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BANG operates in the field of Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D). We build Internet Protocol (IP) communications to help bridge the digital divide in South Africa. We work with real communities, and build real solutions using state-of-the-art technologies.

We work with multi-modal semi-synchronous communications. Multi-modal means that communication consists of multiple modalities, e.g. text, voice and video. Semi-synchronous means that communication occurs in real-time (synchronous), store-and-forward (asynchronous) or anywhere in between (semi-synchronous). Instant Messaging is a good example of an application that has many of these features.

We are interested in all these forms of communication because they appear ideally suited to bridging digital divide gaps where there is a large variation amongst power provision, networks, end-user devices, media and temporal modalities, and human computer interfaces. BANG research explores how to build communication infrastructure that enables, and even automates, communication across such a wide variety of factors.

From our experience with actual communities, we have learned that building software for the digital divide is much more involved that just designing and implementing software. The process must involve the community so that the software ends up satisfying actual needs, instead of just ending up unused, like so many ICT4D projects. We use a socially aware software engineering approach that combines action research, participatory design, human computer interface techniques, ICT4D frameworks and state-of-the-art IP technologies. The process is iterative and long-term. We have long standing relationships with several local South African communities. This process reveals mistakes in our preconceptions about building appropriate technology, and also yields amazing rewards – both for the community, and for us as a computer scientists.

The project environment currently involves the following types of technologies for Deaf telephony, rural telephony and e-learning telephony projects:

· Web services and web servers: XML, SOAP, HTML

· Real-time communications and protocols: SIP, RTP, RTCP, UDP, TCP

· Asynchronous communications: SIMPLE, FTP, SFTP

· Application Servers: Open Cloud JSLEE, JBoss

· Media gateways: SIP, H.323, Asterisk/Digium

· Physical networks: WiFi, ADSL, PSTN, GSM, GPRS, 3G

· End-user devices: PCs, laptops, handhelds, mobile phones (Symbian and .Net)

· Development environments: Java, Enterprise Beans, .Net (C#), C, C++, Python

All of our work is completely free and open source software and can be found at softbridge.uwc.ac.za