Calling all journalists...

My name is Murali Shanmugavelan. I head the 'information society' project at Panos London - a non-profit institute that works with the media and other communicators to foster debate on global development issues. I previously worked at the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation in my native India.

Panos London does various things, from working directly with journalists in developing countries to explaining why donor agencies must view communication as an integral part of development. But our fundamental belief is that only by including the voices and views of people most affected by these issues will lasting solutions be found.

Enough of the NGO speak! What's this blog about? Well, there's no doubt that the world of information and communication technologies (like mobile phones and the internet), the policies that govern them and their impacts on 'ordinary people' are changing rapidly. But the issues at stake - and the negotiations around them - are often highly technical and far from transparent.

Journalists are in a unique position of being able to objectively report on, and spark public debate around, such developments. We know this first-hand, from our work with Southern journalists at the World Summit on the Information Society in November 2005.

So I've decided to dedicate a blog to these issues. My intention is to provide a no-nonsense commentary on topical issues that are in danger of eluding the media spotlight. I'm not a journalist. But I do feel that I have something relevant to offer. So I'm asking journalists - particularly those in developing countries - to share your views and experiences. And if there's a story I'm missing, don't hesitate to let me know!

Comments

[Rina Mukherji]

This is an interesting development that I thought you should know about:::

Rina

Feat Oscar Project
An exercise in ICT, agriculture and society

July 2006

Rico Lie
Media Anthropologist
Department of Communication Science,Wageningen University, The Netherlands
[email protected]

D. Balasubramaniam
Manager-Information Systems
French Institute of Pondicherry (IFP)
[email protected]

This article discusses OSCAR project's aim of integration of user & technical perspective on the development and use of an open source based weed identification software programme.

FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) has opened democratic spaces for the participation of civil society, thus creating potential for developing ICT tools to address problems at local level. The OSCAR-project (Open Source Simple Computer for Agriculture in Rural Areas) is an initiative from European and South Asian Institutions to develop Open Source ICT solutions to assist decision making in agriculture.

OSCAR is a collaborative effort, initiated by IFP (French Institute of Pondicherry) with the Rice-Wheat Consortium for Indo-Gangetic Plains from India, CIRAD (Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement) from France and the Communication and Innovation Studies Group from Wageningen University in The Netherlands as partners in the action. The project is co-financed by the European Commission's Asia ICT programme under the 'get-in-touch and keep-in-touch' activities in the focus areas of agriculture and society.

The project aims at building an open source based weed identification system for the major weed species for rice-wheat cropping systems of the Indo-Gangetic plains, covering Pakistan, India, Nepal and Bangladesh. Conceived as a decision support system for the target groups, the OSCAR prototype application contains 50 major weeds, considering their economic impact, invasiveness and commonality in different cropping systems in rabi/kharif seasons in all the four countries of the Indo-Gangetic Plains. The OSCAR-project integrates a technical perspective and a user perspective.

Need for technical perspective
The difficulty encountered when identifying weeds using standard flora is centred on three major constraints, namely:

• ability to identify the species without its flowers or before it flowers;
• use of a dichotomous key, which cannot tolerate any error and imposes the choice as well as the order of questions;
• use of technical terms not understood by the non-specialists.

To overcome these constraints, the OSCAR-project developed a software programme that uses a graphic interface based on the identity kit system, which reconstitutes the plants, using images. It is designed to remove the main difficulties encountered by non-botanists, when identifying species, using standard flora as it uses only drawings instead of technical jargon and provides users the freedom to choose the character that needs to be described. Missing information or data are permitted, thus allowing for the identi-fication of incomplete samples. The users can access the photos, the description, and the botanical illustrations of the species at any moment. In case, users encounter doubt in the choice of characters (for description), they could ask the program for the most pertinent one. If the probability of a species identified is less than 100 %, the programme indicates the characters that contain observation errors by the user. The descrip-tions of the species are available through the Internet website. The programme is multilingual and caters to wider section of people. All the technical terms used are highlighted as a hypertext, and an illustrated definition is accessible. Once the correct weed species is identified, the description page is displayed which contains the weed control measures for it. These control measures include botanical, mechanical and cultural control measures. These species description pages are made available in English, Hindi, Urdu and Bangla to cater to the language needs of the IGP.

The OSCAR application is available in four different versions, MS Windows version, linux version, PDA (Simputer) version and web-based version, all of which are available online at www.oscarasia.org. The software is offered free of charge. Apart from the MS Windows version, OSCAR is developed using FOSS tools and is an open source product.

Need for user perspective
An integral part of the OSCAR-project is to look at three different potential users - farmers, extension officers and scientists and students in agricultural sciences. The project learned about perception and appropriateness of the tool through extensive interactions with farmer groups, extension personnel, IT specialists, NGO and UN staff, government officials, scientific researchers and Ph.D. students in various disciplines and M.Sc. students in all the four IGP countries. A summary for the findings reads as follows:

Farmers in the Indo-Gangetic Plains:

• The current communication systems in place seem to work well as far as problems with weed identification are concerned;
• Priority issues for farmers, as far as weeds are concerned, lie with management and control and have an economic nature.

Extension workers (at different levels):

• There seems to be no major problem in weed identification among extension officers. In a rare case, when an extension officer cannot identify a certain species, he turns to the scientists at national or university level for help. It seems therefore more logical to offer the software and database at this level.
• Computers are, in most countries, available from the regional/district level upwards. In most rural areas, there are no computers used in extensions services.
• The software and the database could be of relevance to in-service trainings.

Students and scientists:

• The software seems to be primarily an educational tool. It could find its relevance in school education, higher academic (agricultural), education (B.Sc, M.Sc and Ph.D levels) and in professional education in agriculture. It could also be relevant for in-service trainings at the level of 'teaching the teachers'. In all countries, there was a lot of interest among scientists and students to use the software.

Advantages of the software
The software was demonstrated and tested in India, Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh and The Netherlands. Basically, the students and scientists, farmers and extension officers were very enthusiastic in working with the software and no major problem was observed. Some of the findings in this area are as follow:

• Visual interface: Provision of a visual interface to the identification process is a major advantage in the tool. This eliminates any prerequisite botanical knowledge about weed species. The interface design was easy to use and to identify weed species. Though there were issues with their first exercises, subsequently everyone was able to navigate through the software with ease.
• Specialised versus general information in the database: The farmers and extension people have an occasional problem with weed identification. If they have a problem with a specific species that they do not know, the farmer turns to the extension officer and if the extension officer doesn't know, he or she turns to the specialist at the National Agricultural Research Centre. Putting general information in the database would only make sense if the focus were on the general public or on lower level students, like those in a high school biology class.
• Weed management and control: Many people felt that if the software would be useful for extension people and farmers, issues on weed management and control should be emphasised in the database. Weed specialists in the different countries can help to provide this information. Difficulties are that if management and control are socio-economically determined and differ accordingly between the many regions in the IGPs, standard use of pesticides and herbicides could be included.
• Language issues: Language issues relate to the type of end user. To use local languages, software is only necessary if the end-user does not read English. Having the names of the species in all the local languages and dialects is of interest to all end-users. To have the control and management descriptions in the database available in the local languages is of interest to the farmers/extension officers. However, to translate the descriptions in the local languages will not be necessary. If the software be used as an educational tool for students at higher levels of education in the different countries of the IGPs, to have the description only in English will be enough. There is no immediate need to translate the descriptions into other languages.
• Updating and maintaining the software and the database: If people want to add additional information, they can do so in their personal copy of the software. The fact that they can enhance or customise the current version according to their own specificities was seen as a positive aspect. If they think the additions are relevant for everybody, the info could be sent to CIRAD/IFP for verification and publication. It is recommended to let people register before downloading the software.
• Open source aspect: The free/open source nature of OSCAR seems to kindle some interest among target groups, particularly among scientists and students.

Conclusion
Processes of technical and social integrations are difficult, but needed. It seems necessary to try and combine technical perspectives with user and social perspectives. These kinds of interdisciplinary processes incorporate understanding, respect and negotiation. It is important to realise that crossing disciplinary borders lies in more than one field and that it is important to identify these fields for each particular socio-ICT project. It is often not one border that needs to be crossed, but many. Topics and questions that were learned from OSCAR in the field of 'ICTs for agricultural development' relate among other things, to using appropriate ICTs, ICT applications and crossing knowledge borders. For appropriate ICT applications and realistic opportunities in the field of development and social change, we need to think about combining situations from inside and outside agriculture. ICTs give the potential of integrating information in a cross-sectorial way, e.g. through 'mobile databases'. Participatory Information and Communication Technology Development (PICTD) can play an important role in this regard.

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The rest of my day is devoted to studying and reading, and othere for the kids when they get off of the bus too ...

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A man can succeed at almost anything for which he was unlimited enthusiasm.

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Venice resident Rhonda DeVictor said she noticed the empty lot when she first moved into the neighborhood 12 years ago

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Impressive blog! -Arron