6 Years Later: Examining Long-term Project Outcomes

ICTD authors often publish papers while their projects are still in progress. While valuable, this means that past conferences are full of projects with loose ends. In trying to learn from past research, we are missing much of the context—what happens after publication—despite it being necessary to fully understand a project’s results. From the 15 full papers at ACM DEV 2016, we consider 11 projects that developed digital technologies. Of those, we conducted interviews with authors of 6 of the projects. This novel approach to systematic analysis of the literature adds data unavailable via a traditional literature review. With this, we learn the full trajectories of these projects, including what came after publication, and aggregate learnings from author reflections. This forms what we call a project lifecycle review: we look at both the pre-publication and post-publication lifecycles of ICTD projects in order to understand their end-results and how they got there.