Responsible choice for appropriate technology  (Page 8/11)

C. Uchangi Dam

C. honest brokering in india

• “People’s Science in Action: The Politics of Protest and Action” by Pradkhe
• Retired engineers working with NGOs in India help resolve a 14 year standoff between the Indian government and villagers in Chafawade and Jeur. The engineers carried out detailed studies into the STS surrounding these villagers including land use mappings. They were able to formulate plans for a different irrigation system that had less impact on these communities but still delivered the basic functions of an irrigation project.
• Values: (a) Responsibility: Shift design responsibility from a bureaucratic government agency to local communities empowered by work with NGO engineers; (b) Justice: Develop and design an alternative irrigation project that bettered distributed harms and benefits of irrigation among all the stakeholders; (c) Community Solidarity: Use government challenge as an opportunity to discover community values and give these voice through locally organized resistance and value responsive engineering plans
• Technologies: (a) Replace single large scale dam with several smaller dams; (b) Relocate water storage sites away from Chafawade and Jeur; (c) Redistribute and spread both the benefits and harms associated with the Uchangi dam and irrigation project. (d)Reconstruct the stakeholder alliance to represent better the interests of small villages in this region of India

D. rapunsel: designing value into educational software

• M. Flanagan, D. Howe, and H. Nissenbaum, “Embodying Values in Technology: Theory and Practice,” in Information Technology and Moral Philosophy , Jeroen van den Hoven&John Weckert, Eds. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp. 322-353.

• Educators in software development notice that there is a shortage of women programmers. Further investigation reveals that part of the problem is the gender bias inherent in software development including pedagogical materials (educational software) that is biased toward male and against female students. Educational specialists develop new educational software called Rapunsel that is geared toward computer programming to girls. Developers enact a value realization process that includes the discover of key values, their translation of these values into a design prototype that operationalizes and implements these values in software, and a rigorous process to verify that the design in question actually realizes these values.
• Framework: (a) Discover by examining project definition, design features, designer values, user values including the values inherent in “subversive uses” (b) Translation that includes the operationalization of values in a design and their implementation in a concrete STS; (c) Verification brought about through the triangulation of methods of participatory observation that include questionnaires, interviews, and day-in-the-life-scenaios
• Values: (a) Project Definition: social and civil interaction, privacy, security, equity; (b) Design features: social and civil interaction, cooperativeness, fair and equitable representation; (c) Designer Values: diversity, distributive justice, gender equity; (d) User values: self-expression, authorship, collaboration
• Examples: (a) Educational software to teach girls computer programming; (b) Enacted in the form of a game environment; (c) Modified in light of participatory observation and “subversive uses”