MoSoGood 2014 - Mobiles for the Social Good Workshop

There were about 5 billion mobile phone accounts in the world in 2012, and 60% of the subscribers lived in developing countries. Beyond facilitating communication, mobile phones are also transforming the way we send money, take care of our health, check market prices, engage with our governments, do emergency response, and many other things. Yet to a vast majority of the world's population many of these services remain out of reach due to issues of low-literacy, limited technology experience, language barriers, device and infrastructure constraints, physical disabilities, and other cognitive, socio-cultural and socio-economic barriers. The complex interaction of these issues provide a challenging yet rich context for how research in HCI could help underserved populations, across the developing and the developed world, realize the full potential of what mobile technologies have to offer.
The "Mobiles for Social Good" workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners interested in understanding underserved populations in both the developing and developed world, and designing, developing, and evaluating mobile systems for their sustained social and economic development. A key goal of the workshop is to identify common research practices, to discuss challenges of HCI research in the field, and to discuss requirements of specific challenges at the intersection of HCI and Mobiles for the Social Good, such as socio-economic & cultural settings, local and regional power relations, or literacy.
Call for Contributions
Rather than focussing on a single well-established community we want to bring together a diverse group of participants with different backgrounds and interests, both within and beyond the established MobileHCI audience.
A key goal of the workshop is to identify common research practices, to discuss challenges of HCI research in the field, and to discuss particular requirements of specific challenges at the intersection of HCI and Mobiles for the Social Good.
We invite the contribution of detailed problem statements, position papers, research papers, and interactive demos of up to 4 pages from everybody interested to share ideas, experience, or methods applicable within the scope of this workshop.
Topics
Topics of the MSoGood workshop include but are not limited to:
Interfaces/interactions for illiterate or low-literates -- both in the strict and wider sense (e.g., techno-literacy)
Interfaces/interactions for (mobile) data collection and contribution
Interfaces/interactions for participatory sensing/monitoring or other citizen science activities
Context-adaptive interfaces
Interfaces/interactions for mobile ICT4D systems
HCI research methods in ICT4D settings
Socio-cultural and socio-economic challenges
Committees
Organizers
Falko Schmid, CapacityLab -AT- University of Bremen
Lutz Frommberger, CapacityLab -AT- University of Bremen
Muki Haklay, ExCiteS -AT- University College London
Matthias Stevens, ExCiteS -AT- University College London
Ed Cutrell, Microsoft Research India
Indrani Medhi Thies, Microsoft Research India
Program Committee
To be anounced!
Venue
mosogood is held on September 23 in conjunction with MobileHCI 2014 in Toronto, Canada. The conference venue is
Hyatt Regency Toronto
370 King Street West
Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5V 1J9
Tel: +1 416.343.1234, Fax: +1 416.599.7394