Open Source Simple Computer for Agriculture in Rural Areas
(OSCAR)

Workshop - March 14, 2005

The workshop on “Perception and Appropriateness of OSCAR” was launched on the 14th of March, 2005 at the administration block of Wageningen University and all the project staff were present. The workshop opened with a session on “Socio-Technical Innovations and Transdisciplinary Science”. Prof. Dr. Cees Leeuwis (Chair, Communication and Innovation Studies Group) made a presentation on the group’s project “Convergence of Science” and Dr. Rico Lie made a presentation about the “transdisciplinarity in OSCAR”. The OSCAR exercise can be viewed as traversing among the disciplines of botany, agriculture and information technology with the end users as farmers, extension officers and students from various levels. The perception and appropriateness of OSCAR tool can be assessed with the key questions of:

• the goal to be achieved
• method employed
• content
• target groups/audience and
• organisation

The target groups are well defined in the farmer community, extension officers and the new addition to these were the academic community, mainly focussing on students from Undergraduate and Postgraduate schools. It was planned to conduct some tests with the students from the Wageningen University to get their feedback about the perception of OSCAR. The discussion spanned around various issues of how to present the drawings and pictures so as to make relevance on field, what are the real needs of the farmers and extension workers at the field level, and if there is no real problem in weed identification, whether providing the much needed information on weed management and control would be useful. It will also be helpful to assess the needs beforehand in terms of what were the target groups doing in the absence of a tool like OSCAR. Introducing new institutions and new methods with new technologies will have an impact in the social learning of the target groups and the success of which will mainly depend upon the appropriateness of the goal (increasing productivity of the Rice Wheat systems of Indo-Gangetic plains), method (in our case, ICT), content (the OSCAR tool itself), the nature of the target groups and the organisation of the institutionalised effort.

Prof. Anne Van den Bann, former chair of Communication and Innovation Studies Group, who has a very rich experience in studies related to the extension services in India delivered a talk on the “Changes in Agricultural Extension”, which mainly focussed on the changing needs of the farmers in the light of new technological innovations and the demands it necessitates on the extension services. The farmers’ major preference being what is more productive and what produces immediate tangible results, the new interventions need to cater to such natural and justified expectations. One also needs to balance between the importance attached to the learning of new skills and what could be more productive immediately and this should define the goals set for such initiatives like OSCAR and also need to identify to whom to cooperate with to make such a new endeavour to be a success. The progress of each partner was evaluated in their respective areas. As planned, the Open Source pre-release beta version of OSCAR was demonstrated in the workshop. Considering the stage of development of the open source version, the participants agreed that we need to pace ahead consistently to make the open source version stable. On the botanical aspect, a final list of 50 species has been incorporated in the database. The drawings for the identikit are being prepared and so far, the entire sets of drawings for 12 species have been completed. The Rice and Wheat Consortium staff have started working on the aspects of weed management and control measures. They also presented a basic framework for designing the solutions for weed management and control. This was well received by all the project staff and it was agreed to proceed in the same lines to incorporate the control measures in the OSCAR tool.

Dr. Ir. Lammert Bastiaans, Crop and Weed Ecology Group, Wageningen University presented the work of the group which covered the weed management practices in Netherlands, the problems and the new initiatives in weed control. This helped to improve the understanding of the various practices with their different cultural background which contribute to research and implementation of new weed control and management techniques. The interesting aspect of the discussion happened to be the growing concern of the extensive use of herbicides and how it affects weed management practices at the farmer level. The strategy of preventive and curative weed control with application of less lethal herbicide, practices like intercropping, direct seeded rice, proper residue management practices, cover crops were discussed as viable alternatives in weed management. The experience sharing with this group which has wide experience in weed control projects in South East Asia and Africa proved to be very useful. A discussion with the PROTA (Plant Resources of Tropical Africa) group was also held during the workshop. It intends to synthesize the dispersed information on the approximately 7,000 useful plants of Tropical Africa and to provide wide access to the information via Web databases, Books, and CD-Rom’s. PROTA is not being selective about the species and the products are mainly derived from the web databases. It was interesting to learn the experiences of this well established group and the advantage of using ICT for easier and effective dissemination of information, and the question of updating of the information on regular basis was discussed.

Further on, the workshop focussed on the testing of the OSCAR with the students. Members of Semper Florens (Study Association of Plant Scientists) were invited for a session of the workshop where the OSCAR tool was presented to them and were asked to use the tool themselves. After the students worked on the software for a considerable amount of time identifying a two to three species, their responses against the features of the software such as:

• the drawing of the characters;
• the ease of navigation within the software (the ease with which one can reach various screens containing character states and back);
• the usefulness of scientific content of the software (the herbarium sheets, the glossary of botanical terms, the botanical description of each species).

The tests were again conducted with a group of bachelor students. Altogether, the response of the students was very positive and they felt that the graphical representation of the characters and character states made it easy to identify easily compared to the conventional identification methods. The navigation aspects needed to be improved and in general the feel of the software was well rated. The scientific content in terms of botanical description of species was found to be useful and in particular hyperlinks providing explanation for technical terms (like monocotyledons etc) in the description was appreciated.

Mr. Bharath Krishnan from RWC gave a talk on the “Design of Software” which highlighted the importance of end-user perspectives in the OSCAR. The question of integrating text-to-speech (TTS) capability for OSCAR was discussed but was decided that presently the focus will have to remain on completing the final version of open source OSCAR software.

New deadlines were agreed upon for follow-up of work for each partner. RWC agreed to locate the translation teams and to propose weed control measures to be included in the software. CIS and CIRAD planned for the next field trip in Pakistan. The field trip in Pakistan will be organised in the month of September, which happens to be late compared to what is charted out in the project calendar, but considering the busy schedule of the staff, this was agreed upon. Subsequently the next workshop which was to be held in the month of September would be held in the month of December, 2005 in Bangladesh. RWC will handle the responsibility of organisation of the both the field trips and workshop in Pakistan and Bangladesh.