From the Editor’s Desk

My dear readers of Journal of Extension Education,

Wish you a happy and prosperous New Year!

Access to digital technologies has enabled increased access to information to farmers. However, several ICT projects in agriculture that were designed and implemented for the marginalized sections of the society in the last decade have failed to scale and sustain. Many feel that such failures could be attributed to avoidable reasons. I was recently going through a publication entitled ,‘From Principle to Practice: Implementing the Principles for Digital Development by Waugaman (2016) of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Global Development Lab. The nine principles enlisted in the publication seek to institutionalize lessons learned in the use of ICT in development projects.

1. Design with the User: Develop context appropriate solutions, including all user groups in planning, implementation and assessment.

2. Understand the Existing Ecosystem: Participate in networks and communities of like–minded practitioners and align to existing policies.

3. Design for Scale: Design for scale from the start, and assess and mitigate dependencies that might limit ability to scale. Be replicable and customizable in other countries and contexts. Demonstrate impact before scaling a solution.

4. Build for Sustainability: Plan for sustainability from the start, including planning for long–term financial health e.g., assessing total cost of ownership. Engage with local governments to ensure integration into national strategy

5. Be Data Driven: Design ICT projects so that impact can be measured at discrete milestones with a focus on outcomes rather than outputs.

6. Use Open Standards, Open Data, Open Source, and Open Innovation: Adopt and expand existing open standards. Develop software to be open source by default

7. Reuse and Improve: Use, modify and extend existing tools, platforms, and frameworks whenever possible.

8. Address Privacy & Security: Assess and mitigate risks to the security of users and their data. Ensure equity and fairness in co–creation, and protect the best interests of the end–users.

9. Be Collaborative: Engage diverse expertise across disciplines at all stages. Document work, results, processes, and best practices and share them widely. Publish materials under a Creative Commons license by default, with strong rationale if another licensing approach is taken.

Though it may not be feasible to implement all the aforementioned principles simultaneously, they might be of help to the practitioners and policy makers in achieving a balance between adoption of these principles and usage of resources.

I am happy to inform you that JEE is now being indexed by DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals – https://doaj.org/toc/2456–1282 ). This issue of JEE has papers on topics such as information seeking behavior, adoption of crop insurance schemes, and mobile advisory services. I hope you find them interesting. Do send your feedback to editorextension@gmail.com .

JEE 29(1)

D. PuthiraPrathap

Chief Editor