A Cross-Cultural Noticeboard for a Remote Community: Design, Deployment, and Evaluation

Remote communities all over the world often face the problem of creating and sharing digital contents in ways that are appropriate for their values and customs while using tools that were designed for Western contexts. This paper advocates for a different approach that builds upon the own goals and ambitions of a specific community, leveraging existing skills, and reflecting local ways of knowing in spite of the higher costs. We present the design of a digital noticeboard tailored to the needs and values of the Australian Aboriginal community of Groote Eylandt. The noticeboard was designed to support communication and promote literacy by offering bi-lingual multimodal content creation and sharing. The final design mirrors the preference for orality and storytelling, is well suited to working in groups, and pays special attention to issues of moderation. The noticeboard does not rely on a stable connectivity, and notices can be shared to many locations using low-tech opportunistic mechanisms. Because the value of custom designs can hardly be assessed only in terms of cost and efficiency in this paper we propose to focus on community engagement as a measure of success for HCI4D projects.

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