Social Innovation for Regreening & Resilience in Low Resource Environments Essay by Wendelien Tuijp & Anna Bon This essay is the authors’ version of a chapter in the book The Connected World – Insights from 100 Academics on How to Build better Connections, edited by Ivar Vermeulen, 2023, VU University […]
User-centred design
14 posts
The longstanding collaboration between the VU Centre for International Cooperation and the Computer Science Department of VU on the research theme ICT for Development – the Digitizing Society in the Global South, has again led, this year again, to a fruitful result. We can harvest seven interesting theses and one […]
Ownership of data and data privacy have become an extremely important issue, nowadays. Users are becoming aware of the need to control their personal data, and not letting it be manipulated and used by anyone on the Web. A new initiative, in this respect is Solid. Solid (derived from “Social […]
“Sustainability assessment and ethical considerations are not commonly included as subtasks in the development of digital systems and services and receive less attention in the design process than business and technical aspects. When developing digital systems/services or platforms for people in resource-constrained environments, it is important to take a wider […]
Siying Zhang’s master research was about how to design a participatory Covid-19 app. The events of this year 2020, have more than ever demonstrated the link between social networks and the spread of infectious diseases. No one can deny that opportunities are offered by the digitized society to prevent and […]
Over the past decades information system developers and knowledge engineers in ICT projects in wealthy regions of the world have come to realize that technical work can only be successful when situated in a broader organizational context. However, for low-resource environments (such as for example rural Africa), where contextual embedding […]
Amsterdam 23 May 2019 – The annual symposium “Perspectives on ICT4D”, organized by Victor de Boer and Anna Bon, was focused this year on transdisciplinarity — collaboration between academics and non-academics — in search of solutions for the Global Challenges of our Age. The theme was reflected in the talks by […]
In the framework of the W4RA research program to tackle Global Challenges and bridge the Digital Divide, five students Information Science set out to map the contours of digital exclusion within our own urban, wealthy, and highly connected context. Carlbandro Edoga and Marc Hegeman examined the obstacles homeless people face […]
In our modern society the increasing digitization of so many aspects of life holds a risk of social exclusion of various groups. People who find difficulties in accessing online information and navigating the Web are heavily disadvantaged, when information from the government, taxes, health services, legal information etc. is increasingly […]
Despite the fact that more than 70% of Africa’s population depends on agriculture for basic life needs, and in Africa’s drylands rain-fed agriculture is widespread, reliable meteorological data about rainfall and weather forecasts — in Europe timely and accurate — is often not available for African farmers. Recent studies in rural areas of […]