Paroli: Designing for Productive Participation and Engagement in Voice-based Platforms for Rural Workforces

Over the last two decades, voice-based platforms (VBPs), including interactive voice response (IVR) and WhatsApp, have shown remarkable promise in bridging the digital divide faced by organizations and communities in international development contexts. However, much work in VBPs has focused simply on community participation, with little focus on how this participation over VBPs can be configured to maximize participant engagement and productivity, especially in rural workforce settings. Across two deployments, with nonprofits supporting rural fisherfolk and tea garden workers, we piloted a VBP unlocking new participation formats in VBPs tailored to specific needs and lived experiences of target workforces to enhance the participation experience. Leveraging telephony, the VBP fosters inclusive and flexible community engagement, facilitating synchronous small group discussions and streamlining both asynchronous and synchronous interactions unique to existing VBPs. Our study further contributes to HCI and CSCW literature by identifying the factors important for sustaining remote workforce engagement in VBPs: (1) community ownership for increasing participation, (2) need for upskilling VBP hosts to increase productivity, and (3) embedding local cues as part of the VBP deployment to maximize uptake.