Nic Bidwell has made community networks (CNs) more visible to Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), a research field in which she focuses on technologies in rural contexts and supporting African researchers. She was first introduced to locally built telecommunications in 2008 whilst undertaking research in South Africa’s Eastern Cape. Over the next four years her participatory technology projects supported local people’s technical interests, which contributed to their, later, set up of a pioneering CN. Nic extended her support of CNs when she moved to Namibia by facilitating university students and marginalised groups in exploring or establishing CNs in their villages and by hosting the first African Community Network Summit at the African HCI conference that she co-founded.
Between 2017 and 2019 she studied gender and other social factors that affect access to, use of, and interactions with CNs in rural India, Indonesia, Uganda, South Africa, Mexico and Argentina, supported by the Association for Progressive Communications. Nic has held positions in departments of computing, informatics and IT in Australian, European and African universities, is an associate editor of AI & Society journal and of the Association of Computer Machinery’s (ACM) premiere journal, and is on the Executive Committee of ACM’s Special Interest Group in HCI. She is currently Associate Professor and Research Group Head of Techno-Anthropology and Participation in Aalborg University’s Technical Faculty of IT and Design, in Denmark, and adjunct Professor at the International University of Management, Namibia.
