Social & new media tactics: Generating and curating provincial news

As part of my lecture series for mid-career journalists at the Sri Lanka College of Journalism, I held a class today on leveraging new and social media for news managers dealing with provincial news in Sri Lanka. Noting that the basis of this presentation was the generation of news from the provinces in a manner that also used new media (most provincial journalists still file their reports either through voice calls or by faxing hand written copies), I said that separate from this, those in Colombo in charge of news curation needed to be aware of the information already generated from the provinces through citizen journalism, as well as train themselves on how they can manage this growing range of information better.

I concentrated therefore on both news generation as well as news management using tools like Google Reader, Seesmic Look for Twitter and Google’s own updated news feeds.

See my earlier lecture on Social media: An introduction to practical uses during elections here.

What is interesting about the class composition is that the SLCJ mid-career course is that it brings together journalists from both State as well as Private media. It is a great mix of journalists both well versed with new media, or at least aware of its potential, and those very keen to learn, but without institutional support to do so. As was noted today by a journalist from State media, media and journalism in Sri Lanka is heading into a new paradigm based on new media, and journalists from both State and Private media will be left behind if they don’t have the means to access this media. Another provincial journalist, who for decades had filed reports to a well known private newspaper group, said that what he learnt today would help him create his own media from reports that were rejected for publication, yet dealing with issues vital to provincial communities / audiences.

I brought up the example of Saru Praja Radio in Nissankamallapura, where last year I spent a few days spent developing media capacities for community radio online. It was an eye-opener as to how advanced some rural communities were in adapting and adopting new technologies to meet their information needs.

Information and Technology for socio-political Change

I had an interesting interaction this morning with Christina Goodness and a group of graduate students in New York University on Sri Lanka, touching upon the challenges it faces post-war and the ways in which information and technology can play a role in more systemic peacebuilding and reconciliation.

The class wiki (as PDF here), largely based on Christina’s exemplary vision, is a cutting-edge, interdisciplinary and international syllabus that I wish universities in Sri Lanka also had. They don’t, and it is one reason why our tertiary education especially in the journalism, mired in outmoded and outdated pedagogy and syllabi, cannot cultivate in students a critical appreciation of our contemporary domestic and international affairs.

We sadly didn’t have enough time for questions, but I hope to be in touch with at least some of these students as they grapple with, as outsiders, some of the pressing challenges that face peacebuilders in and from Sri Lanka have to deal with post-war. My presentation looked at the systemic nature of governance, the root causes of violence and the situation around and immediately after the presidential elections. I was asked at the end by Christina to give the class an idea to work on, and I could think of no better one than the vexed challenge of reconciliation, especially with a government that simplistically sees the end of war as the perfect peace.

The future of reconciliation in Sri Lanka I see as an intersection of inimical partisan politics, progressive technologies, the empowerment of marginalised narratives, contesting narratives ad the disintermediation of such narratives through technology to form new civic identities, the progressive engagement of the diaspora and strengthening community resilience to enduring systemic violence. ICTs can play a role in all of these aspects and areas.

For other ideas, I pointed students to Building peace through ICT – Ideas for practical ICT4Peace projects and The future of mobile applications and some other ideas. We didn’t have time to talk about (new) media development post-war, but this too is an area that shows tremendous potential in Sri Lanka, despite disturbing developments in the recent past to clamp down on dissent online. Obviously, such autochthonous or endogenous media, resonant with community concerns and aspirations, have a great role to play in reconciliation as well.

Social Media in Haiti provides critical information on Haiti’s need

OCHA’s ReliefWeb has (a very rough) transcript of my recent podcast with IRIN on the use of technology in Haiti’s January 2010 earthquake relief effort.

Read it here. Read about the podcast and listen to the original version here.

A pertinent excerpt from the interview:

TUNBRIDGE: Did you see what is going on high-tech world here is unprecedented. Did you think it is going change forever the way we do respond to disasters?

HATTOTUWA: The way we respond to disasters it will always be the same. It will require sweat. It will require physical effort and it will require political will. These three key ingredients are the backbone of any post disaster relief effort and these will not change even as we move into the future. What I think highly demonstrates quite clearly is that technology is the fourth element. We have seen an unprecedented effort with regards to technology deployment to find out very rapidly after the earthquake what the needs on the ground were, where the most urgent cases of aid were in Port-au-Prince and the rest of the country. As well as technology deployments to generate financial aid for the relief efforts. I think Goggle set up a dedicated page very quickly after the earthquake. Apple allows you to donate through Itunes. And unprecedented sum of money that the American Red Cross – the ICRC have got through mobile donations. I think at last count 10 to 12 million US dollars. This has been unprecedented in relief efforts for disasters of this nature and certainly yes it will change the way the world responds to disasters. Because these are now technologies that as we have seen with Haiti can be extremely quickly deployed and we have seen with platforms like USHAHIDI, SHAHANA, INSTEED that is a global community behind these efforts to shape it to translate the systems into Creole and French, to fine tune the systems to the needs on the ground in Haiti. I think this has been unprecedented in the way they respond to the disasters and certainly sets the parameters of what we can expect in the future after disasters such as this.

Banning Sri Lankan porn online: A couple of months after…

Responding to an ill-advised and misguided petition filed by the IGP (yes, the same one who said mobile phones can be used by rape victims as evidence), the courts ordered the Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (TRC) to ban twelve sex sites in July 2009.

At the time, pro-government Sinhala media incredibly suggested that these sites were evidence of “an international conspiracy to tarnish the image of the country”, in addition to of course the hundreds of other conspiracies floating around.

Fast forward a couple of months, and it appears that the blocking of these sites is as haphazard as the blocking of news sites during Sri Lanka’s presidential elections. On both counts, the government of Sri Lanka demonstrates a monumental ignorance of progressive telecoms policy, confusing hypocritical morality with individual liberty and good parenting. The table below also suggests that there is really no coordinated approach to the implementation of these bans imposed by even by court order.

Dialog today remains the most open ISP, allowing four of the twelve banned sites on its network (though 3 of them are expired, and another just redirects to a different sex site). But even with SLT, the banning of sites is bizarre. www.tamilcanadian.com, and the popular news.tamilcanadian.com news aggregation portal is inaccessible on SLT ADSL, but freely accessibly via Mobitel HSPA and of course, Dialog. Why this is the case is anyone’s guess, but it points to a filtering regime that is still largely uncoordinated.

This may however all change with the Chinese expertise the Sri Lankan government is getting to help track down inconvenient information online.

Clamping down on websites in Sri Lanka with Chinese help

I have written extensively since 2005 on how the Rajapakse government has increasingly clamped down on websites. In From pornography to censorship? I flagged fears over the regime’s avowed desire to protect children from online pornography could lead to more blanket censorship of inconvenient content on the web. When the government went on to ban 12 pornographic sites (of the tens of millions still freely accessible), myself and others questioned the legality of the ban.

Just before the Presidential election, a number of independent websites and aggregation portals were blocked from the government ISP. But the latest and most disturbing development in this growing encroachment of online freedom comes with news that the government is seeking the help of Chinese experts to track down Facebook and Twitter users. Ostensibly to stop the spread of false rumours, it is very clear that the Chinese expertise and technology will be used to track and clamp down on any information the government considers inconvenient. As Lakbima News reports,

A special team at the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (TRC) is already monitoring the user activities on Facebook, LAKBIMAnEWS learns. “A special team is randomly monitoring activity on social networking sites. The government is worried about false notes on Facebook that criticize the election results giving false allegations and openly doubting the validity and the legitimacy of the result,” a TRC source said. “The order has been given by the government to monitor activities of Facebook and Twitter and monitor how the trend continues.”

Emphasis mine.

Media abuse in Sri Lanka’s Presidential Election

A short article I wrote for the Index on Censorship on the abuse of media in Sri Lanka in the campaign for the presidential elections in Sri Lanka is now online here. I end by noting that,

Sri Lanka once had rich history of dissent, beyond the partisan bias of traditional print and electronic media. Given the significant growth of web and mobile-based media, it will be much harder to suppress the inevitable growth of independent critiques. If during his second term, the president chooses to do this through repression and violence and emulating the disastrous examples of Myanmar, Iran and China, he risks political capital and condemnation both domestic and international. However, I am confident that the same citizens who re-elected him for a second term will not countenance it.

Presidential Campaigns grooving to New Media, says Daily Mirror

An article by Sumaiya Rizvi in the Daily Mirror looks at the use of web media and social networking by the contenders in Sri Lanka’s recently held Presidential Election. Titled Presidential Campaigns grooving to New Media, Sumaiya notes,

Regardless of the extent of its appeal to the larger Sri Lankan population the campaign planners have realized its effects on the audience that can make a decisive vote. New media or these sites associated with new media are likely to have a larger impact on the youth population of this country that include the first time voters or swing voters that are always an integral concern of the campaign planners is a point to take note of… New media epitomizes a candidate’s ability to speak to an audience directly and is thus obvious that no candidate is taking their race lightly. New media websites and applications encourage greater social networking where supporters or campaign planners can initiate support groups favourable for their candidate and create an online fan base, it can also go against them since anyone and everyone has free hand in creating an account or hate group.

Read this article as a PDF here.

For a related article on the use of web media for dissent and activism, read Smriti Daniel’s article in the Sunday Times, published last year, here.

Presidential election 2010: Archiving campaign websites of key candidates

Mahinda Rajapakse, who went on to win and Sarath Fonseka were two key candidates in Sri Lanka’s presidential election held on 26 January 2010. For around six week, the websites archived here on 27 January 2010 contained information on issues, policies and practices championed by both candidates. They also carried the usual propaganda and counter-propaganda.

These archives don’t include the content on social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr, along with entries in Wikipedia.

Of interest here is www.sfbalakaya.com, set up as a spoof with the clear intent of deriding Sarath Fonseka in the guise of being his official website. This site was particularly pernicious because of its publication of completely false information pegged to real individuals and organisations.

• Download www.mahinda2010.lk here.
• Download www.sarathfonseka.com here.
• Download www.sfbalakaya.com here.

I’ve written in detail about my Websites at risk initiative here.

Haiti and the perennial challenge of information lock-in

Erik Hersman from Ushahidi makes the following pertinent observation, amongst others, in a recent blog post on the Ushahidi Situation Room for Haiti.

“Decision-makers on the ground still do not have access to accurate, real-time data. That may be because of firewalls, lack of bandwidth, people are unaware these resources exist, the command structure of an org does not allow people to use open sources, or the decision makers do not want that data.”

My response to Erik was based on the immensely frustrating phenomenon of locking in vital, life-saving information into formats not easily integrated with other system, accessed, downloadable or mashable. I said,

“One example is the hugely valuable master contact list in Haiti published yesterday by OCHA and available on the OneResponse website as a ZIP download containing an Excel 2007 format spreadsheet with multiple tabs. Far more simpler would have been to just upload this information to the web for people to access and search? In fact, what I did was to save each tab in that huge spreadsheet as a separate file, upload it to Google Docs, publish them as webpages and link to them on the ICT4Peace Foundation wiki… Simple, effective, efficient.”

OCHA’s master contact list that I refer to comes as a ZIP file, which contains a single, very large, Excel 2007 format spreadsheet. I make that point because I know a good many people in Sri Lanka who have older versions of Office / Excel, have not installed updates and thus cannot by default open this file. So while the file was great for offline use for those who could open it and among other uses, for emailing around and uploading to various communities of practice, it struck me as rather odd that this information wasn’t more easily accessible online. So with a minimum of fuss, I created the following:

1. Primary Contacts in Haiti
2. Cluster Leads
3. IM Focal Points
4. OSOCC - MINUSTAH Base / OCHA - UNDAC team list

Erik’s response to my comment is even more pertinent. It’s a small example of many others I have observed during the first two weeks of the crisis information management response to the Haiti earthquake that I’ll write about in more detail in the coming months.

A public apology to Patrick Meier

Patrick Meier, now part of the Ushahidi Advisory Board and author of New Technologies in Emergencies and Conflicts: The Role of Information and Social Networks seems to have taken violent exception to my comments on this blog. In chronological order, the blog posts in question are:

1. Some critical thoughts on New Technologies in Emergencies and Conflicts: The Role of Information and Social Networks
2. A response to a defence of New Technologies in Emergencies and Conflicts: The Role of Information and Social Networks
3. A response to Diane Coyle’s defence of New Technologies in Emergencies and Conflicts: The Role of Information and Social Networks (which is not directed at Patrick, but his co-author)

An email to Patrick to ascertain what precisely the matter was resulted in a response I got this morning, which noted inter alia that I “went out of [my] way to directly question [Patrick's]professional integrity” and “lost no time in escalating the direct, personal attacks against [Patrick] through repeated blog posts and comments on the ICT list serve to further discredit [him]“. Patrick also noted that he had spoken to “several trusted mentors about this ordeal and every single one of them agreed that [I] were completely out of line and malicious in your attacks”. Finally, Patrick avers that the basis for talking further, and implicit in this, working with the ICT4Peace Foundation further, would be to “start with a public apology on [my] blog and on the list serve”.

I confess that my first response to reading this was to laugh out aloud, which is perhaps not the response Patrick intended to achieve. So I begin my apologising for that. My initial response was such because Patrick and Ushahidi, supported by Sahana and InSTEDD through their own platforms now form a significant triumvirate of open source, bounded and unbounded crowdsourced crisis information management platforms. There is, simply put, no other set of technologies that even comes close in adaptation, utility, reach and content, including the UN’s own OneResponse in the domain of crisis information management. To even begin to harbour the belief that I can and will question the “professional integrity” of someone like Patrick, and launch “direct, personal attacks” against him in a concerted effort to “discredit” him struck me as outrageously funny.

So here it is Patrick.

I am very sorry that you have taken the critique of the report so very personally. The intention was not such. To be entirely honest, I had long since moved on from the report and did not even remotely to the degree that you do peg any judgement, perception or future engagement of you personally or Ushahidi institutionally on it.

As for the point about the listserv, I assume you mean conversations including others on the Humanitarian ICT Yahoo! Group set up by members of Sahana. For the record, on 14 December 2009, you said in a response to the group over the report that “We had 80 pages of text, editors cut down to 60.” Along with others in the group, I found this surprising because the report does not mention any editors at all. I responded on 28 December 2009 by saying that “The UNF / Vodafone report does not mention any editors – who were they and why did they cut down 20 pages of what you submitted? Were you not given a page / word limit to begin with?”, a sentiment echoed by noted academic in this field Bartel Van de Walle in his response as well, on the same day. My intent here was to get whatever that was in those 20 pages out in the public domain. Because of a lack of any response, I followed up once again on 7 January 2010 by noting that “Wanted to follow up on the comment you make here about ‘editors’ cutting down your report by twenty pages. Neither your post here nor Diane’s response here specifically mention any ‘editors’ of the report. Can you please clarify what you meant below?”

You never got back to us on these questions. Having re-read my posts, I really don’t see them as constituting personal attacks or questioning your professional integrity. Other messages to the forum, also archived in it and thus open to independent appraisal, point to the fact that I merely referred members of it to my discussions with you and separately, your co-author, on this my personal blog. Again, there was no name calling, vituperative diatribes, or any hint maliciousness.

But above all, I wish to reiterate my apology, unequivocal and sincere, over what seems to have been an exchange perceived extremely differently by the two of us. It was certainly not even remotely my intent to upset you in the way you have.

As you know, in my first critique of the report, I have noted that I consider you “one of the world’s foremost researchers on the use of ICTs for HA/DR/EW and DRR.” In April 2008, when you first started to blog and we had a great exchange on Human Rights 2.0, I noted that “It’s rare that I unhesitatingly recommend a blog for its gripping content and this is one. Patrick’s extremely prolific… his significant experience and lateral thinking are evident in any of the posts.” I don’t believe I have been anything but respectful and appreciative of your work here and in other fora, which is precisely why I have held it up to standards and scrutiny, respectively higher and greater, precisely because you raise the bar for work in this field.

I trust this apology will serve as a foundation for continued engagement both personally through our respective blogs, as well as in and through institutional domains larger and more important.

A link to this blog post will also be put on the Humanitarian ICT listserv, as requested.