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Challenges in Designing Cultural Heritage Crowdsourcing: Tools with Indigenous Communities
Abstract
This chapter presents our latest interventions within the ongoing digitization of cultural heritage of the ovaHerero and ovaHimba indigenous communities in pastoral Namibia. It describes the communicative and technical processes undertaken in a number of sessions at four different sites over a one and a half year period. These sessions were part of the co-design, co-development, and future implementation of an Indigenous Knowledge (IK) Crowdsourcing Management System that aims to provide and to empower elders from rural ovaHerero and ovaHimba communities with extended tools to gather, store, classify and curate their traditional knowledge. Applying co-design as the process aims to ensure users are involved in the design process ensuring their needs and concerns are elicited and suitably addressed. As such this chapter introduces first the background, rationale and scaffolding of the project. Then it pronounces the aims regarding the technologies intended for deployment, their current co-design and co-development phases, and the methods positioned in each session discussed in order to progress in the design endeavours of our multidisciplinary team of researchers and local communities in four villages, namely Erindi-Roukambe and Okomakuara for ovaHerero, and Ohandungu and Otjisa for the ovaHimba ethnic group. Further, it details the initial take-on, engagement, and participation of partakers in Usability and User Experience co-design sessions. The chapter closes stressing the challenges revealed and the future projections thus-far unfilled.
... Previous applications of CBCD have demonstrated its methodological strength in creating innovative technologies, such as the secret sign language app with a Penan community in Borneo [67], the augmented reality mementos with a rural San community in Namibia [65], or a crowd sourcing tool with an Ovahimba community in Namibia [8]. CBCD prioritises technology improvements and appropriation activities, ultimately leading to innovative products with higher product quality and enhanced relevance [13,24]. ...
Many technology projects are driven by (hidden) agendas which prioritize the one or the other stakeholder or the technology itself, thereby creating tensions and compromising important perspectives. In the field of digital conservation and wildlife management, the focus has often been on safeguarding wildlife (the lion), not incorporating socio-economic factors of communities (the Omuhimba), by exploiting technologies concerned with wildlife data collection only (the drone). Concerned with reconciling heterogeneous perspectives the authors present the development and conceptualisation of an integrated wildlife monitoring system in Southern Africa. The authors postulate that a community-based co-design approach, grounded in the Ubuntu philosophy, leads to novel and innovative technology designs embracing ecocentrism.
... There is no known research on crowdsourcing in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities for pandemic mitigation specifically, or health promotion more generally. Crowdsourcing has, however, been used in other settings to engage indigenous peoples in collaborative communities-for example the collation of threatened language databases, or cultural heritage collections (21)(22)(23), as well as in more transactional, labor market crowdsourcing such as ecotourism mapping (24). ...
Health comunication is a critical component of pandemic mitigation, but mainstream prevention messaging often lacks social, cultural and linguistic relevance to vulnerable populations. This community case study presents a novel, highly participatory pandemic prevention communication campaign that engaged individuals in remote Aboriginal communities of the Northern Territory of Australia directly in prevention messaging via crowdsourcing, and distributed videos to remote area post-codes via targeted Facebook advertising. Facebook metrics, administrative campaign data and national statistics are used to assess campaign reach and engagement. The case study discusses lessons learned from the campaign, including how seeking unscripted COVID-19 prevention video messaging can support community ownership of pandemic messaging, rapid content generation, and a high level of Facebook user engagement. It also discusses the effectiveness of targeting remote area post-codes via Facebook advertising both to reach the target audience, and to support quality improvement assessments to inform health communication decision-making in a low resource setting.
This chapter discusses the authors’ experiences with collaboration through initiatives aimed at preserving and promoting Indigenous cultural heritage (ICH) in the digital age. Establishing trust and creating a safe environment among Indigenous and non-Indigenous stakeholders is essential for the success of these collective projects. The Indigenous perspective of a holistic approach, as presented in the medicine wheel model, proposes avenues for reflection and action to foster trust within groups and communities through four interdependent dimensions: emotional, spiritual, physical and intellectual. This chapter, presented in the form of an essay, encourages readers to become aware of the overlooked dimensions of collaboration—the emotional and spiritual dimensions—which are viewed as essential for cultivating a dynamic of trust (harmony) in collective practices centred on ICH. A holistic approach helps maintain a balance in the engagement and organisation of collaborative projects in an Indigenous context.
In the past few years, crowdsourcing has developed a reputation for its ability to ‘widen participation’ by engaging the public in archival practices or engage non-professionals as ‘citizen archivists’ to complete archival work. However, does public voting truly widen participation? If so, how? While public voting may appear to meet the aims of gathering many opinions for its ease of use and low barrier to participation, is it really a decent method to widen participation? And further, are the results of the public voting of use to potential users who engage with the results of a project? This paper reports on the use of public voting as a method to gather opinion for the Walk1916 mobile walking tour app, which was developed to enhance use of and access to digital content in archival collections.
We analyse some of the ways that English shapes technology production in Namibia by critically reflecting on translations in designing the first fully bilingual Oshindonga website. We show that English, and symbols linked to English, perform in technologists' lifeworlds, felt-experiences and identities. Our reflections add to literature on mismatches between 'universal' paradigms and local ways of knowing. More significantly, they inspire deeper exploration of how language constrains design possibilities. Design research rarely remarks on linguistics in constructing technology or technologists. Yet, relationships between English and technology production exclude and inhibit the involvement of social, intellectual and emotional capitals in innovation.
As a new distributed computing model, crowdsourcing lets people leverage the crowd's intelligence and wisdom toward solving problems. This article proposes a framework for characterizing various dimensions of quality control in crowdsourcing systems, a critical issue. The authors briefly review existing quality-control approaches, identify open issues, and look to future research directions. In the Web extra, the authors discuss both design-time and runtime approaches in more detail.