Socio-Technical Issues of Participatory Design in the Developing World

This article describes how the VeSeL project which involves a distributed team of technologists and users from different cultural backgrounds is attempting to manage the process of user involvement and participation. In this case the developers are distributed but linked by a number of communication technologies while the users have very few technological means of communicating with the developers. It describes how the contrasting social and community issues of both the developers and the users can be understood and managed.