Strong Angel III – 18th August 2006

I am living in two time zones, 13 hours apart.

Managed to put a brave face for breakfast to meet so many of those with whom I had long and rich conversation with over Groove and email, but had never met in real life. Eric Rasmussen, Nigel Snoad, Robert Kirkpatrick – all geeks with hearts with a measure of humility that only comes from a vast experience with the complex and often incredibly frustrating, thankless world of humanitarian aid.

I’m happy that through Microsoft Humanitarian Systems (for whom I wrote an unsolicited vision statement a while ago) there will be, in this Strong Angel, an emphasis on peacebuilding and conflict resolution as an area distinct from humanitarian aid.

Because the simulation will rely on Groove for some of its communications, and because I’m not entirely certain that Groove will run nicely on Parallels which I’ve already installed on my Mac, I’ve decided to go ahead and install Bootcamp 1.1 beta and purchase what will be my first legit copy of Windows XP SP2! Installing Bootcamp looks dead simple and I’m looking forward to seeing how well the MacBook Pro performs under a Windows environment.

SA III has an extremely impressive line-up of people spearheading its operations. What I noticed however was that in all the objectives of SA III there is, at least in what’s stated, a distinct lack of emphasis on gender mainstreaming. As a statement by Ms. Carolyn McAskie, Acting Head of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs recognises, humanitarian assistance can only be effective if it is gender-sensitive:

While both men and women are affected by conflict, crisis situations have a differentiated impact on them. Conflict and war are not gender neutral. Thus, eighty percent of the internally displaced persons and refugees around the world are women and children. Women are in flight, adapting to life in camps, or are directly caught up in the midst of conflict. In many cases, women and teenage girls in conflict zones are the sole providers and protectors for their families, since most men have either been killed or are away on combat duty. This situation leads to a shift in gender roles with a dramatic increase in the number of women heads of households.

There are some very useful resources in this regard here, and it will be interesting to see how in the days ahead an emphasis on gender grows, not just in terms of numerical representation in decision making bodies, but in terms of a practice that mainstreams gender considerations in all aspects of SA III.

San Diego’s a great place – the weather is delicous and in the distance a behemoth American aircraft carrier docked in the harbour reminds us that the world writ large is far more chaotic than the controlled chaos in SA III and brings a necessary measure of humility to our work.

I’m looking forward tremendously to the days ahead.

Now if only there was a quick cure for dramatic changes in time zones, that helps me to sleep instead of typing this entry at 3am.

Revisiting Public Service Television – Some thoughts on a UNESCO ICT@PSB production

I don’t know who to thank for it, but I was sent a DVD of UNESCO’s Revisiting Public Service Television – a series of seven films and documentaries illustrating how topics such as human rights, the fight against discrimination, freedom of expression, tolerance and peace can be approached by public service television.

I used a long-haul flight to the US to watch these compelling productions and think that in very different styles of narrative and film-making, ranging from animations to documentaries, they explore issues that are central to polity and society but are often under-represented in the domains of commercial mainstream media. For this alone, this is a DVD worth having in one’s library, not just for archival purposes, but to be used in workshops and discussions to instigate critical debate and discussion, and to larger audiences, to bring to their attentions stories of people one rarely hears or sees. the DVD includes:

# The Box, Pakistan, animation, 8 minutes
Directed by Zabreen Hasan

# The Children of Darfur, Denmark, fiction, 24 minutes
Directed by Camilla Nielsson

# Cualquier Ciudad, Colombia, documentary, 8 minutes
Directed by John Jairo de los Rios

# Village Nomade, Niger, documentary, 25 minutes
Directed by Mahaman Souleymane

# The Place I Call Home, Egypt, documentary, 49 minutes
Directed by Tamer Ezzat

# Mothers on Wheels, Argentina, documentary, 52 minutes
Directed by Mario Piazza and Monica

# Meena, India, fiction, 21 minutes
Directed by Jasmine Kaur and Avinash Roy

A PDF gives a description of the productions, while a webpage on UNESCO’s site also has information on the productions. The DVD is a product of UNESCO’s ICT@PSB project:

This project aims at putting information and communication technologies (ICTs) to the use of programme development on major societal and development issues such as human rights, peace, tolerance and the fight against discrimination by providing public service broadcasters in developing countries with training, production and distribution opportunities in these areas.

There are a few critical but hopefully constructive observations I’d like to make. Firstly, UNESCO is not unknown for high quality productions that grapple with social development, human rights, justice, reconciliation, peace et al. However, many of these productions rarely trickle down into local civil society groups for use in local process – they remain essentially high quality productions that are not used to full effect to strengthen local processes and change initiatives. I, for one, in over 5 years of working closely with media reform initiatives in national and provincial levels in Sri Lanka in particular, have not found a single local organisation that is aware of the wealth of productions facilitated by UNESCO on issues and initiatives that they are also deeply involved in. This is a pity and ultimately a measure of UNESCO’s impact.

Another critique I have is of a unnecessarily exclusive interpretation of ICT. For instance, these productions don’t have a wiki or blog based webpage of their own. In and of themselves, they are productions that are powerful and thought provoking. Precisely on account of this, but also because the cultural resonance of these productions and their messages differ, it would have been useful to create an iterative process of learning using these films – a webpage that encourage such a global discussions – a collection of experiences of viewing these films and of opinions of those who saw them – would have been a tremendously useful way in which to learn how the PSB productions help (or in some cases don’t) local processes for human rights and social justice.

Instructive in this regard is the VOR Radio website, with built in support for comments on the productions, so as to create a community of learning based on the productions archived on the site. Also instructive in this regard are websites such as Listen Up! – for instance, this film on the social construction of beauty has, at the time of writing, generated 35 reviews, which contain some really interesting feedback and commentary.

Listen Up!’s website is also notable for its web based streaming media – the UNESCO films are too long for streaming, but it may have been useful to have trailers that captured the core issues of each film uploaded to the web so that a person interested in the themes could get a gist of what each film was about.

I would also submit that ICT based PSB is not so much about the product, but about the content. It is also more than just a exposition of the content, but more about the dialogues based on the content. This DVD from UNESCO, and others like it, are touted as products but are incapable of transforming social and political agendas by by themselves. Moving away from a product mentality to a ICT enabled social dialogues based on the content is a useful paradigm shift that truly makes use of the synergies between ICT and PSB. In the case of the Revisiting Public Service Television DVD for instance, it would have been useful to not just limit a webpage to acknowledge its creation, but to use a “launch event” to showcase the DVD as the beginning of a larger, and I would submit more important, local and global dialogue on the issues that the productions highlight.

Because of the growing number of users, especially youth, who have access to mobile devices that can play video, it would have also been useful to have these movies in a digital format compatible with devices such as Apple’s iPod. This involves a deeper understanding of PSB in our digital age, where the emphasis on not so much on broadcasting, but on media & content production. While the DVD may be fit to broadcast, media consumption patterns bring to sharp relief that many consume media on the web and on portable devices – a DVD alone isn’t enough to capture the diverse opportunities for media dissemination that ICT engenders (which is one reason I prefer to use the term Public Service Media instead of Public Service Broadcasting).

As I’ve noted in an earlier post:

Public Service Broadcasting and Media in this respect gain added significance in our information age – to create pervasive information access and production architectures for those already familiar with media, but more importantly, to create ways through which the marginalised, disenfranchised and disempowered voices of peoples hidden in the hinterlands of our digital age make their voices heard in polity and society.

UNESCO’s Revisiting Public Service Television offers a compelling glimpse into how public service content will be produced and delivered in the future. But UNESCO barely captures the range of possibilities made possible by ICT in the promotion of public service content – one hopes that over time, such productions will be disseminated in more ways than just through DVD and that UNESCO, and others who produce similar content, will use them not so much as showpieces that only reside on the shelves of offices within the limited confines of the UN system, but as instigators of progressive dialogues and debate that strengthen democracy and are captured and nurtured using the myriad of social communications technologies made possible by the web and internet.

Related links:
Future of Media Report