Are the needs real or just what we imagine?

[dbosk]

From the reviews:
"In keeping with the author’s comment in their conclusion regarding the need to face the “engineer’s disease” of failing to thoroughly analyze user needs before providing technical solutions, I’ve tried to reflect on my own experiences organizing large scale demonstration before writing this review.
In that light, I’m not convinced that some of the needs identified by the author are real, or if they are, whether they are the most pressing ones faced by protest organizers and participants. I think there needs to be more empirical evidence referenced in the paper which substantiates the author’s choices to that effect.
I would therefore encourage her/him to seek out academic research related to these issues, or perhaps look for some kind of needs assessment type documentation emerging from social justice communities. What are the real problems faced by anti-authoritarian activists attempting to organize demonstrations in the Middle East, for example? I am also not sure that the ‘after a protest’ section is complete: while combating misinformation is important, there are also challenging problems in terms of what to do if a participant is arrested or disappears that may have technical implications, and are not covered here.
I would also encourage the author to engage in a critical reflection about whether technical solutions are in fact always the most effective or efficient solutions to the problems faced by these groups (for example, is it realistic that activists would seek out otherwise-strangers as outlined in section 2.1 to organize public demonstrations using a digital tool like this?)"

[dbosk]

Guillermo, about a month ago:
In short... it sounds like: look for the problems and some references to back up the usefulness of the solutions to those problems. The last statement on whether technical solutions are most effective/efficient/approppiate depends a lot on the particular use case or scenario. For example, if the sole act of accessing the internet requires some sort of governmental permission that is already a hassle because it flags a particular individual in terms of surveillance, and in that case, maybe accessing internet is not the best and mouth-to-mouth is more secure...

[dbosk]

This relates to #5 .