Interactions - September/October 2010

[ 6] Smyth, T., Kumar, S., Medhi, I., and Toyama, K. “Where There’s a Will There’s a Way: Mobile Media Sharing in Urban India.” In Proceedings of ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2010): 753–762.

September + October 2010

summer of 2007, I worked on a project with Jatan Trust, a pioneering NGO for the organic-farming movement in Gujarat. We worked on developing an innovative organic certification system in which we co-designed the standards for certification (the very definition of what it meant to farm organically in Gujarat) with local farmers. Through the project, I came into contact with many of Gujarat’s most advanced organic farmers. A question I began routinely asking was, “How did you get started farming organically?” Almost invariably, I would get the same one-word answer: “Sarvadamanbhai.” Sarvadaman Patel is an organic farmer in Gujarat, running a 40-acre marvel outside the city of Anand. Sarvadaman came from an upper-class family and received a Western education. He studied agronomy and settled back in Gujarat to experiment with farming practices he learned from reading the likes of Sir Albert Howard and Masanobu Fukuoka. Over the course of decades he mastered many aspects of organic agriculture, and other farmers took notice. Soon he was spending much of his time giving tours to farmers who would travel great distances to see his operation. Many of today’s committed organic farmers in Gujarat got their start from an inspirational visit to Sarvadaman’s farm.

After I first met Babubhai, I gushed to the staff of DSC about how impressed I was by him, how I thought he was a rare diamond in the rough. One of the staffers responded by saying, “He is impressive, but not rare. All over Gujarat, there are thousands of Babubhais.” It is my belief that leveraging the Sarvadamans and Babubhais is the key to sustainable and impactful ICT4D interventions. Supporting lead users with the appropriate tools to amplify their natural intent, capabilities, and influence is what will drive diffusion and ultimately development—economically or otherwise.

interactions

a thought-leader. Near the other extreme is Uncle Kishore: conservative, resistant to change, skeptical. In evolving Avaaj Otalo in terms of its capabilities and value proposition, I realized I should no longer think about what “farmers” need. I decided to design specifically for Babubhai.

There are at least two advantages in designing for lead users. The first has to do with motivation. I am not going to easily convince farmers like my uncle that they should use Avaaj Otalo, but Babubhai hardly needs any convincing at all—he is already motivated. While many farmers may need Avaaj Otalo, Babubhai also wants it. At CHI’ 10, Tom Smyth and his colleagues at MSR India highlighted the distinction between needs and desires in their study of mobile video sharing in Bangalore, India [ 6]. They pointed out that while many ICT4D projects are developing mobile services for health or education, users are highly motivated to be entertained. They routinely overcome a slew of obstacles (cost, time, legality, even the complexity of the computing device itself) to meet this desire. To attract use of a new service or practice, addressing a clear need isn’t enough; users should have a genuine willingness.

Smyth and his colleagues also suggested ICT4D projects may be overlooking the importance of generating demand for a service while focusing on making that service more easily accessible for scalability purposes [ 6]. But catering the technology intervention to a lead user’s wants and needs can drive both demand and scaling up. By focusing on delighting the Babubhais of the world, we shift the focus from diffusion at scale to serving a small but dedicated user community.

Ultimately I predict nurturing this community can indirectly meet the scale challenge. In Indian villages, where the social fabric is very dense, lead users like Babubhai hold a lot of sway as thought leaders. Diffusing Avaaj Otalo through the empowerment of lead users decentralizes the process, and the word-of-mouth approach may help the message stick more effectively than when the technology is pushed by outsiders. As a researcher, I come from another culture, have no social capital in the local community, and my personality is not necessarily the most persuasive. Thought leaders like Babubhai win on all of those counts.

I have seen the power of the persuasive farmer firsthand during my time in India. During the

AbOut the AuthOr Neil Patel is a Ph.D. stu-dent in computer science at Stanford University, where he works in the HCI group. His research explores the design and usage of IC Ts for under-served communities; specifically, he works on social software for agricultural communities in rural