Comments on: Questions for Question Box

By: Benita

Benita — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 05:43:00 +0000

Interview with Question Box and Open Mind founder.

By: Dr Rajveer Singh Pawaiya

Dr Rajveer Singh Pawaiya — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 06:25:28 +0000

It interesting to see such projects meant to overcome the physical infrasructural and financial difficulties to the poorest of poor masses. People may have many hypothetical ot hitherto unforeseen questions in mind about the successfulness of the project. But what I think at the moment is Rose has done a marvellous job which requires an awful kind of courage to serve back the very mass/public purposefully from which you have risen with some skill. When something is inititaed people see it with much skeptics, instead of admiring and encouraging the efforts.

The project is indeed meant for the poors who even struggle to meet both the ends, forget skilling and equipping them with computers and other such gadgets. In such circumstances, when they are able to know about the health problems, domestic problems ar any sort of information they might need in day to day life, at least Question Box can be ideal to equip them with some sort of information which they are deprived of otherwise. Even this can help them transmit the information from their remote village during some calamitous emergency, some attacks by bandits or so, like in naxalite infested areas and likes. Congratulations Rose for your novel efforts using your IT skills to serve the poor people. How many IT professionals we see even think of poor people leave alone serving them with their skills. Good Bavo Buck up.

By: Rose Shuman

Rose Shuman — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 19:25:31 +0000

@Trishna

@ Trisha, Andy –
Yes, Andy’s right here. In India, over 40% of people can’t read. For a population of 1.2 billion, there’s only 5 million or so Internet connections. Longterm, yes, everyone searching on their own is a great vision. However, Question Box begins solving people’s needs now. Most queries are quite straightforward – ex., the price of cauliflower in town X – and the Operators handle them ably.

@ Zack, Andy –

1. Re: Government, corporate funding – An interesting question, and we will learn by doing. Regarding corporate sponsorships, I think it would be odd to curtail the results to sell more Pepsi, but sponsors should have a right to play a message while people are waiting for search results. For the Government, I’d presume it would be branded as a government service powered by Question Box, meaning there’s full disclosure, and probably a limited set of topics for that service (like how to get land titles, etc.)

2. Re: voice recognition, Andy pretty much sums it up. People in India, even middle class ones, still aren’t using voice mail, let alone voice recognition. It’s going to be awhile before that works for mass audiences.

Thanks to everyone for reading Andy’s interview! Please feel free to get in touch with me via http://www.questionbox.org.

By: Andy

Andy — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 22:55:33 +0000

@Trishna
The reliance of the users on the Operator is of course less desirable than giving everyone a net connection and a thorough education. But such a goal is long-term, the villages where Question Boxes are deployed have underdeveloped infrastructure – far from being able to support broadband. Illiteracy is also a factor at work here. Ultimately these obstacles *need* to be overcome, but they are of a much larger scope than what Question Box aims to address.

@Zach
Q1 – See Rose’s answer near the bottom. I’m speculating but I’d think the key to retaining impartiality in this case would be to keep the Operators and their responsibilities insulated from the sponsoring body.

Q2 – That’s a very interesting scenario, but I don’t think it’s likely. You would need a combination of some powerful artificial intelligence, voice recognition, and voice generation – tailored for each local language. This is a lot of effort for a project aiming to cover the interim transition of web access to remote areas. As Trishna mentioned, education is a much higher priority in the long term.

By: Zack

Zack — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 15:58:54 +0000

I think it’s an interesting concept.

Question #1: If you’re recieving government funding, who’s to say that the government isn’t influencing the answers that you get? Or corporations? Say you ask where you can get a Coke, and although you can get one in the store across the street the operator tells you that s/he cannot find one near you, but there is a Pepsi vendor down the block?

Question #2: If one day voice recognition software gets to the level of ability and availability, would they do away with the operators and have a completely self-sustaining system?

By: Trishna

Trishna — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 12:25:56 +0000

It’s an interesting concept, but the fundamental problem with it is that it doesn’t contribute to people’s own capacity to find, analyse and utilise information effectively. If there’s somebody else answering their questions, they aren’t necessarily being provided with the information that they want. It’s all well and good saying that the service providers are English literate, but they aren’t necessarily information literate – a key factor in such a service. If these villagers are relying on somebody else to provide their information, they don’t acquire the skills to find it themselves – that’s not smart, because they don’t empower themselves to deal with an increasingly information oriented world. Perhaps the project would be more effective, if it functioned instead as a tool to teach people how to find their own information and installed computers with Internet access and Skype.