Introduction
With the booming development of mobile phone technology, it has opened the possibility for these devices to assist people living in developing communities. The power of contemporary mobile phones is beyond that of a standard phone. More appropriately, they are mobile computing devices. Kospeak takes this idea and focuses it towards the indigenous people of Kowanyama located at Cape York in Northern Australia.
Target Community
Kowanyama is a rural Aboriginal community located on the Gulf of Carpentaria side of Cape York. The Aboriginal people who live in this community descend from the Kokominjena, Kokoberra and Kunjen tribes. The local dialect is Yir-Yorent, but English is the most commonly used language. In July 1987, the Queensland state government handed over the land to the indigenous community via a DOGIT (Deed of Grant In Trust). Furthermore, the Queensland government recognises the traditional tribal laws and allows for governing elders in the community to augment state law. This group of elders is known as the Community Justice Group. Due to alcoholism and a history of prejudice, the community currently faces many hardships in the forms of domestic violence, alcohol abuse amongst other problems. The elders and Queensland land government have recognised this and tried to overcome these problems by implementing alcohol bans in specific areas. Although, the issue of most importance for the elders, is the future of the youths in the community. The youths are losing touch with their heritage as result of poor influence.
Project Brief
Kospeak aims to bridge the gap between the elders and youth of the community via cultural stylization of asynchronous communication.
Technical Description
Kospeak's functionality has been coded using Adobe's Flash 8. The applications is packaged as an executable for the phone's Flash Lite 1.1 Player. Flash Lite is quite an impressive toolkit for visually beautiful and animation intense projects, but it lacks the ability to communicate with the phone's camera, microphone and bluetooth. Kospeak requires access to Global Positioning System (GPS) co-ordinates, hence a Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME) application must run in parallel in order to communicate with the bluetooth GPS device. Although, due to time and technical restrictions I was unable to implement the J2ME program, so currently the system generates dummy co-ordinates. All the systems data is stored on an offshore database and all database communication is executed via PHP server-side scripts. The following is a more detailed description of the technically intense aspects of the project:
Downloads
» Install file
» Kospeak source
» Documentation
» Evaluation report
» Promotions poster
» Presenter