Designing interactive mobile services to promote civic participation in northern Uganda
Aris Alissandrakis, Marcelo Milrad · KTH Publication Database DiVA (KTH Royal Institute of Technology) · 2013
This chapter presents the activities and outcomes of the "People's Voices: Developing Cross Media Services to Promote Citizens Participation in Local Governance Activities" project. The aims of the project were a) to identify and describe a number of cross media services that can be used to promote citizens’ participation in political decisions and civic activities, and b) to develop a conceptual design and a prototype system of such a service. The project included a number of field trips from Sweden to Uganda, and used participatory design and ethnographic techniques for requirements elicitation, actively involving the different stakeholders. The developed system allows people in Uganda to use their mobile phones to submit reports of irregularities in local governance or poor services delivery using an interactive voice menu interface. We hope that our specific contribution will emphasize on how novel ways of integrating and using ICT can provide opportunities to encourage and facilitate civic engagement in North Uganda. The potential massive adoption of the kind of interactive mobile services described in this book chapter can be used in unique ways to provide opportunities to make governmental services more innovative, transparent and cost-effective, as well as to encourage citizens to become more engaged and goal-focused for the common good of their society.