Commonsense net: A wireless sensor network for resource-poor agriculture in the semiarid areas of developing countries

COMMONSense Net (CSN) is an ongoing research project that focuses on the design and implementation of a sensor network for agricultural management in developing countries, with a special emphasis on the resource-poor farmers of semiarid regions. Throughout the year 2004, we carried out a survey on the information needs of the population living in a cluster of villages in Southern Karnataka, India. The results highlighted the potential that environment-related information has for the improvement of farming strategies in the face of highly variable conditions, in particular for risk management strategies (choice of crop varieties, sowing and harvest periods, prevention of pests and diseases, efacient use of irrigation water, etc.). Accordingly, we advocate an original use of information and communication technologies (ICT). Our demand-driven approach for the design of appropriate ICT tools that are targeted at the resource-poor, we believe, is relatively new. In order to go beyond a pure technocratic approach, we adopted an iterative, participatory methodology.