in ICTD, however, is interdisciplinary collaboration—working with scholars and practitioners from many different fields. Sociologists, ethnographers, and anthropologists, for example, can provide valuable information about the communities intended to benefit from ICTD. This information, regarding such things as cultural practices, traditions, languages, beliefs, and livelihoods, must guide the design and implementation processes for successful solutions in ICTD.

Economists and political scientists play important roles in ICTD as well by designing new economic models, marketing strategies, and governmental policies that affect the economic viability and sustainability of technological interventions. Social scientists also play a crucial role in evaluating the impacts and outcomes of ICTD projects using both qualitative and quantitative methods. They observe and predict how people in developing regions interact with technology, and they aim to affect social systems for adopting technology-aided solutions without disruption to the community. Thus computer scientists working in the field of ICTD must quickly learn to work with this variety of scholarly players, to benefit from their points of view, and to complement them wherever possible.

ICTD does not only cross disciplines; it also transcends the boundaries of academia and involves multiple sectors. This reality obliges ICTD researchers to work with practitioners, government representatives, multilateral institutions such as the United Nations, nonprofits, nongovernmental organizations, and even the private sector, whose interest in ICTD begins as it seeks access to emerging markets and new avenues for corporate social responsibility. Many of these sectors’ people have been addressing the challenges of development for decades, and their efforts should profit from the addition of professionals in CS and related fields who will contribute new perspectives and their useful styles of rigor, critique, and innovation.

ICTD is therefore a truly global undertaking with a grand vision. It brings together numerous players, across geographic, socioeconomic, regional, disciplinary, and sectoral boundaries,

although the
cause is noble
and the impact
can be large, iCtD
must ultimately
be judged on its
research value—
and in particular, its
research value in
computer science.

who must work together if we are to improve the quality of life for the least privileged on our planet.

the many Challenges of iCtD

Given its enormous ambitions and multidisciplinary requirements, ICTD presents its researchers with a variety of challenges. They include adapting to unfamiliar cultures and traditions, ensuring accessibility to local languages and multiple levels of literacy, overcoming the barriers of misinformation and mistrust of technology, creating solutions that work within the local infrastructure, and many more. For example, networking must work in circumstances with low bandwidth, intermittent bandwidth, or no bandwidth at all. Computers must operate reliably in environments characterized by dust, heat, humidity, and inexperienced users. User interfaces must accommodate semiliterate and illiterate users. And software applications must be sufficiently intelligent to provide useful, accessible, and relevant services to populations that might be interacting with a computing system for the very first time.

Further, ICTD field tests often require considerable ingenuity, whether they involve accessing target communities, setting up long-term studies, transporting equipment, observing the logistics and legalities of export control laws, addressing safety concerns, and establishing trust and common ground with partnering organizations that cross cultural and geographic boundaries. And to begin with, researchers must be entrepreneurial in obtaining funding for their research, as ICTD is not yet an established field with reliable funding sources.

Although the cause is noble and the impact can be large, ICTD must ultimately be judged on its research value—and in particular, its research value in CS. Like other multidisciplinary fields, ICTD must be simultaneously present in multiple communities, each of which may have it own value system for research. Even within computer science, ICTD is judged differently by different CS communities.

In the human-computer interaction (HCI) community—for example, at the annual ACM CHI conferences— ICTD has been well received, as HCI