A community-initiated website development project: promoting a San community campsite initiative

Abstract

Digital services have not been truly available for marginalised rural communities, especially in the Global South. Rural communities often lack technical infrastructures, awareness about available services and the necessary skills to use them to their full potential. In this paper, we present a collaborative web-site development project initiated by a rural San community in Namibia. The website intends to support a current community livelihood activity of setting up a campground next to their village. Embedded in a community-based research approach we have deployed co-design methods and techniques to establish a consensus-based business description, including target market, activities, pricing and promotion strategies. Co-design techniques enabled the community to examine and refine their conceptualisation of their business endeavour as well as anticipate target audiences and operational scenarios. A basic website has been created including the agreed upon content. Further efforts include a wider dissemination of the information as well as possible inclusion in global broker websites. We conclude with a reflection on the co-design process providing a researcher and a community perspective.

A Systematic Review and Thematic Analysis of Community-Collaborative Approaches to Computing Research

“…Type of Technology Developed: Projects focused on a wide variety of technological artifacts and systems, including artifacts such as mobile or computer apps [26,28,35,75,89,100,110,114,117,120,126], websites [47,48,74,106,119], robots [88,93], and drones [131] as well as systems for knowledge management [13,72,130], air quality monitoring [4,64], co-operative canoe paddling [31], among others.…”

“…Most researchers from the included articles partnered with an existing community-based organization or representative group to identify and connect with participants for their projects (n=31, 66%) (in some studies, the first group of participants acted as intermediaries, recruiting additional participants [100,130]). Some researchers were engaged directly by a community themselves [64,72,74], while others allowed individual participants to self-select by sharing advertisements through social media and posting in places of assembly for a community (e.g., invite-only chat groups [2]).…”

“…The majority of included articles described efforts by researchers to attend to power differentials between researchers and communities by elevating the voice of communities (n=27, 57%). Some articles emphasized the importance of researchers providing assurances to participants that their community knowledge is of equal value to the collaboration as the knowledge of researchers [43,48,74,84,88,114,116,137]. In projects involving people with a disability, researchers noted the considerable effort required to adapt methods to enable and support participation [52,84,93].…”