MIT Center for Future Civic Media reports on one example of technology promoting civic engagement and community building. “Healthline” is a collaborative research project involving Carnegie Mellon University, the Aga Khan University, and the Health and Nutrition Development Society
Few expect a technology with civic potential to exemplify all the characteristics highlighted in the wish list above. A quick search for technologies that aspire to some of these standards did, however, yield interesting results. Healthline, for example, is an information access system hosted on a server and designed for use by community health workers in the developing world. The system can be accessed at any time, toll-free, using a fixed line or cellular phone. Community practitioners can call Healthline and retrieve medical information through a spoken conversation with the system in their native language. While the Healthline project does not address issues of community building and civic engagement per se, it serves as a useful model for analysis and to consider the obstacles that might arise when deploying a new technology within a community.
Ismailimail 