TV Prabhakar	Runa Sarkar	Jayanta Chatterjee
Indian Institute of Technology	Indian Institute of Technology	Indian Institute of Technology
Kanpur	Kanpur	Kanpur
tvp@iitk.ac.in	runa@iitk.ac.in	jayanta@iitk.ac.in

This Cooperative effort of experts from apparently unrelated domains: farmers and agricultural scientists working with computer scientists and economists can lead to effective knowledge creation and growth. Relevant information at the right time could provide farmers with the appropriate tools to make more economically sound decisions. Process of decision making could enhance their competitiveness and, as a result, improve well being. This is the main objective of the project “The digital ecosystem for agricultural livelihood (DEAL)”.

Developing such an ecosystem requires the development of peer to peer networks, classification schemes, controlled vocabularies, thesauri, authority .les, and glossaries as well as the creation of semantic standards for exchange of high quality metadata. The semantic framework would comprise shared data exchange standards and instruments that would allow services exchange (interoperability) between collection of information and knowledge.

There is a need to consult, inform, orient, and involve stakeholders (NGOs, farmers and administrators) in developing, sharing and refining the content of the open knowledge space. This is particularly important since the aim is to facilitate interaction between peers on all relevant issues and to share resources and experiences. This paper explores the crucial elements which lead to the creation of relevant content for effective deployment and use of socio technical networks in the context of Indian agriculture. Identifying and applying alternative roadmaps for self-sustainability and growth of socio- technical networks for enhancing knowledge sharing would lead to our ultimate goal of achieving regional development.

Introduction

Information and communications technologies (ICTs) are present (either in large or small scale) and developing in every area of economic, social, and political activity. Due to the networking possibilities they enable, ICTs reduce transactions costs and change the structure of markets and institutions, resulting in an immediate increase in the potential value of human capital. Further, they embody an enormous amount of knowledge and can serve to empower people at local and national levels.

In India, the adoption and development of ICTs in the agricultural sector takes place through thousands of specific initiatives led by communities and development, donor, and business organizations. The implementation of effective ICT deployment can be a challenge for a diffuse network of local innovation systems, since it requires local knowledge, literacy, skills development, technical capability and e.ort. There is, however, a government established top-down network of agricultural extension counters called ’Krishi Vigyan Kendras’ (KVKs) which could be used to link India’s geographically and culturally dispersed rural community.

Agricultural and food security policymakers clearly see the need for knowledge connectivity from the academic/research institutes to the villages and then, from these to the world. The ‘best’ practices can enhance India’s agricultural effciency, create the “next” practices and promote new opportunities for rural livelihood. There is a national agenda for creating knowledge centres in every village. Nevertheless, the ‘soft side’ of this challenge needs more attention. There is no concerted e.ort to create a national ‘digital’ agricultural knowledge repository that is alive and nurtured daily through feeding, weeding, and pruning (or enriched by interactive usage). A large part of useful unstructured information or tacit knowledge remains at local level. Moreover, agriculture is among the most complex commercial systems, since it requires inputs from myriads of sources including soil, water, environment, goods, asset and labour markets. A detailed study conducted by the Asia-Pacific Research Centre of the Stanford University tried to assess the socio-economic impact of 9 major ICT initiatives in India to conclude that the usage of ICT was sparse in comparison with its potential. The results of a questionnaire survey applied to the potential users of ICT and ICT providers (usually called “infomediaries”) to explore the gap between actual and potential ICT usage shows that the majority of the users consider the lack of availability of useful content and programs the significant impeding factors for the use of ICT, whilst fewer ‘infomediaries’ had a similar opinion. The creation, dissemination and enhancement of appropriate, timely and relevant content for the farmer (user) are the focus of the ‘Digital Ecosystem for Agriculture & rural Livelihood (DEAL)’ project (www.dealindia.org).

The digital ecosystem (DE) is an approach through which one can ensure relevant and timely content availability to the rural community through dynamic and amorphous interaction among a multiplicity of small entities to support knowledge sharing, co-creation of knowledge and developing new business models. Moreover, the diffusion and use of ICT can be self sustaining and self enabling despite technological and literacy barriers.

This paper documents our experience from being involved in developing and implementing a DE for knowledge diffusion in rural India. The sustainability of the initiative is associated with challenges due to language and literacy barriers, resource scarcity, and dominance of top-down solutions and limited existence of successful participative business models. A DE for agriculture gives farmers from less developed and remote areas opportunities to participate in the global economy. This results in dynamic knowledge sharing and global cooperation among farmers and the world community, fostering as a consequence local economic growth. Co-creation and self-management of digital contents to support agriculture and rural livelihood development activities would result in access to the appropriate information at the right time, resulting in inclusive growth as well as competitive agriculture. It also facilitates cooperation between farmers and agricultural scientists which is critical for further technological progress in agriculture, whether with respect to innovation or technology adoption.

A Pathway to Information Design for Knowledge Diffusion in Rural India

Quick dissemination of technical information from the agricultural research system to the farmers, and its adaptation to the different soil and climatic conditions will result in increased agricultural productivity. Thus, the ‘one-way route’ of India’s conventional agricultural extension system needs rapid transformation to a ‘real time and adaptive’ knowledge exchange network. The network can provide the necessary traction from other industrial and business knowledge management technologies and processes such as user to user exchange, expert to expert exchange and KM oriented standards for information storage, retrieval and aggregation with analytics.

Limitations of the ‘face to face’ Transfer of Technology (TOT) model remains a challenge for the public and private extension systems since there are at least 400,000 medium and large villages that need to be reached spread over a subcontinent. With the availability of telephone and Internet, it is now possible to reduce this gap to a large extent, but only if an appropriate mix of technologies can deliver ‘dynamic content’ in response to ‘user pull’. Unless the content is ‘problem-solving oriented’ in order to help farmers take risks in venturing out to crop diversification and the adoption of new processes, the TOT cannot produce a real impact in alleviating rural poverty through competitiveness improvement. A digital ecosystem can help break down the barriers in both, horizontal and vertical knowledge, since it entails a series of interconnected and intra-dependant digital platforms, that are created at key institutional levels (international, national and local/community), and augmented by technical (ICT) and social networking processes.

The Agricultural Ecosystem

An agricultural ecosystem is a unique and reasonably stable dynamic arrangement of farm enterprises, managed by a household in response to the physical, biological and socioeconomic environments. There could be several interacting subsystems within this large ecosystem (as at the regional level), and equally relevant non agricultural systems (as the market system, the rural credit system, etc). Agricultural subsystems include the crop ecosystem, animal ecosystem, soil, weed and insect ecosystem, all of them interacting and depending on each other. We can also find as part of the agricultural ecosystem, farm related factors and inputs such as weather conditions, type of soil, stage of incidence or intensity of weeds; and socio-economic factors, such as availability and nature of credit, costs of agricultural inputs, price of end-products, farmers’ personal objectives and resources, etc. An ideal knowledge ecosystem for agriculture would be able to capture all these intricacies and build a large knowledge sharing database to ensure that the implicit knowledge or experience of one farmer is shared with many others without requiring the ‘face to face’ connection over geographically or temporally separated regions.

Implementation

Figure 3 shows the information for rural development activities. From the beginning, there was a need to develop a common ontology, a semantic interoperability that facilitates knowledge storage, retrieval and exchange within the network among the different stakeholders so that a knowledge ecosystem could be developed. In order to create this network, a successful implementation of a knowledge system was required. This included the development of digital content from the tacit knowledge of Krishi Vigyan Kendras (and other frontline entities) through multiple media (i.e. landline phone, mobile phone, audio-video recording and digitization of paper documents). Open content and open source optimization was also needed to make the technology tools affordable and available to everyone while evolving. In order to deal with the language and education divide, “citizen interfaces” to facilitate the access of the users to the extensive knowledge base were required. Because these interfaces are meant to be easily accessed by ‘rural citizens’, they could be iconic, graphical, or symbolic user interfaces that relate to the ontology. Examples of technology applications are: the touch screen, text to speech, screen reader, visualization and animation, interactive voice-response system computer-telephony integration and application of wireless data services like MMS. Digital content interfaces and tools for an easy user (frontend and backend) interaction with the knowledge base using telephone, mobile data and FM radio were also developed.

Partnerships were created with existing ‘tele-centers’ in rural institutes, village schools and Krishi Vigyan Kendras. There is an inherent advantage in using an existing physical infrastructure because it only has to be extended to the project requirements. Also, some of the ICT training can be cost-effectively integrated into the mainstream curriculum of these institutions. A conceptual architecture of the desired knowledge-net was built after several brain-storming sessions with the stakeholders of the DEAL project, as seen in Figure 2.

It is clear that, in order to acquire the characteristics of a self-managed ecosystem, ‘interoperability’ is needed. Particularly in this knowledge-net whose digital contents are created in different forms by its stakeholders. Interoperability provides potential for guaranteed automation and systemic self-management. Initial experiments within the digital repositories of the project stakeholders showed that syntactic interoperability can be achieved for transfer, exchange, mediation and integration of content. This could be achieved by adopting compatible forms of encoding, accessing protocols and designing guidelines. Identification and naming schemas are important at this stage for pulling together common information.

Lessons

During the implementation of the DEAL project, we encountered the existence of several barriers to information access. These barriers are physical, economic, intellectual or technological, and they usually impede the participation of rural users in the activities that contribute to the digital knowledge repository (see Kralisch and Mandl, 2006).

The architects and system designers did not impose the barriers directly, but their lack of action and understanding of the critical user conditions contributed to the formation of these barriers. Other factors, such as demographic, geographic, cultural, social, psychological and economic factors also contribute to the critical conditions of users. Issues related to Information system usability such as ease of use, usefulness (Davis, 1989), decision effectiveness, user response, and user satisfaction (Doll et. al., 1988) have been studied in great detail. Nevertheless, interactions with focus groups at different agricultural market places around Lucknow-Kanpur showed the necessity of developing a more detailed study focusing in different set of priorities.

Typical flow of information among rural development agencies.
Source: CRISP group, National Informatics Centre
A general framework for web design that includes human-computer interaction theories (Pirolli, 2001), website usability principles (Huang, 2003), information intensity paradigms (Palmer and Griffith, 1998) and e-customization models is already in place and it is assumed that it sufficiently addresses the question of the definition of broad guidelines for designing any successful website. Following this principle, it was assumed that in order to have a successful website universally accepted (and therefore also in India), it should have accurate, up-to-date and pertinent content. Also, it should be user-friendly customized to particular user groups, and tailored to specific geographical needs. In the case of rural India, it was found that the challenges to agricultural and rural livelihood website usability arise mainly because of the specificity of local needs and the great diversity of the local conditions. The major challenges identified were:

But there were more lessons. The project soon revealed that without a self managed, evolving, ecosystem working as a knowledge repository the editorial overhead remained high and expensive. Users must be able to co-create content and this content could be also “tagged” in order to be recalled and reused in multiple contexts.

The initial research at DEAL showed that the existence of a number of desired features in any ICT system especially designed for rural India leads to higher user satisfaction. Such features aim to satisfy one or many of the following immediate user objectives:

Written information is a challenge, especially at the content creation stage, because most of the farmers are quasi-literate. ‘Audio-content’ is often the only way under which we can operate. Audio-content is easy and natural to create, and as a consequence it is easily accepted by the creator, the listener and the community. Nevertheless, indexing and searching ‘audio-content’ poses problems and requires manual intervention.

Conceptual architecture of knowledge-net.
Source: Chatterjee and Prabhakar, 2005

Figure 3 shows a sample page of the user interface addressing some of these issues. The user IDs and passwords are introduced with the help of icons. The alphabet consists of icons of fruits and vegetables and the users can ‘spell’ their user names and passwords using this alphabet (i.e. the user can choose a tomato, two onions and a potato as the ‘User Name’ and another such combination as the password).

A computer based platform appears difficult to maintain because of various reasons. There is the cost of the computer, but there are also problems related to the erratic power and electricity provision. One needs to think of backup power sources like batteries, uninterrupted power supplies and generating sets making the feasibility of the whole solution untenable. A mobile device, like a phone or a PDA, appears to be the most appropriate delivery platform.

The DEAL project thus revealed that ICT tools and technologies could make knowledge and ‘in the field’ experiences (in the form of digital content) widely available. Ethnographic observation guided design principles, which improved the access and acceptance by rural citizens. Nevertheless, the maintenance, dynamic update and enhancement of the digital content needed regular editorial intervention and the process of finding and assembling information remained largely a manual task. Interoperability is needed in order to achieve automation and systemic self management in the knowledge net, because digital contents are created in various forms by different stakeholders. While initial experiments showed that such syntactic interoperability can be achieved and enforced with the use of a corporate extranet, continuous socio-technical difficulties and the existence of multiple hardware/software in the network pose problems in the domain of rural livelihood.

Iconic Logic in the Web interface for the DEAL Project

Benefits

Although the benefits resulting from the DEAL project have not been formally documented, some observations can be made. First, the ‘ecosystem’ approach sped up the process of identification, development and uptake of innovation. Second, rural entrepreneurs bene.ted from the project because the DE helped them to improve their access to markets and/or supply chains and provided them with a broader base for decision-making.
Moreover, it has been reported by several researchers that in many local communities ICT has increased bottom-up participation in the governance process and helps to expand the reach and accessibility of government services and public infrastructure (Dossani, Misra and Jhaveri, 2005). We have not tested this in the DEAL project, primarily because the mandate of the project was more focused on creating a self sustaining ICT platform rather than conducting a social experiment.

Conclusions

A digital business ecosystem, as a platform to foster business networks, based on a dynamic and amorphous interaction among a multiplicity of firms, is a self sustaining mechanism of ICT adoption and development. It supports knowledge sharing and skill development. This paper analyzed the ‘learning from using’ semantic web technologies to construct agricultural portals that address the need for customization and localization at the rural level. The digital ecosystem for agriculture and rural livelihood (DEAL) project is an ambitious web based initiative that coordinates back-end infrastructure, media technology and knowledge in order to make agricultural content accessible through multiple channels in rural India. It attempts to overcome language and literacy barriers by the development of iconic, symbolic and visual overlays on knowledge maps. Existing Krishi Vigyan Kendras serve as nodes and catalysts for knowledge-driven self-generative socioeconomic development that nurture innovation in rural livelihood models. By activating and/or strengthening knowledge, skills, technology and market links, the DE is an instrument to preserve and nurture the wisdom of the farmers while improving their agricultural competitiveness.

References

Chatterjee, J. and Prabhakar, T.V. (2005) “On to Action - Building A Digital Ecosystem for Knowledge Diffusion in Rural India, Proceedings of the 2005 International Conference on Knowledge Management, North Carolina, USA, available at http://emandi.mla.iitk.ac.in/deal/other/deal_paper.doc

Davis F. (1989) “Perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use and user acceptance of information technology”, MIS Quarterly 13 (3), 319–340.

Doll, W. and Torkzadeh, J. (1988) “The measurement of end-user computing satisfaction”, MIS Quarterly 6, 259–273,

Dossani, R., Misra, D.C. and Jhaveri, R. (2005) Enabling ICT for Rural India, Asia Pacific Research Center, Stanford University and National Informatics Centre, downloaded from http://iis-db.stanford.edu/pubs/20972/ICT_full_Oct05.pdfðôsearch=%22ict%20governance%20india%20rural%22, last accessed 30th September 2006

Huang, W. (2001) “Using Information Technology to Enhance Communications among Agribusiness Organizations”, IAMA World Food and Agribusiness Symposium, Sydney, NSW, Australia

Kralisch, A. and Mandl, T (2006) “Barriers to Information Access across Languages on the Internet: Network and Language Effects”, in Proceedings of the 39th Hawaii International Conference on Systems Science (HICSS-39, 2006)

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