ict4peace: beyond the hype

sanjana hattotuwa

TEDGlobal Fellow

sri lanka

systemic problems

• Post-war violence and repression still high

• Violence against independent media and critical dissent

• Legacy of 30 years of war: Communal distrust, no reconciliation, no political settlement, continued militarisation, national security mindset, repressive government, on-going censorship, poor rule of law, un-constitutional governance

my work from sri lanka

ict4peace blogict4peace.wordpress.com

imparting new media skills to mediahttp://www.slideshare.net/yajitha/presentations

helping mainstream media leverage new media

one text peace negotiations platformhttp://ict4peace.wordpress.com/2007/09/03/one-text-negotiations-and-collaboration-platform-in-sri-lanka

monitoring election violencecmev.wordpress.com

monitoring election violencecmev.wordpress.com

Facebook, Flickr, Podcasts, Twitter

monitoring election violencecmev.wordpress.com

the politics of remembrancewww.neveragainsl.tv

human rights monitoring

mainstream media monitoringwww.cpalanka.org/mediamonitoring

mainstream media monitoringwww.cpalanka.org/mediamonitoring

helping CSOs and NGOs use new mediawww.vimeo.com/cpa

helping rural communities leverage new mediahttp://ict4peace.wordpress.com/2009/07/29/from-community-radio-to-internet-radio-mobiles-and-narrow-casting-new-models-for-enduring-needs

visualising peacebuildinghttp://www.insightonconflict.org/conflicts/sri-lanka

groundviewswww.groundviews.org

groundviews: end of war special editionhttp://www.groundviews.org/category/issues/end-of-war-special-edition

From 19 – 27 May 2010, Groundviews ran a special edition on the end of war in Sri Lanka. Over this week alone, the site received over forty thousand readers and exclusively featured over eighty thousand words of original content, one video premiere, over a dozen photos, generating over one hundred and fifty thousand words of commentary.

Tens of thousands more have read and commented on this content since, making the special edition a sui generis archive of intelligent debate, incisive critique and vital perspectives that mainstream media in Sri Lanka, even post-war, is too fearful to feature.

groundviews: civility code

so what’s the big deal?

• ICTs help bear witness, in a country with a regime that seeks to erase inconvenient truths and kill those who document them.

• Less about hype (e.g. regime change) more about documentation, narration, archival, strategic dissemination, capacity building, knowledge creation, oral testimonies

• ICTs help advocacy. Web visualisations help render complex challenges in a manner that nourishes understanding, review and action.

• ICTs help human rights. Ordinary citizens can bear witness.

• ICTs help communities and individuals, marginalised in mainstream media and politics, create their own media and tell their stories, as they wish.

the future is anchored to and underpinned by

• Geo-location and geo-referencing via Google Maps, Bing etc

• New media and Web 2.0 technologies, including social networking

• Mobiles, and especially smartphones

• Broadband, especially wireless

• Interoperable ODR systems / data portability initiatives

the enduring challenges will be

• Privacy, in the age of Facebook

• Culture and context, actors and process, physical vs. virtual

• Transforming investments on PC based platforms, to mobile based platforms

• Engendering the political will to transform complex conflict

• The emphasis on the process, as opposed to the technology - people as opposed to the platform

thank yousanjanah@gmail.com