Wirelessly supporting peace

In the short to medium term at least, it is a case of understanding individual user requirements and blending WiFi and cellular options accordingly.

I don’t usually point to purely technical articles, but this one, from which I’ve quoted above, is a very useful one that succintly explains the the key wireless internet & web access methods with one notable exception.

Mesh networking.

The backbone of the $100 (or is it $140) dollar laptop, the potential of mesh networking for ICT4Peace is as multifaceted as it is exciting.

One agrees with the point made at the end of the article. In countries like Sri Lanka, which suffer from an almost pathological inability for spectrum management or telecoms regulation in a progressive manner, the potential of wireless access is strangled by the inability of a ordinary citizens to avail themselves of the full potential of technologies that are introduced in a haphazard and piecemeal manner. As such, the challenge of ICT4Peace, in supporting governance, democracy and peace, is to use existing technologies creatively, as I have written about in earlier posts – Content without wires & Last mile & first mile, access & production.

T.E.D videos and digital archiving

A recent post by David Pogue points to a fascinating set of videos that are as interesting as they are thought provoking, covering a broad range of issues and featuring some of the best known thinkers, politicians and writers of today.

The videos are from the Technology, Entertainment and Design conference, which cost more than US$4,000 to attend in person. That through the web resources and ideas hirtherto enjoyed only by a few to date is now open to a much larger audience is proof of the web’s potential as a vehicle for the democratic diffusion of knowledge.

David mentions in his post that the videos of the TED conference are available in “every conceivable format”. This is an interesting point, as it highlights a common assumption that the digital media and digital file formats we use today are those that will be in use 5, 10, 20 years hence.

I think not.Which brings us to a central challenge of ICT4Peace in particular, but also of digital archiving in general – how do we ensure that the knowledge we increasingly capture digitally is stored, without data loss, for posterity?

Given the perishable nature of the file formats and storage media we have today, and the inability, to date, to fashion a digital technology as long lasting under adverse conditions as parchment or manuscript papers, this is a very real problem that many leading libraries around the world are grappling with.

On the one hand, there is the problem of exchanging knowledge between diverse systems. As the work of Paul Currion shows, discussions in related fields such as humanitarian systems design show us that data storage and exchange between various systems is a pressing issue. Even the field of Online Dispute Resolution has engendered discussions on a common format for information exchange.

On the other hand, there is the problem of data integrity. ICT4Peace systems need to capture and store information for decades, if not centuries, with zero data loss. Entire histories of peoples and nations, coupled with irreplaceable discussions at peace negotiations and the historical record of public voices in a peace process are digitized knowledge that form the foundations of social contracts. However, given the high failure rate of existing digital storage techniques, when measured in decades or centuries, results in the understandable resistance to the greater adoption of technology for peacebuilding and conflict transformation.

While projects such as Dropping Knowledge, or initiatives that like TED, seek to transform private events into public knowledge must, at some point, grapple with the fact that the manner in which they make available the content may need to radically change to accommodate new ways of content access, storage and dissemination.

The printed word needs no electricity to be readable. Humidity, dust, floods, fire and general acts of vandalism such as the etching of one’s initial’s on pages aside, the printed word is still the most reliable, energy efficient long term storage solution we have today. No such technology exists for video and audio.

This said, projects such as digitalpermanence are useful in this regard.

digitalpermanence is a McGill University Archives initiative, promoting the collaborative, strategic, long-term management and preservation of McGill University’s electronic records.

Records–in all formats–support McGill’s ability to pursue its mission, demonstrate accountability, defend its interests, and maintain institutional memory. The increased reliance on electronic media for essential administrative record-keeping provides unprecedented opportunities for rapid response, collaboration, and sharing of corporate data. With these benefits come the challenges of strategically managing and preserving the resulting volume of digital records. How can we ensure McGill’s digital legacy is not vulnerable to quick deletion, media instability, and software/hardware obsolescence?

Responding to these challenges requires the cooperation of records creators, archivists, and information technologists. digitalpermanence is a McGill University Archives (MUA) initiative launched in December 2003 to promote the collaborative, strategic, long-term management and preservation of McGill University’s electronic records.

Initiatives such as this go beyond open standards based information exchange frameworks and information management.

The long term success of ICT4Peace in particular is pegged to the integrity of knowledge capture and management systems. Information and knowledge, in a peace processes, are assets sometimes more valuable than the lives of any one single individual in the process. While sophisticated negotiations systems are envisaged in future projects such as Peace Tools, as yet, there is a dearth of interest in the design of technologies for long term archival of mission critical information in a peace process – future proof data-centres in other words, that continuously update storage media and formats to ensure that what is captured today is as easily accessible 25 years hence as it is for users today.

As a paper titled Digital archiving, knowledge management and the persistence of digital data: managing access to digital resources as technologies change points out:

It is essential that the issue of long term access be addressed at the point of creation of the digital resource. Changing technologies, hardware and software will continue to present problems for long term access unless appropriate procedures are put in place to ensure that essential digital resources are preserved and continued access assured. The methods suggested to date: archiving the technology, migration of data, and emulation, all present problems of cost, practicality and loss of data. Today, our ability to store information is unparalleled. The wealth these stores contain is essential to our economic and social wellbeing. This wealth is of little use, however, if we lose the key.

There is no need to re-invent the wheel – ICT4Peace can use existing standards, such as those which respected digital archive agencies such as U.S. National Archives and Records Administration use.

The call here is for ICT4Peace to explore, with far emphasis than displayed to date, ways through which the digitization of our knowledge is accesible by future generations, to whom the most sophisticated digital media creation, storage and dissemination systems in use today are, inevitably, going to look as ancient as the Sinclair ZX-81 (my first computer!) does to us today.

ICT for Human Rights

Christine Herron has an interesting post on Communication Technologies that Support Human Rights. The post makes special note of Witness, an impressive project that I’ve written about as well in musings on the possibilities of using technology to overthrow repressive regimes.

Thanks Bill for this link.

Also see Irrepressible – Safeguarding Rights on and off the ‘net.

Dropping knowledge = wisdom of the crowds?

Having got to know of the Dropping Knowledge initiative through Private Sector Development Blog, I was intrigued to read more about it and came across this description of its mission:

dropping knowledge is a global initiative to turn apathy into activity. By hosting an open conversation on the most pressing issues of our times, we will foster a worldwide exchange of viewpoints, ideas and people-powered solutions. However knowledge is defined, by dropping it freely to others, we all gain wisdom.

This seems to assume, inter alia, that wisdom is not cultural relativist, global, trans-national and free from linguistic, ethnic, religious and cultural bias. While the initiative itself sounds truly interesting, if only for its sheer ambition of creation a vast knowledge repository of ideas that can help transform some of the most pressing problems facing humanity today, it would have been more useful to recognise that its outcome would be in the form of information, not knowledge or wisdom. Having said that, initiatives such as this challenge us to think about what’s sometimes called the Wisdom of the Crowds – whether collectives are better at the formulation of alternatives and solutions than individual minds working in isolation.

Dropping knowledge’s close relationship with technology to capture, store, disseminate ideas is fascinating. Digital media plays a huge role in the initiatives, from film, to the ways through which the meeting itself will be conducted. Called the Table of Free Voices, the event in Berlin on September 9, 2006 will bring together 112 individuals to drop their knowledge. The answers will be filmed, generating some 600 hours of footage.

If particular interest to me was the Living Library:

The dropping knowledge Living Library is an ever-growing, open-source platform for multiple viewpoints, the 600 hours of answers from the Table of Free Voices serving as its seed content. The Living Library empowers users to come together and inhabit a conceptual topography of 25,000 interconnected issues, setting up camp around the issues that interest them and creating a new space for ideas, information and people-powered solutions. New global problems require a new global approach. The Living Library not only increases awareness of existing solutions but, through an active dialog among users, generates new answers, new initiatives and new solutions.

The feature set of the Living Library is impressive:

Offering user-friendly search and 3-D graphic navigation facilities, as well as a built-in interface for locating content by asking questions in natural language, the Living Library will evolve in accordance with user-participation, prioritizing its accumulating content according to thematic relevance, level of traffic generated and a user-driven content-rating system.

This description addresses a topic that I’m deeply interested in – the visualisation of knowledge & information, which I’ve briefly touched upon here. If the graphical representation of the library is what it ends up looking like, it is remarkably like the Semantic Navigator tool we used with Groove based databases in the early days of InfoShare, albeit in on the web.

My interest here is how, and if, advanced visualisation can help identify the inter-related nature of information on, say, peacebuilding – intelligently mapping connections between nodes that may not be immediately apparant to even the most seasoned researcher or analyst.

This blog will explore the topic of information visualisation in future posts.

A detailed PDF of the dropping knowledge initiative is available here. Wikipedia’s entry on The Wisdom of the Crowds is also interesting for the links it provides to further resources and reading.

I’m going to keep my eye on this.

Adaptation in action – The Mosquito Ring Tone

…we are convinced that we are contemplating the emergence of a new social landscape in which individualized persons strive to cope with the responsibility of constructing their networks of communication on the basis of who they are and what they want. Excerpt from
Castells, Manuel, Mireia Fernandez-Ardevol, Jack Qiu and Araba Sey,”Social Uses of Wireless Communications: The Mobile Information Society”, paper prepared for the International Workshop on Wireless Communication Policies and Prospects: A Global Perspective, USC, October 8-9, 2004, available for download here.

The ring tone sounds godawful, but the story is a fascinating one, forwarded to me by Bill Warters.

A technology using ultra-high frequency sound to drive teenage loiterers away from shopping centers in the U.K. has been hijacked by tech-savvy teens to create an inaudible cell phone ring tone. Students are employing the technology to surreptitiously use mobile phones in class by creating ring tones that most adults cannot hear.

As Castells et al point out above, we are living in the age of mobile communications, where the social adpatations of mobile phones and other portable telephony and computing devices are as varied as they are evolving. Two interest podcasts on the issue of the socialisation of technology, which I’ve pointed to in an earlier post as an issue of great interest to me, are to be found on the PodTech.net.

The first, titled The Challenges and Possibilities of the Wireless Future, is an interview with Intel’s Communications Technology Lab Director & GM, Alan Crouch on Intel’s research in connectivity technology for mobile and enterprise computing. Though the focus is chiefly on Intel technologies in this interview, it is interesting to note how one of the world’s semiconductor companies is thinking about mobility.

The other podcast of interest is titled Defining Behavior, Designing Technology and is an interview with researchers, anthropologists, and product designers who have traveled the world on a mission to learn how people define a sense of place, and how they interact with technology at home and on the road. Listen, for instance, to the ways mobile phones are being used in India – to view entire Bollywood movies ! (To the uninitiated, a Bollywood movie is usually a wonderful 3 hour long celebration of music, dance and colour, with the occasional plot thrown in for good measure…)

The mosquito ring tone is one more way in which we are discovering new uses for mobile technologies. In my post Desperate for a Revolution (among others in this blog) I’ve explored more serious uses of mobiles.

What is the frequency of peace, I wonder.

Related:
New York Times article on the Mosquito ring-tone

Cellphones and conflict
Content without wires

Technology for non-violent struggle?

100 Years of Non-violence, campaign that invites citizens around the world to attend and organize screenings of the movie Gandhi on September 11, 2006 organised by New Yorkers for a Department of Peace and the M.K. Gandhi Institution for Non-Violence is one well worth promoting.

Flyers and other promotional material are available here, while the website developed for the campaign has other useful material and background information as well.

One of my first readings on non-violence and technology remains, to date, one of the best on the topic – Technology for nonviolent struggle by Brian Martin, the full text of which is available online as html or pdf. Of the entire book, the most interesting chapter for me to read is Brian’s exploration of the theories of technology, ways through which technology is understood, designed for, used by and evolves within communities.

This contextualisation of technology within a particular zeitgeist is extremely useful in order to ascertain how technology in general and ICTs in particular can aid peacebuilding.

Firstly, we have to acknowledge that most technology is not designed for peacebuilding – the most obvious example being the internet, which was initially designed for as a failure resistant communications system to support nuclear war.

Secondly, let us not in the celebration of non-violence eschew other viewpoints, perhaps equally valid, on the limited uses of violence to promote peace. As peacebuilders, we often show a marked disdain towards violence, which we on account of our avowed pacifism consider as unacceptable in any form under any circumstance.

This I feel need to be problematised, difficult and controversial a suggestion and process as this may be.

Technology for Peace, in other words, needs to look at ways through which the same platforms suggested for peacebuilding can motivate people to become violently motivated for democracy and peace. Rallies and civil disobedience campaigns that, as with the case of Nepal’s people’s movement recently, are on occasion violent for the specific purpose of strengthening democracy, need to be seen as inherently violent processes for a greater good.

This is interesting terrain, since it requires us to envisions ways through which technology can actually help people rise up in arms against repression.

My interest here was to provoke the imagination of those who say that non-violence is a movement or guiding principle that is easily applied in any context of conflict.

It is not.

I’ve also questioned how non-violent methods work after protracted conflict in the absence of hope. Socio-political and historical conditions that allowed the space for the most referred to non-violent successes, such as Gandhi’s own struggles against colonialism, are an ill-fit with the means despots and tyrants today have at their disposal – from WMD’s to more insidious means of oppression, such as torture and extra-judicial killings.

ICTs, as a social construct, need to be seen as supportive of both violent as well as non-violent social change. The central challenge of this blog, as well as the larger corpus of research and practice on ICT4Peace, is to find ways through which the creation of hope and the strengthening of democracy and peace are best supported by ICT on a sustainable basis.

It is in this light that violence is untenable in the long-term – it’s emphasis on the goal as opposed to the process is severely detrimental to the social fabric it weaves to cover the wounds of injustice.

ICT4Peace is about the exploration of ways through which Gandhi’s central vision is articulated and strengthened through technology – that peace is a process, not a goal, and one that can be supported in a myriad of ways through the creative use of ICTs.

Understanding terrorism better through technology?

As I wrote in a recent article:

“The central disconnect between conflict resolution theorists and the essential nature of terrorism lies here – we do not really know the logic that drives terrorism, a logic so alien to us that we cannot even imagine it. It is a logic that driven by a rationale and psychological imperatives that may make little sense to us…”

Juxtapose this with an article featured on the New York Times recently:

“When an Iraqi insurgent group releases a new videotape or claims responsibility for an attack, Western reporters in Baghdad rarely hear about it firsthand. Nor do they usually get the news from their in-house Iraqi translators.

Instead, a reporter often receives an e-mailed alert from a highly caffeinated terrorism monitor sitting at a computer screen somewhere on the East Coast. Within hours, a constellation of other Middle East analysts has sent out interpretations — some of them conflicting — and a wealth of contextual material.”

Reading the article further, it is evident that we are on the cusp of a revolution in journalism – where bloggers and websites shape to a great extent the analyses that frame a story or issue. This brings to sharp relief several questions:

Information is not knowledge
Journalists “embedded” in places like Iraq and Afghanistran aren’t necessarily good journalists. Pegged to the military and unable to travel outside of designated safe-zones, their viewpoints are circumscribed by the radius of a turret or the range of a sniper. Unable to analyse the context, caught up as they are in the rigours of vicarious daily combat, these new journalists rely, as teh NYT article points out, on a slew of websites that seek to disseminate information of various known terrorist groups who post messages and other on the web.

Information however, is not knowledge. Given the subjective interpretation of all content, it is small wonder that a statement from a single source may be interpreted in many ways by which ever person or organisation that chooses to flag its significance. Journalists on the ground are thus faced with a range analyses from which they have to choose from – a choice oftentimes made under the pressure of instant TV journalism and by definition, ill-informed.

Veracity
Given that some journalists in regions of conflict don’t speak the local languages, interpreting what’s online to help contextualise events on the ground becomes an exercise of blind trust in the subjective opinion and language abilities of those who can and do post their interpretations of terrorist material online.

There is no real measure of the truth of a single interpretation until it is juxtaposed against several others, a task that very few in the field have the time to do on sustainable basis.

The end result is that the opinions of a few key influential organisations and individuals are given primacy over others who may have equally valid interpretations.

“On this front, Memri, the largest translation service, may have drawn the most criticism. It was founded in 1998 by Col. Yigal Carmon, who had spent more than 20 years in Israeli military intelligence and later advised two Israeli prime ministers. Its 60 staff members scan Arab and Muslim media and send translations by e-mail to 100,000 subscribers, including journalists and officials. Critics have long said it focuses on translating the most dangerous-sounding material.

“They say they highlight liberal voices along with the dangerous radicals, which is fine,” said Marc Lynch, a scholar of Arab politics at Williams College who has criticized Memri on his own blog, Abu Aardvark. “But what that conceals is the entire middle ground, where most of the political debate goes on in the Arab world.”

Implications for the framing of conflict
If we are to assume that journalism coming out from conflict zones is inextricably entwined with the opinions of those who interpret material deeply relevant to the socio-political dynamics of the region from afar and through content on the web, we must be mindful that what we may read, see and listen as investigative reporting may be, at worst, nothing more than real-life footage given to embellish the opinion of a partisan think-tank or biased individual somewhere else in the world.

There is no real solution to this dilemma. One way forward may be for the global news agencies and also for journalists in general to begin to list out their sources for background research, giving the reader and audience clarity on the construction of perspectives and the framing of the issues.

The other is also basic journalism – to not trust any one source and to fight the herd mentality of embedded journalism to ascertain perspectives of peace and conflict from communities living with and affected by conflict. Furthermore, radical terrorism on the web may be itself several shades more virulent than that which is practised on the ground by the same organisation (the web allows for thought and action not always possible on the ground). This must be kept in mind when weaving in the analyses and interpretations of material on the web to explain what’s occuring on the ground.

Let’s also not forget the importance of learning the language of conflict to inform the grammar of journalism. The language of conflict covers the vernacular of those embroiled in the conflict (to understand their hopes and aspiration, there one must speak their language) to the language, as it were, of the complex interplay of social, economic, political, religious, caste and other identity markers that fuel conflict and also hold in them the keys to conflict transformation.

In sum, maybe the web gives more access to analyses and information. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that journalism is better for it.

Also see my earlier posts on web translation and peacebuilding:
I don’t speak Tamil – Skype to the rescue?
هل تتكلم العربيه؟

Social networks poised to shape Net’s future & information visualisation

A news report confirming that which I’ve commented on for a while – that the growth of social networks on the web and mobiles are going to revolutionise the web and also the way in which we produce, store, distribute and consume information.

Mobile devices are another growth opportunity, Rashtchy said, and video will be a particular complement. “This is going to get big, folks,” he said.

There’s another reason why CNET’s News.com website interests me.

Like Paul Currion, I’m interested in the visualisation of information – ways to represent complexity so as to make very large datasets more easier to navigate and comprehend. This is something that InfoShare experimented with in its early days through a tool called Semantic Navigator by ISX Corporation for Groove Virtual Office, that never got beyond the experimental stage, but was a phenomenally powerful tool that could work with massive databases to siphon relationships that would not be immediately evident.

News.com has a new feature derived from liveplasma.com – a visual navigator that allows one to graphically navigate through stories on the website and see their relationships with each other. Best used rather than described, this is precisely the type of information visualisation tools that need to be developed for ICT4Peace systems that enable stakeholders to more easily plough through complex issues without having to read through reams and reams of text.

Citizen, Content, Connect

“Easy really, a website is only as good as the commitment and engagement of the people who give to time to publish captivating and useful content. If you haven’t got that you might as well give up. You’ve got to get the technology right, but once you’ve done that it’s all about people.”

I’ve noted in earlier posts (Last mile & first mile, access & production, Access vs. content development) the need to emphasise content development as a process that is as important as providing ever-widening footprints of wired and wireless internet connectivity.

This is borne out by an interesting news report I read today on a report titled Citizen, Content, Connect, by Martine Tommis, Project Manager, URBACT Information Society Network. Of particular note are observations on local content generation, the need for content to really animate internet access frameworks and the essential emphasis on people, not technology.

I’ve long since felt that engaging and creative content is what drives the adoption of technology. While provision of internet access is important, ICT4Peace sees communities as partners in a process of strengthening democracy by building their capacity to produce and distribute content that raises local issues and highlights local voices.

Content that is compelling, locally relevant and results in concrete changes through greater awareness of a particular issue (via political intervention, community action or a combination of both) is, for ICT4Peace, a fundamental reason to support of ever widening footprints of wireless internet access coupled with an equally important emphasis on the generation of content that animates the use of the internet and web in ways that help communities change their life for the better.

Related posts:
Desperate for a revolution
Public Service Broadcasting – using technology for democracy

Related websites:
Urban regeneration – www.Wythit.com
URBACT The Information Society Network

Serious games and peacebuilding

Noted with interest the Serious Games entry in Wikipedia, which defines a serious games as:

“… computer and video games that are intended to not only entertain users, but have additional purposes such as education and training. They can be similar to educational games, but are primarily focused on an audience outside of primary or secondary education. Serious games can be of any genre and many of them can be considered a kind of edutainment, but the main goal of a serious game is not to entertain, though the potential of games to engage is often an important aspect of the choice to use games as a teaching tool. A serious game is usually a simulation which has the look and feel of a game, but is actually a simulation of real-world events or processes. The main goal of a serious game is usually to train or educate users, though it may have other purposes, such as marketing or advertisement, while giving them an enjoyable experience. The fact that serious games are meant to be entertaining encourages re-use. While the largest users of SGs are the US government and medical professionals, other commercial sectors are beginning to see the benefits of such simulations and are actively seeking development of these types of tools.”

Going through the page, I observed the lack of a single serious game for peacebuilding and the abudance of military strategy games such as Real War, Full Spectrum Warrior and America’s Army. Desperately needed on this list are more games along the lines of what I’ve written about before in this blog, such as A Force More Powerful and the Climate Game.

Serious games are also envisaged as part of the Peace Tools suite of applications championed by the Nobel Peace Laureates Foundation.

Also noteworthy is the Serious Games Initiative, which has some details of the development of serious games for peacebuilding here.

Some related posts:
Technologies of Play: Video Games and Gender
PC games and peacebuilding
Online Violence : Take 2
Darfur is Dying : Using games for political activism