IDSS Presents: 'Question Box: An ICT Case Study of Service Delivery and Data Generation from Outlier Populations'

Woman uses a QuestionBox to call for help

Photo courtesy of QuestionBox

About the Program

Ground implementation programs in the developing world frequently wish to reach more remote communities, as well as better engage with hard-to-reach demographics within the communities they already reach.

Rose Shuman and her co-presenter, F. Mita Paramita will discuss the Question Box, a network array of public shared callboxes serving marginalized or rural populations. Semantic analysis of call records from Question Box installations provides a new layer of data insight for macro-level analysis of the conversations happening on the edges of societies, from which early patterns in crisis, health, political and environment can be inferred to better inform quantitative decision-making.

About the Speakers

Rose Shuman, founder of Question Box, is an experienced international technology & innovation practitioner. Question Box is an international information and communications technology nonprofit that specializes in reaching and generating data from marginalized populations in the developing world. She is a TED Fellow, a Senior Fellow at the USC Marshall School Society and Business Laboratory, and sits on the UK Guardian Global Development Advisory Panel. She received her BA and MA from Brown University. Rose has published in Public Service Review; International Trade Forum Magazine; The Guardian (UK); Harvard Business Review online; and the United States Institute for Peace International Network for Economics and Conflict. Her work with Question Box has been featured by the U.S. Department of State; VOA; TED; BBC; Telegraph (UK); Deutsche Welle and the New York Times amongst others.

F. Mita Paramita is a practitioner specializing in new operations and technology initiatives for emerging and frontier markets, with focus on underserved populations. She is also Technology Lead for Question Box. Mita cofounded a personalized digital news aggregator that was acquired by MySpace, then the world’s largest social network. As Vice President of Operations, she managed teams of engineers to produce innovative new digital products and audience behavior analytics platforms. Of Chinese & Indonesian heritage, fluent in English, Indonesian and French, and proficient in Mandarin and several regional dialects, Mita holds civil engineering, graduate architecture and design degrees from Lehigh University and RISD. Learn more about the International Development Speaker Series