Supporting Collaboration with Non-Literate Forest Communities in the Congo-Basin
Michalis Vitos, Julia Altenbuchner, Matthias Stevens, Gillian Conquest, Jérôme Lewis, Muki Haklay · 2017
Providing indigenous communities with ICT tools and methods for collecting and sharing their Traditional Ecological Knowledge is increasingly recognised as an avenue for improvements in environmental governance and social-environmental justice. In this paper we show how we carried out a usability engineering effort in the "wild" context of the Congolese rainforest -- designing, evaluating and iteratively improving novel collaborative data collection interfaces for non-literate forest communities that can subsequently be used to facilitate communication and information sharing with logging companies. Working in this context necessitates adopting a thoroughly flexible approach to the design, development, introduction and evaluation of technology and the modes of interaction it offers. We show that we have improved participant accuracy from about 75% towards 95% and provide a set of guidelines for designing and evaluating ICT solutions in "extreme circumstances" -- which hold lessons for CSCW, HCI and ICT4D practitioners dealing with similar challenges.