ICT for Peacebuilding (ICT4Peace)

Came across this post on LirneAsia on the cost of war and the effects of conflict on investments in ICT.

It appears that the sad deterioration of the political environment in Sri Lanka offers a natural experiment in assessing how the qualitative and sudden deterioration (as opposed to gradual decline) of the political environment effects investment in ICTs.

Prof. Samarajiva’s point at the end of the post is self-explanatory in that a rise in levels of violence is reciprocally and inevitably a dramatic decrease in the levels of investment in, inter alia, ICT in Sri Lanka.

The essence of what ICT4Peace as a theory and practice in particular seeks to address is, through the strategic use of ICT, to help bring about measures that help stop our descent into a vortex of violent conflict from which there may well be no easy return. The ideas that ICT4Peace seeks to generate, through research and most importantly, the application of research into practice in support of iterative learning frameworks, is to help stakeholders in a peace process - politicians, leaders of guerrilla movements and other non-state actors, civil society stakeholders, academics, business leaders, diaspora and the grassroots - engage in dialogues, through ICT, that may otherwise not have been possible, given the biased and highly politicised nature of most mainstream communications media in Sri Lanka.

Put another way, the threat of increased conflict in a sense gives a sense of immediacy to projects and ideas that help, above all, the people to communicate their aspirations for peace to the political leaders of today. Such networks exist - the Peoples Forums is a case in point.

While the investment climate may well take a cautious stand in light of recent developments, I’d argue that the need has never been greater for a closer look at how ICTs can help bring about a modicum of peace to help Sri Lanka from spiralling towards all-out war.

We stand humbled at the injustice of history that inadvertently catapulted us to a position in which we used what we knew best to help those less fortunate. It is the work of ordinary individuals in the very heart of the affected areas worst hit by the tsunami that continues to inspire us in our work towards the creation of sustainable IT architectures that fully harness the indomitable nature of the one thing the tsunami couldn’t sweep away.

The human spirit.

When I first wrote those words, I based the thoughts on what I personally and InfoShare organisationally had learnt in the aftermath of the Boxing Day tsunami that hit Sri Lanka in 2004. I wrote a paper titled Tsunamis, Disaster Response and Info Share that explored in great detail the technologies InfoShare used in after the tsunami and their varying levels of effectiveness in the relief efforts.

On a related note, Mitch Kapoor makes an interesting point in this post, when he says that:

In the end, people will use whatever feels most natural to them.

That very much captures the essence of our experience with technology as well, not just in the tsunami and its aftermath, but InfoShare’s experience in using ICT for peacebuilding in general, through exercises such as the design of the ICT architecture for the support of the One Text exercise in Sri Lanka. I intend on writing about the pros and cons of the One Text in Sri Lanka - from a technology perspective - in a future post, but suffice to say that though we have dabbled with some of the most sophisticated software platform commercially available, the highest levels of participation came with the use of technologies that participants felt comfortable using.

Put another way, the highest levels of security in the world didn’t automatically ensure that participants actively used the platform to communicate and share information - the complexity of the programme and the steep learning curve threw them off, making it difficult to rekindle their interest afterwards.

As I’ve said before, technology must empower people instead of dictating to users processes to ways it sees fit. Technology should be putty in the hands of those who appropriate for their tasks – from relief and aid delivery, to the creation of virtual collaborative frameworks for the long term support of affected communities.

I put forward six mantras, based from my real world experience, that I think technology for peace in general, and ICT in support of (long-term) humanitarian operations in particular need to be founded upon:

1. Stakeholders are not interested, don’t have time for, and possibly lack the capacity to utilise any programme or technology to its fullest. Solutions that are not culturally sensitive, are geared to the regional and local context, don’t have support for local language and are difficult to learn will never help relief efforts.

2. New technology needs to be eschewed in favour of culturally resonant technologies which communities are familiar with. The introduction of groupware systems to those unfamiliar with such frameworks will not create any cohesion between relief groups and may in fact impede effective aid delivery. Media such as newspapers, radio, newsletters, photocopied information sheets can sometimes be more effective at information exchange, dissemination and coordination that any PC based solution (paper does not run out of power after several hours without a charge!). Championing the use of new ICT frameworks to help disaster management should not be at the expense of funding larger, more resilient and older communications architectures like the mainstream print media and radio.

3. Stakeholders respond to technology they are familiar with. The reason why Info Share chose the programmes that are mentioned in this document as the bedrock for their tsunami response was that key stakeholders in the Sri Lankan peace process were familiar with this technology, which made it easier for us to appropriate this familiarity for new processes that were a result of the tsunami. The introduction of new technologies to traumatised communities and over-worked aid organisations is fraught with difficulty at the best of times – it is nigh impossible, as mentioned earlier in this document, to engender the use of solutions in the immediate aftermath of a large scale disaster.

4. No matter what IT frameworks are created, they have to be resonant with the needs on the ground. Technologies designed for collaboration in corporate environment or between geographically dispersed teams in the Global North, are often based on assumptions of underlying network connectivity, user experience, hardware and cultural acceptance that can render them useless in emergency situations, where all of these aspects are put under severe strain. The use of technology in aid, relief and humanitarian work, along with its use in peacebuilding, needs to be handled with adequate knowledge in conflict transformation, conflict management, conflict sensitive disaster response frameworks and knowledge of the communities and regions which have been affected.

5. Technology has to empower local communities, or at least, create the architecture for the gradual empowerment of local communities to deal with trauma and a return to normalcy. Technologies that create dependencies, on the donor agency that funds such solution, on the company that provides the technology, on the people that implement it, on those who are responsible for its deployment, training and servicing, can inadvertently lay the foundation for inequitable distribution of resources. A via media has to be drawn between the creation of IT frameworks to help in relief efforts and the sincere, committed and sustained empowerment of communities to use such frameworks best they see fit, in ways that are self-determined and not imposed, and in a manner that gives them the freedom and flexibility to use such frameworks not just for relief work, but also for the larger problems of peacebuilding in communities of conflict.

6. Culturally sensitive use of technology. It is grossly tactless to belabour the merits of a certain system and use it in the field for short term visibility, commercial capitalisation and marketing purposes in the immediate aftermath of a disaster. The trauma and loss of life associated with large scale disasters cannot be the bedrock for marketing campaigns.

This all comes back to a point Paul Currion makes:

Five years ago, I believed that better information management would enable better management overall. Yet it is hard to determine whether all this activity has actually improved the provision of humanitarian assistance, since there are no clear criteria for measuring their impact.

Though Paul’s post deals with the issue of information management for humanitarian operations, I would like to submit that the answer to the question he poses lie with the community itself and their ideas and feedback on the ICT frameworks set up ostensibly to support a return to normalcy as soon as possible. Any impact measurement study conducted by the organisations themselves responsible for setting them up run the risk of bias, oversimplification and information silos - where only the technology introduced by that particular organisation is held under scrutiny, and not its role in a holistic appreciation of technology solutions in general.

I think that ICT for humanitarian operations is still at its infancy - those such as Paul and initiatives like Sahana that reflect, at least in part, the 6 mantras above are ripe for study and greater funding, if only to engender a better understanding of the highly complex relationships of communities and technology in times of trauma.

Colin Rule is one of those people who don’t say too much because that don’t have to in order to prove to the world who they are and what it is they do. He kindly linked me to his blog today and in the email informing me of it, had this to say about some comments of mine on violence and games:

I disagree with you on the games, though. I think violence in games is pure fantasy for most players, as connected to real life violence as violence in books, film, and TV. Which is as old as literature itself.

Actually Colin, I don’t disagree with you at all. My post here, which I think is what Colin is referring to, and the comments it generated, if anything proved that the jury is still out on the linkages (if any) between simulated violence in PC games and real life violence and conflict.

However, it is a fact that in early 2005, a Chinese gamer killed a fellow gamer over something that only existed in the online world of a game they were both playing at the time. Now that’s an interesting development - the first I know of the first degree murder of an individual over something that didn’t really exist.

As I ask in my paper on the future of ODR, written for the 4th UN ODR Conference held recently in Cairo, Egypt:

What if communal violence from the real world spills over into flaming and hate between and within communities in Second Life, or vice-versa?

The game I refer to here called Second Life is increasingly becoming a playground for experiments on how the real and virtual worlds interact. Business models and entire lives are lived out on Second Life. My interest is in this new generation of ‘games’ or virtual reality and what impact they can / will have on real life.

Colin importantly points to the larger debate that informs our appreciation of these new developments in his post here:

There are websites devoted to inventorying and criticizing violent acts on film, as if each episode was glorifying violence in the abstract. In fact, all violence in movies is simulated, and much of it is presented critically. Even Shakespeare used violence extensively throughout his plays. As Amanda Mabillard explains it, “Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences reveled in shocking drama… some of Shakespeare’s most violent plays were by far his most popular during his lifetime… Hamlet’s father is poisoned with a potion so potent that it immediately causes bubbling scabs on his body; King Duncan is lured to Macbeth’s castle to be slaughtered in his bed, and so on.” But Shakespeare was not out to glorify violence. His plays are far more subtle and nuanced than that literal interpretation might indicate.

I still maintain however that what Second Life and games like it offer in terms of complexity and real / virtual world interplays is far more complex and textured than the traditional study of games such as Doom III and their impact on real life.

As I’ve called for earlier, it would be interesting to take games such as Second Life, or more specifically, their gaming engines, and create new games that are vernacular driven online world which engage grassroots stakeholders, from community IT centres around the world, to participate and virtually enact real world scenarios so as to gain a better understanding of the complexity of conflict transformation.

Such exercises are already on the ascendant - see for instance the Virtual Peer Mediation experiment using Second Life.

My interest is to take these from fringe activities to mainstream theory and practice - to develop sophisticated gaming systems that contribute to future scenario planning exercises, help build local capacities for peacebuilding and strengthen knowledge and awareness of conflict resolution in classrooms of the next generation of peacebuilders.

I started a while ago to think of ways the latest advanced in graphics processing technology could be harnessed to create games that are as visually compelling as the likes of Doom III or Half-Life, but with a fundamentally different premise - to teach the values of peacebuilding as opposed to strafing aliens.

The problem is not even with the graphics, but with the gameplay and storyline. Peace, unfortunately, is perceived to be less appealing than the visceral pleasure of blasting alien, mutant or terrorist butt. Gameplay for peace gaming needs to come up with storylines that use graphics to envelop a player into a world of break-neck decisions and complexity that often mirrors real life conflict transformation.

Increasingly, we are seeing the emergence of these games with a social conscience. One of the first was Food Force supported by the World Food Programme. Coupling a sophisticated 3D gaming engine to a story line that mirrors food crises in the real world, the objectives of the game were intended to strengthen a holistic understanding of issues like famine, drought and food aid.

Using games for peacebulding isn’t a new idea and a plethora of websites exist with ideas and resources of how best to use game techniques with children, youth and adults to teach the basics of conflict transformation, like Peace Games.

What is new however is, as I mentioned earlier, games that use the same appealing graphics as heavily marketed mainstream gaming titles. The latest addition to this genre is A Force More Powerful, a game that I intend to order soon and look forward to playing. As the website blurb states:

Featuring ten scenarios inspired by history, A Force More Powerful simulates nonviolent struggles to win freedom and secure human rights against dictators, occupiers, colonizers, and corrupt regimes, as well as campaigns for political and human rights for minorities and women. The game models real-world experience, allowing players to devise strategies, apply tactics and see the results.

Whether such games are able to successfully jostle for attention in a market dominated by violent games on the lines of Grand Theft Auto: San Adreas is an open question, but AFMP is, at least, a start. The screenshots show a gaming world similar to that of the Sims, allowing not just a great graphical experience but a useful learning environment as well. Surely, the objectives of such a game would also be to explore failure on account of bad decisions and its consequences to the inhabitants and relationships in the gaming-world.

There is another side to the gaming and peacebuilding debate that I’ve not touched in this blog post because it is so often written about, with little or no agreement on a common stand - the issue of violent games leading to violent lives. Because so much is written on this topic, my interest lies more in PC game development that takes what’s successful from mainstream games today - storyline, graphics, gameplay, celebrity marketing and voiceovers, online gaming communities - and applying them to new generation games for peacebuilding that are as successful in regions of conflict.

Perhaps through games for peace we can teach the generations that follow us that which we have been unsuccessfully trying to impart to the political leaders of today.

Working with the Nobel Peace Laureates Foundation, I’ve been following up the idea of creating a software platform called Peace Tools that I’ve written briefly about in my paper Untying the Gordian Knot: ICT for Conflict Transformation and Peacebuilding.

As the Peace Appeal Foundation website states:

Peace Tools aims to facilitate and enable the implementation of peace education in every school in the world, and to equip every citizen, community and country in the world with collective `tools’, access to peacebuilding resources and knowledge/skills to reduce violence in their societies and jointly solve critical problems. Whether dealing with a conflict with one’s spouse, or addressing an ongoing communal conflict in one’s country, or a wider conflict of international proportions, Peace Tools offers users knowledge and skills to design their own processes of conflict resolution/transformation.

Peace Tools also provides tools for improving governments’ and institutions’ early warning systems through its standardized conflict assessment tools and interactive tools for rapid assessments and analyses. It can strengthen the assessment and early warning capacity of institutions by helping them create transparent, multi-sectoral, authentic networks that can disseminate information and knowledge resources instantly.

The tool further provides all stakeholders (in shared spaces) with virtual working spaces for logistical organization and collaboration, and thereby enhances all stakeholders’ ability to respond fast and effectively to possible threats or crises. These virtual networks also provide vehicles for expanding training mechanisms and materials. AND by providing adjustable frameworks, analytical and management tools for conflict transformation and peacebuilding that can be customized for each conflict situation, the tool could be an essential resource and enabler for each person involved in peacebuilding in the world.

Of course, Peace Tools is, to date, just an idea. But it’s a very powerful idea - that builds on work in ICT4Peace already engineered by InfoShare in Sri Lanka and Nepal and also pushes the boundaries of research to envision peace process support systems far more advanced than what we have today.

I guess the most important value of Peace Tools is that it’s support by the Peace Appeal Foundation - an organisation comprised of some of the most respected peacebuilders in the world. That they’ve recognised the value of using ICT for peacebuilding and conflict transformation is proof that ICT4Peace is not longer a fringe activity, but very much forward and centre in future peacebuilding frameworks.

I first read about the Towards 2020 Science report by Microsoft Research in Cambridge in the Economist here (25th March print edition). Having subsequently read the report, it’s interesting that much of what it opines is also directly relevant to the raison d’etre of the HSG.

In particular, the report highlights the need for new approaches to computing that take into account not just the increase in computational power, but ways through which such power is harnessed for AI / decision support mechanisms - the foundation of InfoShare’s ideas on Peace Tools and Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) in particular.

The report goes on to highlight the need for what it terms new research institutes, which move away from the fetish of academic papers to research that moves from concept, to design and application rapidly.

InfoShare is the archetype of such a research institute - and it’s interesting that some of the key ideas in the report are those which are very similar to that which InfoShare and I have articulated in the recent past.

Paul (again !) got me into this meme on Information Management for NGOs, to which I’ve already responded here.

My interest here is to show the linkages between information management for NGOs and a future scenario study that which I wrote for Microsoft’s new Humanitarian Systems Group here.

At the end of the day, information management for NGOs is going to have to closely mirror developments in ICT4Peace and ODR. The technologies we develop in these fields is going to have far wider ramifications that just the peacebuilding field.

This is evident in our use of Groove Virtual Office. Our experiences with the programme coupled with our feedback played a central role in the design and development of the current version (v3). We took Groove from a plaything of business to a serious tool in peacebuilding - in doing so, testing the programme till breaking-point under extreme conditions that are the norm in any peace process.

In fact, there’s still an old write up about InfoShare’s use of Groove Virtual Office here !

If anyone is using Groove, let me know and I can send you invites to several workspaces we designed for peacebuilding and conflict mapping. Most recently, I designed a state-of-the-art negotiations decision support workspace for the Nepal Peace Secretariat to help them in their on-going peace process.

In many ways, information management for NGOs is much more than Groove, and the needs of InfoShare have out-stripped the current capacity of the programme. Nevertheless, our experiences with commercial software that we adapted for use in a peace process is a useful tale - one that can inspire others to use new technologies and software platforms, running on open standards, to replicate what we’ve done in Sri Lanka and Nepal.

I first came to know of this report from Paul’s post here. The report itself can be downloaded from here (it’s a large file and may take a while on a slow connection).

In a paper titled Untying the Gordian Knot: ICT for Conflict Transformation and Peacebuilding available here I wrote that:

Peacebuilding processes could be greatly strengthened if organisations, peoples and regions are connected in effective multi-sectoral and peace building networks and provided with active and open knowledge banks – with instant access to effective peace building approaches and case studies. By building local, regional and national peacebuilding networks between and within government, local authorities, political stakeholders, civil society and international support and resource institutions, ICT has the potential to shape powerful conflict transformation partnerships.

The ICT4Peace report follows this tradition of exploring how technology is used in aid of conflict prevention, mitigation and transformation. It’s the first serious and high-level report I’ve come across dealing with ICT for Peacebuilding.

I was, however, sorely dissapointed with the report. My central reservations are encapsulated in Paul’s response to my comments.

I’ve never met Paul in my life, but we’ve been in touch off an on regarding ideas and technologies for humanitarian relief, disaster management and peacebuilding and I have a very high degree of respect for his ideas. Which in a sense is why I thought the report could have been so much more than a list of websites enaged in online discussions and serving as portals and information repositories.

My response to that of Paul’s brought this out.

I liked very much this exchange of ideas through our respective blogs, if only because my observations and Paul’s responses provide a great foundation to strengthening the second version of this report - if and when it appears.

I’ve been writing on ICT for Peacebuilding for over 5 years. In 2003, I helped set up InfoShare which gave an opportunity to put some of my ideas into practice, alongside the valuable input provided by my colleagues in the organisations.

InfoShare initially supported what was called a One Text initiative in Sri Lanka. Today, we’ve moved far beyond this and our experience in envisioning and creating ICT solutions to engender progressive social change, conflict transformation, inter-agency collaboration and peace have been fairly ground-breaking.

Some reflections and research based on our work are available from my website. My work and research also pushes the boundaries of Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) from its commercial roots to a body of theory and practice that grapples with the complexity of ethno-political conflict transformation and peacebuilding.

Hello there!

I finally did it - after much procrastination, I set up a blog for dedicated to ICT for Peacebuilding and related areas of research.

There are several reasons why I set up a blog for ICT and Peacebuilding.

Obviously, I think this is a very important field of study - embryonic, but showing great promise to positively influence the fields of conflict transformation and peacebuilding in the future. My work and research over the past couple of years has engaged with the complexity of ICT support structures for peacebuilding - a fascinating and deeply frustrating field of work and study.

This blog aims to flesh out some of this research and experience alongside comparable and similar experiences of others thinking about or actually using ICT for peacebuilding.

Lastly, I needed to get my online life in order. Being invited to an increasing number of conferences and workshops to give expert opinion on ICT, Peace, Media, ODR and humanitarian systems design, I needed to have a single place to point people towards for more information on the issues I brought up. The first step was to delete my old and disused blogs and set up one website that collected in a single place my ideas, research and on-going work.

The second step was a blog to specifically chart the evolution of ideas in ICT for Peacebuilding - those of my own and of friends and colleagues worldwide engaged in this field - related to ICT and conflict transformation.

My hope is that this blog becomes a central node in the study of the design and application of ICTs for peace, highlighting the fantastic work already done by InfoShare and others, but also envisioning the future of where we should be going.

ICT4Peace is soon becoming a widely recognised acronym, denoting a growing interest in this field. It is an interest, I submit, that will hopefully result in the funding and research interest ICT4Peace so desperately needs to move from concept and design to application.

This blog is a small contribution towards this effort.