Sean Blagsvedt

Kelsa+: Digital literacy for low-income office workers

Almost all formal organizations employ service staff for tasks such as housekeeping, security, maintenance, and transport at their office facility. Many of these workers earn wages in line with menial-labor salaries in their respective countries. They have few on-the-job opportunities to upgrade their skills or learn new ones. Kelsa+ is an initiative through which organizations in developing countries can increase digital literacy and skill development among such low-income workers, through the provision of an Internet-connected PC for the service staffs free, unrestricted use when off duty. We study a Kelsa+ pilot implementation in Bangalore, India, involving an office facility with 35 service staff. In a preliminary exploration over 18 months, we find that at a cost that is negligible for the organization, workers use of the Kelsa+ PC is high and can deliver benefits both to themselves and to the office. For workers, broad gains were seen in confidence, self-esteem, and basic digital literacy, while a few individuals experienced improvements in second-language (English) proficiency and career opportunities. These early results point in the direction of a cost-effective ICT4D initiative that could be run in the developing-country offices of the very organizations promoting development off-site.

OWeB: A Framework for Offline Web Browsing

Internet browsing is highly dependent on the real-time network availability and speed. This becomes a significant constraint when browsing over slow and intermittent networks. In this paper, we describe a readily deployable system designed for Web browsing over slow, intermittent networks - OWeB, that is minimally dependent on the real-time network availability and requires no changes on the part of the Web servers. The system subscribes to really simple syndication (RSS) feeds from Web servers and pre-fetches all new content as specified in the feed. Since the RSS feeds are published by Web servers they give accurate information about the new and updated content. Efficiency of network usage is achieved by employing standard techniques to handle intermittent networks, and near-complete utilization of all downloaded content results in better resilience in case of interrupted data downloads. We observed a co-relation between the items in an RSS feed and the homepage of the corresponding Web site (i.e.) the feed items essentially define the content section of the homepage. As part of OWeB, we developed an algorithm for automatically extracting the template of home pages and then locally stitching the feed items into the template. This results in Web sites being up-to-date and fully available offline and bandwidth savings, as we only need to download the RSS feed to construct the homepage

SMSBlogging: blog-on-the-street public art project

In this paper we describe the experimental set-up and execution of a public art project. The aim was to explore the use of SMSBlogging for the purpose of community building and creative self-expression. We also discuss the results from this experiment and show our findings from six blog-on-the-street art acts in Bangalore, India, that introduce SMSBlogging technology in an iterative design process.