lot of time working on something like LiveOps have some protection; allowing workers to take their experience with them, so that it counts elsewhere if they get laid off; forcing companies to disclose the intended outcome of the overall task to enable users to make more informed decisions about how they use their time.