Interesting people
One great thing about being in Cambridge at MSR is the people you can connect with who are either based here or are passing through. We do get interesting people visiting Cape Town, but they must be specifically visiting Cape Town; they are unlikely to be stopping off on their way to somewhere else. Cape Town is not a ‘via’ option, but Cambridge is. In the past few weeks I have met a lot of people who are interested in, or contributing to, ICT for development. Here are some of those people:
ALAN BLACKWELL: What doesn’t Alan do? Check out his web page. He was given GBP 1 Million by the UK government to look at ways in which ICT can be used effectively in the developing world. From that grew a number of projects, including Matt’s digital story telling for India. Alan also has great ideas on teaching interdisciplinary design; something I consider essential to the future of our discipline.
SUSAN DRAY: Susan Dray is an HCI practitioner with a huge passion for developing world issues. She was instrumental in putting together a development consortium panel at CHI in 2001 which inspired many of us into this field of research. She also gives the best tutorials on how to do fieldwork (ethnography / contextual inquiry) for HCI. If you ever get even half a chance to attend one of her tutorials, I would urge you to do so. When Susan visited on Monday we spent a long time chatting about the workshop she is running at CHI this year on development issues. The deadline for contributions is early January so, if you are to be at CHI, please submit something to the workshop.
STEPHANE BOYERA: I didn’t actually meet Stephane in person - just via telephone. He is in charge of the W3C’s Mobile Web Initiative. The goal is took look at developing standards for access to the mobile web in developing countries. The first event will be a workshop in India in early December. You can check out the presenters and information on-line.
Wednesday, 29 November 2006