The team is undertaking an 18-month project, entitled Community-generated media for the next billion, to research how social-media sharing systems should be designed and deployed to benefit billions of people beyond the mainstream 'developed' world.

The project is led by Professor Mounia Lalmas of the University of Glasgow's Department of Computing Science, in collaboration with Professor David Frohlich of the University of Surrey's Digital World Research Centre.

The team will work with their main project partner TranScape, based in Rural Eastern Cape, Ngqeleni District, South Africa, which helps communities to tackle their significant health, social, educational, and economic needs.

Professor Jones said: "Our research targets communities in both 'developing' countries and those that are marginalised in places such as the UK. We will explore a series of novel information ecologies for media-sharing in a highly-populated, but remote, rural development context.

"Working with TranScape, we will build on a current wireless network to establish digital media libraries connecting multiple locations across five villages in the Wild Coast of South Africa.

"We will use this infrastructure to examine the interplay of mobile phones, pico-projectors, situated displays, word-of-mouth storytelling and paper-based artefacts, to create and exchange multimedia content for education, health, agriculture, local social welfare, and community decision-making."

The project will deliver a well-documented toolkit to allow organisations like TranScape to establish community media-sharing infrastructures. The toolkit will also be highly applicable in marginalised communities in the UK and other developed countries.

"We aim, then, to provide a practical way for many others to put our research results into immediate action," added Professor Jones.

"By directing the collaboration of interdisciplinary experts towards the particular technological challenges of rural communities this project can dramatically re-shape the ways we conceptualise the Internet in community information sharing; how the rural poor in developing regions experience media-centric computing; and methods to localise ICT design and development in marginalised communities."

For more information visit:
Swansea University's Future Interaction Technology Lab
Computing Science, University of Glasgow
University of Surrey's Digital World Research Centre
TranScape

This news item has been generated by Bethan Evans, Swansea University Public Relations Office, Tel: 01792 295049 or email b.w.evans@swansea.ac.uk.