Online communities enable people to access and share information, but they are out of reach for poor and isolated communities around the world. Mobile phones have the potential to overcome the PC’s accessibility, affordability, and familiarity barriers. However, most mobile information services limit rural populations to being passive knowledge consumers, not active producers. My dissertation explored the design and usage of voice-based social media for rural communities. My collaborators and I designed Avaaj Otalo (“voice stoop”) a voice message board application that allows small-scale farmers in India to share agricultural advice by posting, listening to, and replying to others' messages using any phone. AO has been live and accessed by thousands since 2009. In all, we have deployed voice message boards with 8 partners in 6 states across India working in agriculture, labor rights, women's empowerment, and education, logging over 100,000 calls from over 10,000 callers. This talk presents research guided by three questions for designing systems in this context: First, how do you design effective UIs for navigating audio content? Second, what community dynamics emerge? Third, how do you support sustained community engagement? I will also present and demo Awaaz.De, the software platform we have developed for hosting voice-based social media applications in India. Awaaz.De follows an "Internet for a few, voice for the many" model, where end-users browse content on voice message boards over any phone, and community managers use a web-based administration interface to moderate the message boards, annotate voice messages with author information and content tags, route messages to responders, and broadcast messages to reach wider audiences. Bio Neil Patel is co-founder and CEO of Awaaz.De, a company that develops social information platforms for the majority of world's people who do not have access to the Internet. He completed a Ph.D in Computer Science from Stanford University, and B.S. degrees in Computer Science and Business Administration from UC Berkeley. He currently commutes between his homes in California and Ahmedabad, Gujarat.
