Question Box was a featured technology presented at UNESCO World Press Freedom Day in Tunis, Tunisa May 3-5, 2012. In developing, emerging, and conflict/post-conflict countries, we demonstrated how Question Boxes can connect the local media to citizens safely and efficiently. Question Boxes are useful both to get tips and reporting from citizens on the ground, and to give citizens a point of access to learn the latest news updates live.

Check out our slide presentation below! If you are a news media outlet, please get in touch if you would like to use Question Box for citizen outreach.

Question Box will be represented on a panel at UNESCO World Press Freedom Day in Tunis, Tunisia on May 4th. Presenters will share “Innovations in Gathering and Sharing News.”

At Question Box, we’ve always seen a natural fit between media and the Question Box approach, both as way for the media to get information from citizens, and for citizens to get information from the media. We will post our slideshow after the presentation. If you are going to be at the conference, please get in touch!

Rose Shuman, founder of Question Box, talks about technology for development and the way technology has changed ideas of scale and shattered old business modelsat the UK Guardian ACTIVATE summit in New York City. View the video here.

Open Mind—Question Box has been selected as a poster presenter for the 2010 International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies. This is our first published paper!

The ICTD is a conference on ICT4D (Information and Communication Technologies for Development). The conference is “a forum for researchers, practitioners, and all those with interests in the use of information and communication technologies for development practice”. Click here to read more about the ICTD201: http://www.ictd2010.org/

We will be presenting a paper titled, AppLab Question Box: A Live Voice Information Service in Rural Uganda, as a poster. The paper was coauthored by Nathaniel F. Futterman, the Uganda Project Coordinator, and Rose S. Shuman, the Founder and CEO of Open Mind. It is an overview of a pilot program where we set up a hotline in two districts in rural Uganda from April through September 2009. The pilot tested the interest and viability of a live agriculture/general hotline in rural Mbale and Bushneyi, gathered information on the informational needs and interests of the target population, and compared a live, voice-delivered information system against an alternative, SMS-based (text messaging) system. The pilot proved the possibility of running a live, local-language hotline using a simple and inexpensive infrastructure. It also showed a unique perspective of the issues of trust surrounding information provision and the role of intermediaries in facilitating trust in this setting.

The ICTD conference is being hosted by the UNESCO chair in ICT4D and the multidisciplinary ICT4D Research Centre at Royal Hollowy, the University of London, this December 14^th and 15^th, 2010. Come check out our presentation if you’re around!

Rose Shuman, founder of Open Mind and Question Box Project will be speaking at an exciting Africa Gathering in London themed “World leading technologies changing Africa” on July 3rd, 2010.

Africa Gathering brings technophiles, thinkers, entrepreneurs, innovators and everybody else together to talk about positive change in sustainable development, technology, social networking, health, education and good governance in Africa. More info…