People are increasingly sharing information on social media during disaster events. This information could be valuable to emergency responders, but there remain challenges for using it to inform response efforts---including filtering relevant information from the large volumes of noise. Previous research has largely focused on identifying information that can contribute to a generalized concept of situational awareness. Our work explores the value of approaching this problem from a different perspective---one of actionablity---with the idea that information relevance may vary across responder role, domain, and other factors. This approach asks how we can get the right information to the right person at the right time? We interviewed and surveyed diverse responders to understand what "actionable" information is, allowing that actionability might differ from one responder to another. Through the findings, we (a) offer a nuanced understanding of actionability and differentiate it from situational awareness; (b) describe responders' perspective of what distinguishes good information when making rapid judgments; and (c) suggest opportunities for augmenting social media use to highlight information that needs immediate attention. We offer researchers an opportunity to frame different models of actionability to suit the requirements of a responding role.
In resource-constrained economies, lack of financial participation prohibits women's economic empowerment and opportunities to improve circumstances. With the advent of Digital Financial Services (DFS), a growing emphasis has been placed on the possible positive impact of DFS on lives of individuals. However, for people to understand, adopt, and use DFS, they require certain prerequisites and enablers. In this paper, we use a mixed methods approach to analyze the gendered barriers in the readiness for and adoption of DFS as well as the impact of gendered roles in curtailing or enhancing the same. We present our analysis of 51 semi-structured interviews to evaluate the affordances or, lack thereof, in affordability of funds, authority of transactions, access to technological devices, and agency of social and cultural mobility-all of which are prerequisites to fully utilizing DFS. We discuss the sociocultural and religious context in Pakistan that underpins some of these gendered barriers and the perceived views of both men and women.
In the last decade, billions of people worldwide have upgraded from basic 2G feature phones to data-enabled 4G smartphones. In most cases, people upgrade in areas with 4G coverage (typically cities and large towns), but increasingly, people choose to upgrade in areas that only have 2G coverage or no cellular coverage at all. This counterintuitive behavior -upgrading your phone despite living in an area that does not actively support many of the features of that new device -is the focus of this work.We investigate the rates and reasons for 4G upgrades and adoption in two extremely remote areas in Indonesia and the Philippines. Our mixed-methods approach combines the quantitative analysis of several years of mobile phone registration logs with the qualitative analysis of multiple interviews in one of these communities. We learn that users are rapidly switching from 2G to 4G technology and skipping 3G entirely; the data suggest that these villages will soon have sufficient 4G phone adoption to justify the investment required to upgrade base stations to 4G technology. The interviews suggest people are making these switches primarily to support consumption of media such as games, videos, and music. Similarly, users switch devices because of damage, often leading to downgrades to more resilient feature phones. We also find that, despite the general value seen in more modern 4G phones, 2G phones are more shared and more active on the network.
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