Last week I was in a village in the rural hinterlands of West Bengal in India on a field research. I observed that they use a certain interesting method to share the local community information. It is done in a way that uses 'Public Information Landmarks' to distribute and disseminate knowledge. Every village administration office (Gram Panchayat) has an information post (mostly on the wall or a notice board outside the office) that depicts a map or land use survey of the village area and some key information regarding the commercials of the administrative office, as mandated by the laws governing accounting transparencies. If you have noticed the pic (above left) of the information post, it has a few 'inline' black patches that are used to record information (handwriting it with a piece of chalk) that are subject to change from time to time. e.g. numbers denoting amounts of money saved or disbursed as loan for the week by the village administrative office.

In the other example a village telephone booth & recharge shop in Ethiopia publishes mobile recharge coupon rates for the consumer. Here we need to remember that many of these mobile companies offer a daily changing rate for their rural consumers to crate the 'pull' factor. 

The interesting bit is that here the information was changing at a very local or micro level. And when we think about all rural ICT based solutions for the developing world market that have been conceived or deployed so far, it is difficult for them to handle information at such a micro-level. This is simply because the vast swathes of rural hinterland in India, China or Africa are not digitally represented in the information super or infrastructures that we have grown accustomed to in our urban existences. The only system that does account for such a scale, GIS or Geographical Information System, unfortunately does not integrate with others to create a seamless whole. Far from  it, even the basic access of a digital community information network is not available for these rural communities. So even if we could map all the little village hamlets on earth on global digital information systems, it can not create that locally thriving information exchanges, unless these local communities are empowered to do so.

The rural communities did have an easily accessible, efficient and sociable platform where they could share or consume various information or knowledge, it is known as the 'Word of Mouth' or WOM. It is one of the most successful traditional community platform even today. But with the advent of communication technologies like 'mobile phones' in the rural social ecosystem, the forces of WOM are on the wane. Some would argue that mobiles have actually augmented the communication and that is partially true, but WOM exists in an organic medium of various 'one to many' or 'many to many' social relationships, that 'mobile phone' has breached by bringing in the direct person to person communication shutting out the others. Today no one depends on the community to know something, rather they call the person who has that knowledge.

I also asked some basic questions (since it was outside the scope of the study) about a possible socially sharable information platform to some our village respondents, I found a set of amazing insights. They reacted to an imaginary scenario of being able to get an update on the progress a loan application requested by a community member to the block development office. They were quick to come back on it  saying 'the fact that the application was being tracked on a daily basis would put pressure on the concerned authorities to  process the application faster.' Here one of the aspects stressed upon was the visibility of such information in public spaces.

When we look at the mental model of the village communities, that 'Hyperlocal' level is extremely crucial and provides a frame of reference for them basis their world view. And probably it is only these communities themselves who are capable of creating and sustaining such a massive scale of 'hyper-local information microcosms'. 

[To be completed...]