The Question Box has just made its debut in Manjiri, a town outside of Pune. Question Box engineers Satish and Sachin (on left, Sachin with mask) are shown with the grocery story proprietor.
Satish's sister has just joined as a community awareness worker, and she will be circulating amongst the population to educate them on the Question Box. We immediately got questions on poisonous snakes and the price of Toor Dahl.
Although this is a reenactment, this was an actual question that was asked a few weeks ago. The caller wanted to know if the pyramids had been damaged or moved.
Why types of questions have we received lately at Question Box?
Currently our service is being used as part of an Agricultural study with our partners at the Grameen and the Gates Foundations. So questions like the ones about livestock and farming are expected. However, it’s always interesting for us when we get questions that don’t fall into those categories. For instance, the question above about investment is particularly interesting to Question Box.
Why?
Because there are a lack of viable financial solutions and related education solutions for rural populations. Are there other students in this area that are interested in saving/investing? If not, can this particular student be motivated in some way to help us serve his community? Are there programs in place that can even facilitate this type of investment? 100.000 Ugandan Shillings is about fifty dollars and half to a third of the cost of average school fees here which is actually a lot of money in this particular region.
In both Uganda and India, the Question Box service receives a lot of health related questions. We are looking for medical professionals who are qualified to answer questions from the rural developing world. Here’s a sample of recent unanswered medical queries from Uganda:
Can a person get swine fever / flu when he eats pork?
What is the best drug for candida?
I have chronic head ache and I can’t even carry anything on my head and I get thirsty all the time?
The man developed high blood pressure and later a wound on his leg and its not curing yet he has been at Mulago Hospital but no change what should he do?
What are the dangerous signs of pregnancy in women?
Why do some women have deep voices like men?
If you’re interested in helping out, please contact us !
An app we’ve been using internally for a long time goes public!
Recently, I began thinking about the data we were collecting and of ways to make it more accessible. Because there was a real time-input (people calling the service), I decided I would try to offer a real-time feed of the questions coming in from people who have no computers, sometimes even no phones. How can they not have phones you ask? Well, in our current pilot with Grameen-Uganda, Question Box works by sending people called Community Knowledge Workers into the field to aggregate questions from rural communities. The CKW then dials a call center (located at Appfrica Labs) with operators on standby waiting to look up the answers. As the operators enter a search (complete with the demographic info of the question asker) the application is populated with those queries, as they occur in real-time. If you’ve ever been to Google’s Mountain View campus, they have a monitor displaying search terms as they are being entered by billions of people around the world, this is the same general concept applied to people who normally live their lives far beyond reach of the web.
The application is called World Wants to Know or WW2K. It’s an exercise in data visualization and offers insight as to the types of information these populations are interested in. Before you ask what the answers are, we do give them to the callers but to protect their identities as well as the interests of our pilot partners, that information (unfortunately) cannot be shared. Over the next few weeks I hope to add many new visualizations to the site based on the data we’re collecting in India and Uganda.
via appfrica.net
In his latest podcast, Jon talks about the recent focus group on Question Box Uganda, our pilot with Grameen and how it all fits in to the big SMS suite of apps Google launched last week. Listen to it below.
Here’s a few shots from the extensive focus group this week. The CEO of Grameen Foundation Alex Counts was there, as were Whitney Gantt, Eric Cantor (Applab), David Edelstein and Kiki Noviandi (Applab Indonesia). The format worked well with two focus groups held throughout the day.
There were two presentations on “What is it like to be a CKW?” and one presentation from our operators on “What is it like to be an AQB Operator?”.
For the focus groups, essentially we all sat around in a circle, Nat, Barbara and I being in separate groups with between 15 and 20 CKWs. Each operator I think was also assigned to a separate group which allowed them to take notes and defend themselves on occasion. The operator in my group, Lydia, did a great job of not being defensive while pointing out specifics about the service and how we are working to improve. Then the CKWs all introduced themselves, where they work, and answered a random question that they had on cards that were handed out earlier. The questions were:
“What excites you most about AQB?’
“What is the most interesting question you received?”
“What service would you like to see next from Applab/Grameen?”
(or how can we improve the ones you already have)
“What challenges do you face as a CKW?”
“What Applab service is most popular?”
FINDINGS
The good news for us is that the most popular services were AQB and 6001 (Google SMS Search). The common gripe about 6001 is that information wasn’t thorough enough and lacked the ‘human’ interaction of AQB. The most common gripe about AQB was about the time it took to get a response back where 6001 usually takes only a minute to respond. Overall the feedback was positive as was the general response following Google, Grameen and MTN revealing that they were partnering to deliver the SMS applications (SMS Search, Google Trader, and Google Tips) the day prior.
These are really exciting times for Question Box!
Question Box’s Nat Futterman and QB Uganda operators Sarah and Fiona hard at work.
Becky Hurwitz, Michael Manoochehri and Charlene Chen of Berkley’s I-School visit the Question Box call center at Appfrica Labs in Kampala, Uganda.
