Questionbox.org has new content and images! A big thank you to our CTO Jon Gosier & Rohan Nigam, currently completing his MS in Computer Science at University of Houston, for making the updates.
This is the beginning of a new questionbox.org....watch this space in the Fall!
Jon spoke with The Guardian about Question Box and how it is being used to find out what Ugandans really want to know.
TEDGlobal: Mobile phone search service for Uganda
Jon Gosier of Appfrica has launched a simple project using a corp of mostly volunteers with mobile phones to find out what Ugandans want to know
A real-time list of questions Ugandans are asking community knowledge workers
One of the features of TEDGlobal was two sessions called TED University where attendees could give short presentations on ideas or projects they were working on. The Grameen Foundation recently contacted African designer, entrepreneur and venture capitalist Jon Gosier of Appfrica.org because they wanted to know: What do people in Africa want to know?
They knew if they opened up a hotline and offered to answer anyone's question about what they wanted to know that they would quickly be overwhelmed. Working with 'community knowledge workers' who were usually retirees looking for a way to give back to their community, people in a village in Uganda could ask these workers questions. The workers then would relay those questions back to operators using an offline internet application to find the answer in real-time. Gosier said:
We gathered so much insight into a part of the world that we don't know much about.
Passionate about data visualisations, Gosier also wanted to release the information in a way that easily showed where the questions were coming from and also the range of the topics. You can see the questions that are being asked in real time at the site, World Wants to Know. While the West and Gosier enjoys social networking tools like Facebook and many choices in terms of real-time communications, he was interested to offer something from "such a rural part of the world"
A visualisation of topics asked by Ugandans involved in the project
I spoke to him more about the project and it's aims, and here is what he had to say:
Jessica Griggs, reporter
Question Box CTO Jon Gosier got great coverage from Forbes.com.
TEDGlobal
A Google For Rural Africa
Bruce Upbin, 07.23.09, 6:00 PM ET
OXFORD, England -
Jonathan Gosier, one of the TED Fellows at the conference here, presented his project called QuestionBox that promises to bring answers to the curious in the most remote parts of the developing world. Gosier started by asking the question, how do we know what people want to know? Google knows what we want to know, and builds its search engine around those requests, but that service covers those of us in rich countries with widespread access to PCs and broadband. What about in rural Uganda?
With the help from the Grameen Foundation and a not-for-profit called OpenMind he staffed up a small call-center where mobile phone owners can call up and ask about weather, history, science, whatever they want. For those with no phones, QuestionBox sends men and women in easily identifiable T-shirts and hats into villages to take people's questions. Gosier showed a sweet video in which a farmer in Uganda walked into a town, and asked a volunteer sitting by a hut if the Egyptian pyramids were still standing. The volunteer got on the phone, registered the question with the call center, and gave the man the answer he wanted. Smiles all around. Check it out at questionbox.org.
Our Pune Question Boxes are being pelted by monsoon rains. Chief Engineer Rama Sundaram reports, "Here is what Pune is looking like now. Add in power cuts and because there is now power there is water being pumped ... Having said that, Pune is still nice!"
To counteract the rain, we have built a new rain shield for the Loni Question Box. When the rain gets really terrible, the Loni shopkeeper who looks after the Box hides it inside his shop/house.
What excites me the most about Question Box are the seemingly endless possibilities that it holds for enriching the lives of the disenfranchised. Apart from providing access to otherwise unavailable information, Question Box holds the potential to be used for Mobile Health and Commerce initiatives that could change the lives of rural villagers in unforeseen ways. For all of the people without access to any sort of medical facility, a Question Box system with established health protocols could save the lives of countless villagers. For people without access to credit or the services provided by banks, Question Box can provide a link to the global network of commerce, including the ability to receive remittances from family members that have moved to cities or other countries.
To learn more about Mobile Health and Commerce initiatives already operating in India, check out the following links.
M-Health: http://www.hmri.in/104_Advice.aspx
M-Commerce: https://www.obopay.com/corporate/press_releases/Grameen_Solutions_Obopay.shtml
Does anyone know anyone who lives in Andhra Pradesh? If so, please get in touch; we could use your help on a quick task.
Thanks!
Internet searching means that finding information mundane, obscure, or fantastically useful is just a few keystrokes away — but not if you're without a connection to the Internet (or can't read), both the norm for many of the world's poor. itwbennett writes "Rose Shuman developed a contraption for this under-served population called Question Box that is essentially a one-step-removed Internet search : 'A villager presses a call button on a physical intercom device, located in their village, which connects them to a trained operator in a nearby town who's sitting in front of a computer attached to the Internet. A question is asked. While the questioner holds, the operator looks up the answer on the Internet and reads it back. All questions and answers are logged. For the villager there is no keyboard to deal with. No complex technology. No literacy issues.' This week, Jon Gosier, of Appfrica, launched a web site called World Wants to Know that displays the QuestionBox questions being asked in real time. As Jon put it, it's allowing 'searching where Google can't.' And providing remarkable insight into the real information needs of off-the-grid populations."
QuestionBox get's Slashdotted!
First time available - listen to Open Mind adviser Sugata Mitra talk about the very first Question Boxes in this "vintage" BBC interview!
Driving around lost late at night in a U-Haul, Nathaniel Whittemore, Founding Director of the Center for Global Engagement at Northwestern University, realized what it's like to be in a bind without information.
"...That's why I'm so excited about projects that open access to information, such as Question Box , a service which allows people in rural villages to call an operator who then uses the Internet to help that caller find specific pieces of information they're looking for. It's simple, but I can see many applications where it could provide vital information for a segment of the population that would be otherwise more or less totally overlooked by modern telecommunications."
Although this is a reenactment, this was an actual question that was asked a few weeks ago. The caller wanted to know if the pyramids had been damaged or moved.
Under the tagline 'Realtime Web for the Bottom Billion', a new type of service for farmers is emerging.
Piloting in India and Uganda, Question Box "brings information to people who cannot or do not access the Internet directly." It "leaps over illiteracy, computer illiteracy, lack of networks, and language barriers."
Combining mobile phones with the power of the Internet, rural people can pose their questions to local call centers where operators research answers. The questions and answers are in local languages and, notably, don't require users to be able to read and write. ( Note, the Kothmale Internet Project in Sri Lanka did something similar by combining rural radio with questions and answers)
I really love this new illustration of the operators at work in Uganda.
Why types of questions have we received lately at Question Box?
Currently our service is being used as part of an Agricultural study with our partners at the Grameen and the Gates Foundations. So questions like the ones about livestock and farming are expected. However, it's always interesting for us when we get questions that don't fall into those categories. For instance, the question above about investment is particularly interesting to Question Box.
Why?
Because there are a lack of viable financial solutions and related education solutions for rural populations. Are there other students in this area that are interested in saving/investing? If not, can this particular student be motivated in some way to help us serve his community? Are there programs in place that can even facilitate this type of investment? 100.000 Ugandan Shillings is about fifty dollars and half to a third of the cost of average school fees here which is actually a lot of money in this particular region.
Great feature on QB from PCWorld.com...
Because many users are, to all intents and purposes, off-grid, some of the data Question Box has been collecting is priceless. When you allow rural people in developing countries to ask any question, what do they ask? What's important to them? Does it follow our health information model, or market prices idea, or an anticipated need for paid employment? Rose, Jon and the team continue to work through the data, but I can tell you that the results are not only cool, they're fascinating.
via pcworld.com
In both Uganda and India, the Question Box service receives a lot of health related questions. We are looking for medical professionals who are qualified to answer questions from the rural developing world. Here's a sample of recent unanswered medical queries from Uganda:
Can a person get swine fever / flu when he eats pork?
What is the best drug for candida?
I have chronic head ache and I can't even carry anything on my head and I get thirsty all the time?
The man developed high blood pressure and later a wound on his leg and its not curing yet he has been at Mulago Hospital but no change what should he do?
What are the dangerous signs of pregnancy in women?
Why do some women have deep voices like men?
If you're interested in helping out, please contact us !
An app we've been using internally for a long time goes public!
Recently, I began thinking about the data we were collecting and of ways to make it more accessible. Because there was a real time-input (people calling the service), I decided I would try to offer a real-time feed of the questions coming in from people who have no computers, sometimes even no phones. How can they not have phones you ask? Well, in our current pilot with Grameen-Uganda, Question Box works by sending people called Community Knowledge Workers into the field to aggregate questions from rural communities. The CKW then dials a call center (located at Appfrica Labs) with operators on standby waiting to look up the answers. As the operators enter a search (complete with the demographic info of the question asker) the application is populated with those queries, as they occur in real-time. If you’ve ever been to Google’s Mountain View campus, they have a monitor displaying search terms as they are being entered by billions of people around the world, this is the same general concept applied to people who normally live their lives far beyond reach of the web.
The application is called World Wants to Know or WW2K. It’s an exercise in data visualization and offers insight as to the types of information these populations are interested in. Before you ask what the answers are, we do give them to the callers but to protect their identities as well as the interests of our pilot partners, that information (unfortunately) cannot be shared. Over the next few weeks I hope to add many new visualizations to the site based on the data we’re collecting in India and Uganda.
via appfrica.net
In his latest podcast, Jon talks about the recent focus group on Question Box Uganda, our pilot with Grameen and how it all fits in to the big SMS suite of apps Google launched last week. Listen to it below.
Here's a few shots from the extensive focus group this week. The CEO of Grameen Foundation Alex Counts was there, as were Whitney Gantt, Eric Cantor (Applab), David Edelstein and Kiki Noviandi (Applab Indonesia). The format worked well with two focus groups held throughout the day.
There were two presentations on “What is it like to be a CKW?” and one presentation from our operators on “What is it like to be an AQB Operator?”.
For the focus groups, essentially we all sat around in a circle, Nat, Barbara and I being in separate groups with between 15 and 20 CKWs. Each operator I think was also assigned to a separate group which allowed them to take notes and defend themselves on occasion. The operator in my group, Lydia, did a great job of not being defensive while pointing out specifics about the service and how we are working to improve. Then the CKWs all introduced themselves, where they work, and answered a random question that they had on cards that were handed out earlier. The questions were:
“What excites you most about AQB?’
“What is the most interesting question you received?”
“What service would you like to see next from Applab/Grameen?” (or how can we improve the ones you already have)
“What challenges do you face as a CKW?”
“What Applab service is most popular?”
FINDINGS
The good news for us is that the most popular services were AQB and 6001 (Google SMS Search). The common gripe about 6001 is that information wasn’t thorough enough and lacked the ‘human’ interaction of AQB. The most common gripe about AQB was about the time it took to get a response back where 6001 usually takes only a minute to respond. Overall the feedback was positive as was the general response following Google, Grameen and MTN revealing that they were partnering to deliver the SMS applications (SMS Search, Google Trader, and Google Tips) the day prior.
These are really exciting times for Question Box!
Imagine a world where the only hospital is a half-day walk on foot over a muddy road. Question Box is a Lifeline for Help reaching thousands of people in villages around the world.For the price of a cup of coffee, you can change the course of someone’s life. With your support, together we make it right and help millions more people. Answer the Call, Join the movement at QuestionBox.org
Question Box is a project of Open Mind, a US-registered 501(c)3 non profit organization.
