skip to main content
10.1145/3448696.3448698acmotherconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesafrichiConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

A community-initiated website development project: promoting a San community campsite initiative

Published: 08 July 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Digital services have not been truly available for marginalised rural communities, especially in the Global South. Rural communities often lack technical infrastructures, awareness about available services and the necessary skills to use them to their full potential. In this paper, we present a collaborative web-site development project initiated by a rural San community in Namibia. The website intends to support a current community livelihood activity of setting up a campground next to their village. Embedded in a community-based research approach we have deployed co-design methods and techniques to establish a consensus-based business description, including target market, activities, pricing and promotion strategies. Co-design techniques enabled the community to examine and refine their conceptualisation of their business endeavour as well as anticipate target audiences and operational scenarios. A basic website has been created including the agreed upon content. Further efforts include a wider dissemination of the information as well as possible inclusion in global broker websites. We conclude with a reflection on the co-design process providing a researcher and a community perspective.

References

[1]
Hilma N. Aludhilu and Nicola J. Bidwell. 2018. Home is not Egumbo: Language, Identity and Web Design. In Proceedings of the Second African Conference for Human Computer Interaction on Thriving Communities - AfriCHI ’18. ACM Press, New York, New York, USA, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1145/3283458.3283460
[2]
Niina Arvila, Heike Winschiers-Theophilus, Pietari Keskinen, Roosa Laurikainen, and Marko Nieminen. 2020. Enabling successful crowdfunding for entrepreneurs in marginalized communities. In Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Academic Mindtrek. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 45–54. https://doi.org/10.1145/3377290.3377303
[3]
Kirsty Blackstock. 2005. A critical look at community based tourism. Community Development Journal 40, 1 (2005), 39–49. https://doi.org/10.1093/cdj/bsi005
[4]
Richard Boateng, Robert Hinson, Rakiya Galadima, and Longe Olumide. 2014. Preliminary insights into the influence of mobile phones in micro-trading activities of market women in Nigeria. Information Development 30, 1 (2014), 32–50. https://doi.org/10.1177/0266666912473765
[5]
Andrés Burgos and Frédéric Mertens. 2017. Participatory management of community-based tourism: A network perspective. Community Development 48, 4 (8 2017), 546–565. https://doi.org/10.1080/15575330.2017.1344996
[6]
Mariama Deen-Swarray, Ali Ndiwalana, and Christoph Stork. 2013. Bridging the financial gap and unlocking the potential of informal businesses through mobile money in four East African countries. In CPRsouth8/CPRafrica2013 .... 1–15.
[7]
DIS. 2009. 9241-210: 2010. Ergonomics of human system interaction-Part 210: Human-centred design for interactive systems. International Standardization Organization (ISO). Switzerland (2009).
[8]
Rachel Dodds, Alisha Ali, and Kelly Galaski. 2018. Mobilizing knowledge: determining key elements for success and pitfalls in developing community-based tourism. Current Issues in Tourism 21, 13 (9 2018), 1547–1568. https://doi.org/10.1080/13683500.2016.1150257
[9]
Ll Dodson, S Sterling, and Jk Bennett. 2013. Minding the gaps: cultural, technical and gender-based barriers to mobile use in oral-language Berber communities in Morocco. Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development -ICTD 2013 1 (2013), 79–88. https://doi.org/10.1145/2516604.2516626
[10]
Marie Ertner, Anne Mie Kragelund, and Lone Malmborg. 2010. Five enunciations of empowerment in participatory design. In Proceedings of the 11th Biennial Participatory Design Conference on - PDC ’10. ACM Press, New York, New York, USA, 191. https://doi.org/10.1145/1900441.1900475
[11]
Peter Gallert, Heike Winschiers-Theophilus, Gereon K. Kapuire, Colin Stanley, Daniel G. Cabrero, and Bobby Shabangu. 2016. Indigenous Knowledge for Wikipedia. A Case Study with an OvaHerero Community in Eastern Namibia. In Proceedings of the First African Conference on Human Computer Interaction - AfriCHI’16, Vol. 21-25-Nove. ACM Press, New York, New York, USA, 155–159. https://doi.org/10.1145/2998581.2998600
[12]
Anna Hüncke and Stasja Koot. 2012. The presentation of Bushmen in cultural tourism: tourists’ images of Bushmen and the tourism provider’s presentation of (Hai//om) Bushmen at Treesleeper Camp, Namibia. Critical Arts 26, 5 (11 2012), 671–689. https://doi.org/10.1080/02560046.2012.744722
[13]
Liesbeth Huybrechts, Virginia Tassinari, Barbara Roosen, and Teodora Constantinescu. 2018. Work, labour and action: the role of participatory design in (re)activating the political dimension of work. Proceedings of the 15th Participatory Design Conference on Full Papers - PDC ’18 1(2018), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1145/3210586.3210599
[14]
Netta Iivari and Marianne Kinnula. 2018. Empowering Children through Design and Making: Towards Protagonist Role Adoption. In Proceedings of the 15th Participatory Design Conference on Full Papers - PDC ’18, Vol. 1. ACM Press, New York, New York, USA, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1145/3210586.3210600
[15]
Haruna Issahaku, Benjamin Musah Abu, and Paul Kwame Nkegbe. 2018. Does the Use of Mobile Phones by Smallholder Maize Farmers Affect Productivity in Ghana?Journal of African Business 19, 3 (7 2018), 302–322. https://doi.org/10.1080/15228916.2017.1416215
[16]
Craig Jeffrey and Jane Dyson. 2013. Zigzag capitalism: Youth entrepreneurship in the contemporary global South. Geoforum 49 (10 2013), R1–R3. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2013.01.001
[17]
Gereon Koch Kapuire, Heike Winschiers-Theophilus, and Edwin Blake. 2015. An insider perspective on community gains: A subjective account of a Namibian rural communities perception of a long-term participatory design project. International Journal of Human Computer Studies 74 (2015), 124–143. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2014.10.004
[18]
Joseph Kasera, Jacki O’Neill, and Nicola J. Bidwell. 2016. Sociality, Tempo & Flow: Learning from Namibian Ride-sharing. In Proceedings of the First African Conference on Human Computer Interaction - AfriCHI’16. ACM Press, New York, New York, USA, 36–47. https://doi.org/10.1145/2998581.2998582
[19]
Pietari Keskinen, Niina Arvila, Heike Winschiers-Theophilus, and Marko Nieminen. 2020. The Effect of Digital Community-Based Tourism Platform to Hosts’ Livelihood. In Communications in Computer and Information Science. Vol. 1236 CCIS. Springer International Publishing, Macau, China, 3–16. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52014-4_1
[20]
Pietari Keskinen and Heike Winschiers-Theophilus. 2020. Worker Empowerment in the Era of Sharing Economy Platforms in Global South. In Proceedings of the 16th Participatory Design Conference 2020 - Participation(s) Otherwise - Volume 2, Vol. 2. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 30–34. https://doi.org/10.1145/3384772.3385147
[21]
Nick Kontogeorgopoulos, Anuwat Churyen, and Varaphorn Duangsaeng. 2014. Success Factors in Community-Based Tourism in Thailand: The Role of Luck, External Support, and Local Leadership. Tourism Planning & Development 11, 1 (1 2014), 106–124. https://doi.org/10.1080/21568316.2013.852991
[22]
Younes Lafraxo, Fadoua Hadri, Hamza Amhal, and Amine Rossafi. 2018. The Effect of Trust, Perceived Risk and Security on the Adoption of Mobile Banking in Morocco. In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, Vol. 2. SCITEPRESS - Science and Technology Publications, 497–502. https://doi.org/10.5220/0006675604970502
[23]
Aldi Lasso and Heidi Dahles. 2018. Are tourism livelihoods sustainable? Tourism development and economic transformation on Komodo Island, Indonesia. Asia Pacific Journal of Tourism Research 1665 (2018), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/10941665.2018.1467939
[24]
Joon Suk Lee, Margaret Dickey-Kurdziolek, and Stacy Branham. 2018. A Design Provocation for Humble Designers and Empowered Users. In Design, User Experience, and Usability: Designing Interactions, Aaron Marcus and Wentao Wang (Eds.). Springer International Publishing, 51–61. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91803-7_4
[25]
Geoffrey Manyara and Eleri Jones. 2007. Community-based Tourism Enterprises Development in Kenya: An Exploration of Their Potential as Avenues of Poverty Reduction. Journal of Sustainable Tourism 15, 6 (11 2007), 628–644. https://doi.org/10.2167/jost723.0
[26]
Tarisai Kudakwashe Manyati and Morgen Mutsau. 2020. A systematic review of the factors that hinder the scale up of mobile health technologies in antenatal care programmes in sub-Saharan Africa. African Journal of Science, Technology, Innovation and Development 0, 0(2020), 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1080/20421338.2020.1765479
[27]
Christine W. Mburu, Chelsea-Joy Wardle, Yaseen Joolay, and Melissa Densmore. 2018. Co-designing with mothers and neonatal unit staff. In Proceedings of the Second African Conference for Human Computer Interaction on Thriving Communities - AfriCHI ’18. ACM Press, New York, New York, USA, 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1145/3283458.3283487
[28]
Marina Novelli and Kathrin Gebhardt. 2007. Community Based Tourism in Namibia: ‘Reality Show’ or ‘Window Dressing’?Current Issues in Tourism 10, 5 (10 2007), 443–479. https://doi.org/10.2167/cit332.0
[29]
Etsuko Okazaki. 2008. A Community-Based Tourism Model: Its Conception and Use. Journal of Sustainable Tourism 16, 5 (9 2008), 511–529. https://doi.org/10.1080/09669580802159594
[30]
Richard Pankomera and Darelle Greunen. 2019. Opportunities, barriers, and adoption factors of mobile commerce for the informal sector in developing countries in Africa: A systematic review. The Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing CountriesMay 2018 (2019), e12096. https://doi.org/10.1002/isd2.12096
[31]
Gamuchirai B. Perekwa, Tania Prinsloo, and JP van Deventer. 2016. The Impact of Mobile Technology on Micro and Small Enterprises in Zimbabwe in the Post-Hyperinflation Economic Era. Impact Of Mobile Technology On Post-Hyperinflation Economics The African Journal of Information Systems 8, 3 (2016), 45–66. http://content.ebscohost.com/ContentServer.asp?T=P&P=AN&K=116347514&S=R&D=bth&EbscoContent=dGJyMMvl7ESep7Y4xNvgOLCmr1GeprVSsau4SLKWxWXS&ContentCustomer=dGJyMPGrtFG2q7ZIuePfgeyx43zx
[32]
Dorian Peters, Susan Hansen, Jenny McMullan, Theresa Ardler, Janet Mooney, and Rafael A. Calvo. 2018. ”Participation is not enough” – Towards Indigenous-led co-design. In Proceedings of the 30th Australian Conference on Computer-Human Interaction. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 97–101. https://doi.org/10.1145/3292147.3292204
[33]
Gina Porter, Kate Hampshire, Ariane de Lannoy, Andisiwe Bango, Alister Munthali, Elsbeth Robson, Augustine Tanle, Albert Abane, and Samuel Owusu. 2018. Youth Livelihoods in the Cellphone Era: Perspectives from Urban Africa. Journal of International Development 30, 4 (5 2018), 539–558. https://doi.org/10.1002/jid.3340
[34]
Sojen Pradhan, Susan Beetson, and Cat Kutay. 2018. Building digital entrepreneurial platform through local community activity and digital skills in aboriginal Australia. ACIS 2018 - 29th Australasian Conference on Information Systems (2018).
[35]
Robert Racadio, Emma J Rose, and Beth E Kolko. 2014. Research at the Margin: Participatory Design and Community Based Participatory Research. In Proceedings of the 13th Participatory Design Conference on Short Papers, Industry Cases, Workshop Descriptions, Doctoral Consortium papers, and Keynote abstracts - PDC ’14 - volume 2. 49–52. https://doi.org/10.1145/2662155.2662188
[36]
Maureen G. Reed. 1997. Power relations and community-based tourism planning. Annals of Tourism Research 24, 3 (1 1997), 566–591. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0160-7383(97)00023-6
[37]
Toni Robertson and Jesper Simonsen. 2013. Participatory Design - An introduction. In Routledge International Handbook of Participatory Design, Toni Robertsonand Jesper Simonsen (Eds.). Routledge, New York, NY, USA, 1–18. https://books.google.fi/books?hl=fi&lr=&id=l29JFCmqFikC&oi=fnd&pg=PA1&dq=participatory+design+an+introduction&ots=VqhpWsnQOX&sig=CjYDjJB3ES2fq7qFNXW3qpcFK_w&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=participatory design an introduction&f=false
[38]
Kasper Rodil, H. Winschiers-Theophilous, and K. Jensen. 2012. Locally situated digital representation of indigenous knowledege Co-constructing a new digital reality in rural Africa. Proceedings Cultural Attitudes Towards Technology and Communication 2012, Murdoch University, Australia(2012), 454–468.
[39]
Kasper Rodil, Heike Winschiers-Theophilus, Kasper L. Jensen, and Matthias Rehm. 2012. Homestead creator – a tool for indigenous designers Kasper. In Proceedings of the 7th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction Making Sense Through Design - NordiCHI ’12. ACM Press, New York, New York, USA, 627. https://doi.org/10.1145/2399016.2399111
[40]
Amalia G Sabiescu, Salomão David, Izak van Zyl, and Lorenzo Cantoni. 2014. Emerging spaces in community-based participatory design: reflections from two case studies. In Proceedings of the 13th Participatory Design Conference on Research Papers - PDC ’14. 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1145/2661435.2661446
[41]
Jeff Sauro. 2015. SUPR-Q: A Comprehensive Measure of the Quality of the Website User Experience. Journal of Usability Studies 10, 2 (2015), 68–86. http://www.upassoc.org.
[42]
Ilja Simons and Ellen de Groot. 2015. Power and empowerment in community-based tourism: opening Pandora’s box?Tourism Review 70, 1 (4 2015), 72–84. https://doi.org/10.1108/TR-06-2014-0035
[43]
Philip Sloan, Willy Legrand, and Claudia Simons-Kaufmann. 2014. A survey of social entrepreneurial community-based hospitality and tourism initiatives in developing economies. Worldwide Hospitality and Tourism Themes 6, 1 (2 2014), 51–61. https://doi.org/10.1108/WHATT-11-2013-0045
[44]
Clay Spinuzzi. 2005. The Methodology of Participatory Design. Technical Communication 52, 2 (2005), 163–174. https://doi.org/10.1353/csd.2015.0028
[45]
Nick Srnicek. 2017. Platform Capitalism. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 120 pages. https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=2HdNDwAAQBAJ&hl=en&pg=GBS.PR2
[46]
Brit Stichel, Edwin Blake, Donovan Maasz, Colin Stanley, Heike Winschiers-Theophilus, and Helena Afrikaner. 2019. Namibian Indigenous Communities Reflecting on Their Own Digital Representations. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Communities & Technologies - Transforming Communities - C&T ’19. ACM Press, New York, New York, USA, 51–59. https://doi.org/10.1145/3328320.3328378
[47]
Teresa C.H. Tao and Geoffrey Wall. 2009. Tourism as a sustainable livelihood strategy. Tourism Management 30, 1 (2 2009), 90–98. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2008.03.009
[48]
Anne-Marie Tupuola. 2006. Participatory Research, Culture and Youth Identities: An Exploration of Indigenous, Cross-Cultural and Trans-National Methods. Children, Youth and Environments 16, 2 (2006), 291–316.
[49]
Tonia Warnecke. 2017. Social Innovation, Gender, and Technology: Bridging the Resource Gap. Journal of Economic Issues 51, 2 (2017), 305–314. https://doi.org/10.1080/00213624.2017.1320508
[50]
Heike Winschiers-Theophilus and Nicola J Bidwell. 2013. Toward an Afro-Centric Indigenous HCI Paradigm. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction 29, 4(2013), 37–41. https://doi.org/10.1080/10447318.2013.765763
[51]
Heike Winschiers-Theophilus, Shilumbe Chivuno-Kuria, Gereon Koch Kapuire, Nicola J Bidwell, and Edwin Blake. 2010. Being participated: a community approach. In Proceedings of the 11th Biennial Participatory Design Conference on - PDC ’10. ACM Press, New York, New York, USA, 1. https://doi.org/10.1145/1900441.1900443
[52]
Heike Winschiers-Theophilus, Veera Virmasalo, Marly M Samuel, Brit Stichel, and Helena E Afrikaner. 2020. Facilitating Design for the Unknown: an Inclusive Innovation Design Journey with a San Community in the Kalahari Desert. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Design Creativity (ICDC 2020). The Design Society, 263–270. https://doi.org/10.35199/ICDC.2020.33
[53]
World Bank. 2016. World Development Report 2016: Digital Dividends. Vol. 1. The World Bank, Washington DC. https://doi.org/10.1596/978-1-4648-0671-1

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)User Participation through WhatsApp – Mobile Instant Messaging as a Medium for Distributed Co-designProceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3643834.3661625(2143-2155)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
  • (2022)A Systematic Review and Thematic Analysis of Community-Collaborative Approaches to Computing ResearchProceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491102.3517716(1-18)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2022

Index Terms

  1. A community-initiated website development project: promoting a San community campsite initiative
          Index terms have been assigned to the content through auto-classification.

          Recommendations

          Comments

          Information & Contributors

          Information

          Published In

          cover image ACM Other conferences
          AfriCHI '21: Proceedings of the 3rd African Human-Computer Interaction Conference: Inclusiveness and Empowerment
          March 2021
          182 pages
          ISBN:9781450388696
          DOI:10.1145/3448696
          Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

          Publisher

          Association for Computing Machinery

          New York, NY, United States

          Publication History

          Published: 08 July 2021

          Permissions

          Request permissions for this article.

          Check for updates

          Author Tags

          1. Global South
          2. co-design methods
          3. community-based tourism

          Qualifiers

          • Research-article
          • Research
          • Refereed limited

          Funding Sources

          • KAUTE-Säätiö

          Conference

          AfriCHI 2021

          Contributors

          Other Metrics

          Bibliometrics & Citations

          Bibliometrics

          Article Metrics

          • Downloads (Last 12 months)17
          • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)1
          Reflects downloads up to 24 Jan 2025

          Other Metrics

          Citations

          Cited By

          View all
          • (2024)User Participation through WhatsApp – Mobile Instant Messaging as a Medium for Distributed Co-designProceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3643834.3661625(2143-2155)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
          • (2022)A Systematic Review and Thematic Analysis of Community-Collaborative Approaches to Computing ResearchProceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491102.3517716(1-18)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2022

          View Options

          Login options

          View options

          PDF

          View or Download as a PDF file.

          PDF

          eReader

          View online with eReader.

          eReader

          HTML Format

          View this article in HTML Format.

          HTML Format

          Figures

          Tables

          Media

          Share

          Share

          Share this Publication link

          Share on social media