Polly Gaster's Page

Dear all

SANGONet (South Africa NGO Forum) has been coordinating a regional research project into ICT4D issues in different countries in the region. Reports are produced, and then debated in Forums in the respective country. So I want to give you a quick report on the Mozambique Forum, which as you know from SANGONet took place on 30 June. SANGONet also circulated the address for downloading our report, so maybe some of you have already had a look - it's available in both Portuguese and English… Continue

As you all know, I attended a 2-day workshop on HCI for International Development on 4-5 April in Boston, followed by a 4-day international conference – CHI 2009. HCI and CHI mean the same thing – Computer-Human Interaction. Here are some more thoughts to share - sorry it's a bit long!

The aim of the workshop was to promote the use of HCI concepts in a development context – in particular, to learn about and study the needs of people in developing countries and look for solutions. There were thr… Continue

The conference in Boston was about Computer-Human Interaction (CHI 2009). The idea of CHI was born out of an educational and scientific society called the Association for Computing Machinery, which established a Special Interest Group o nthe subject (ACM SIGCHI). It took me several days to get all these initials sorted out.
The aim of SIGCHI is to broaden discussion of IT as such, to include human technology and emphasise that the end user of computer research and design is a human being - and h… Continue

I was with Anupama this morning when I had failed to get on to the telecenntre.org site, as the wireless connection at the conference centre suddenly got overloaded. So she said she wd try to get on herslef - I'm glad to see she did.Since then Silvia helpfully suggested that I shd write on Notepad first and then cut and paste to avoid losing stuff, which is a v good idea - but I am not following it for the simple reason that I am not only using a new computer for the first time (hence all 4the t… Continue

When I wrote my blog I really wanted to put the point on the discussion forum, but I didn´t know how to do it so I put it on the blog instead. And now I find I got 4 nings as a reward for my technical incompetence (or for the un-user friendliness of the website for those of us who are less quick brained! Not bad?

So this has to be a good day, the sun is shining at last and I hope my cold will pass. Most of all, I hope we will reach good practical conclusions to take home with us, as we outlined… Continue