Indigenous people comprise only 5% of the world’s population, yet they protect an estimated 80% of earth’s biodiversity. My talk will reflect on how technologies to support communication can disrupt practices in Indigenous and rural communities that sustain life and ways to work with communities to design more sensitively.

• Charles Darwin University, Australia and Rhodes University, South Africa
• Chair Sustainability Committee ACM SIGCHI

Nic Bidwell has researched in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) with rural inhabitants and First Nations people for over 20 years, including with groups in Mexico, Kenya, Namibia, Mozambique, South Africa, Uganda, Indonesia, Argentina, India, far north Australia and Ireland. Her community-based design research with rural collaborators set the stage for South Africa’s first community-owned ISP and her analyses of relations between spectrum regulation and rural communications have informed policy debate. She co-founded the African HCI Conference (AfriCHI) and was the founding Chair of the Sustainability Committee for the Association for Computer Machinery’s Special Interest Group in HCI. Nic is an Associate Editor for AI and Society Journal and Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction and has held academic positions in Africa, Europe and Australia. Currently, she is a Professor in the discipline of IT at Charles Darwin University, Australia and in Information Systems at Rhodes University, South Africa, and co-leads a Discovery Project about how AI should participate in communicating about extreme weather from the perspective of remote First Nations communities in north Australia.