Information Technologies and International Development
Designing an architecture for delivering mobile information services to the rural developing world
Proceedings of the 15th international conference on World Wide Web
aAqua: a database-backended multilingual, multimedia community forum
Proceedings of the 2006 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data
Information Technology for Development - IT Investments in Emerging Economies
Requirements of a mobile procurement framework for rural South Africa
Mobility '09 Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Mobile Technology, Application & Systems
PDP '10 Proceedings of the 2010 18th Euromicro Conference on Parallel, Distributed and Network-based Processing
Bottom billion architecture: a generic software architecture for ICTD use case scenarios
Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services
On the use of goal-oriented methodology for designing agriculture services in developing countries
Proceedings of the International Conference on Management of Emergent Digital EcoSystems
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The progress of developing countries towards an information society has entailed a strong demand for Information and Communication Technology (ICT) access solutions that are able to cope with the infrastructural and cultural requirements specific to rural developing areas. Most software architectures developed in former ICTD projects realize ICT access limited to one specific concept like kiosk PCs or Smartphones or SMS applications. However, extensible and reusable architectures supporting multiple concepts are missing. In this paper, we present the Bottom Billion Architecture (BBA), a software architecture that supports various hardware (Desktop PCs, Smartphones, Feature and Non-Feature Phones), applications (native, Java, Mobile Web) and data channels (voice, signalling, data). Implemented in rural South Africa, the BBA was deployed within a real procurement use case, following a Living Lab approach. During a eight month pilot experiment the BBA proved to be an appropriate architecture concept to host an improved ICT enabled procurement process that saves time and money of the participating shops. To test and improve the generalizability of the BBA concept it will be replicated in an agricultural use case in rural Ghana. This paper presents our research work which is based on a detailed requirements analysis, following a user centered technical ICTD research methodology. The architecture is described in detail and computational and usability evaluation results are analyzed.