ICT for Peacebuilding (ICT4Peace)

If there’s anything that drives advances in computing power, it’s games. Today’s average graphics card packs more punch than a mainstream desktop of even a few years ago. The elegant beheading or dismembering of an opponent in Unreal Tournament is, for some, an actual profession, since full-time gamers are now increasingly being recognized as serious sportsmen and sportswomen.

It’s interesting that most of the games in the market, on whatever platform one chooses to play them on, are violent. They may differ on the levels of blood and gore, but the basic idea is the same – the more accurately one can render the physics of an artery ripped open by an exotic weapon, the better the game will sell. There is no other explanation for the success of games such as Quake, Doom, Unreal Tournament and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

It’s remarkable when you think about it. Apart from scientific visualization – say the unfolding of a protein or DNA – the most advanced graphics are used in pursuit of the ever increasing realism of in-game violence. From the pixellated red splotches of early games such as Wolfenstein 3D to the incredible realism made possible by today’s advanced graphics cards such as Ageia’s Physix, the rendition of violence is the staple of the gaming industry, a time tested recipe for the almost guaranteed success of a game.

There’s increasing debate on just how much of an influence this on-screen violence has on our day-to-day lives. Are we more violent because we kill unthinkingly in games? Do violent games in regions of actual ethnic or political violence inflame tensions? At what age should children be allowed to play violent games? What are the stereotypes that are promoted by games such as Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas? Are those who play games less inclined towards non-violent conflict resolution in real life? What role does good parenting play in contextualizing violent games?

These aren’t new questions to researchers who have been studying the impact of games on children, youth and adults for a number of years. This article however wants to point towards an emerging school of games called “Serious Games”, which are being looked at by cutting-edge peacebuilding and humanitarian initiatives to bring attention to some of the world’s most pressing problems such as hunger, violence and conflict.

Read my full article, published first in iTimes, here.

It’s been a tremendously challenging year for us in Sri Lanka.

Despite the increased violence and the severe erosion of the peace process, InfoShare designed, developed and launched a number of state-of-the-art ICT for Peace (ICT4Peace) initiatives to strengthen conflict resolution and democracy.

InfoShare’s own PeaceLibrary was launched this year. We added over 1,000 new resources to the PeaceLibrary in 2006 and also began the InfoShare Research Unit blog, which hopes to alert users of the PeaceLibrary on new content as well as resources on the web that are of interest to the larger community of actors engaged in conflict resolution. A comprehensive user survey towards the end of year clearly indicated the need to expand and strengthen PeaceLibrary resources, with many respondents clearly articulating the continuing need for a central repository of knowledge and information on peacebuilding in Sri Lanka.

InfoShare designed and deployed, supporting the Centre for Policy Alternative’s Voices of Reconciliation (VOR) project, groundbreaking Citizen Journalism and New Media initiatives in Sri Lanka - Groundviews and VOR Radio.

Also supporting the work of CPA and demonstrating it’s commitment to media development in Sri Lanka, InfoShare designed, developed and deployed the websites of the Sri Lanka Working Journalists Association (SLWJA), the Federation of Media Employees Trade Union (FMETU) and the Sri Lanka Muslim Media Forum (SLMMF).

For a fuller list of InfoShare’s activities, please visit here.

Though the challenges of peacebuilding will invariably increase in 2007 in Sri Lanka, InfoShare will continue to support the work of CSOs / NGOs / CBOs and other developmental actors in the field of conflict resolution, development and peacebuilding through the innovative use of technology.

I wish you a safe and happy holiday season and a fruitful, peaceful New Year.

Reading Clive Thompson’s article on spying in the New York Times and Chris Anderson’s interesting blog post on it, i t occurred to me yet again what a colossal waste of intelligence, human and financial resources and genius is spent on the war against terrorism through means less effective, less desirable and less successful, in the long term, than the same technology and tools used to strengthen communications between and within communities, nations and States.

Clearly, the effectiveness of Clive’s envisioned open sourced spying model is not what is in question - it is the desirability of establishing online what is effectively a mechanism of the commons to stifle free speech and the freedom of expression, in addition to forces already aligned to the same cause - such as repressive governments, dictatorships and regimes that control the flow of information.

I have noted earlier the development of systems to help the US better understand the world and its place in it. The problem with these systems, and indeed an open source spying model, is that it tackles the symptoms of terrorism and does little to explore and flesh out its root causes. Indeed, as it is increasingly the case in many countries, those who do try to do so are seen to be partial to and allied with terrorists. Accordingly, given half a chance, blog-vigilantes will take every opportunity to spam or “expose” those who they feel are a “threat” to “national security”. The essential anarchy of the blogosphere only guarantees that the resulting warning of threats to be equally anarchic - and the more “successful” the system gets, the more information agencies will have to deal with, clearly leading to an explosion in the levels of information, but not necessary a consonant increase in the knowledge that helps address the root causes of terrorism.

Accordingly, with the increase of information from diverse sources, varying widely on accuracy, open source spying ultimately becomes a pyrrhic exercise in which more and more resources will be needed to help deal with and sift through the exponential growth of information generated by the commons. Given the highly dubious levels of both human and machine intelligence at many spying agencies around the world, who operate on threat matrices and alert levels that are often wholly disconnected from the measures necessary to actually address the (re)emergence of violence, technology to use the commons to spy is really only going to result in mass hysteria, false positives, possible human rights abuses and the establishment of a culture of self-censorship.

It is imperative that we use all the tools and technology available to us to fight terrorism. The web and internet, and the exponential growth of mobile devices with multimedia affords us unprecedented potential to use ordinary citizens are vital nodes in ascertaining how best to respond to violence, strengthen peace and democracy, and safeguard fundamental rights. Projects and initiatives such as Witness, and Amnesty’s Irrepressible, offer inspiration on how technology can be used to safeguard democracy. Citizen journalism such as Groundviews help us nurture and amplify voices that may otherwise go unheard. The mobile phone offers us a way in which to communicate news and information for public good, such as the newly established SMS based news service on JNW. I have also written extensively on how new technologies can help radically transform dispute resolution and conflict transformation.

It is regrettable (inevitable?) that those who do have the money to spend on making our world a safer, better, more secure place to live in do so in ways that only guarantee the perpetuation on a fear psychosis that in turn leads to a Orwellian society, where Big Brother is actually your colleague in the next cubicle, where your neighbors have web cams trained on your backyard and your email is checked without your knowledge for any content that may be seen to be a “threat”, to someone, somewhere or something.

It’s not a society I’d like to see technology foster, especially when as enumerated above, technology allows us so much of potential to ensure a society free of fear, hunger and misery. Rather than open source spying, how about some open source peacebuilding?

First Monday has an excellent article on video games for political activism here.

Videogames have dominated popular culture for some time, but only in 2004 did they make a significant break into the world of politics, advocacy, and activism. This paper provides an overview of a variety of types of games used for political speech, from endorsed party messages to activist dissent. After explaining the state of the field, I discuss approaches to design and measure success for such artifacts. While some political opinion is black and white, most issues occupy grey areas, heavily influenced by other public policy issues. Can healthcare reform really be separated from taxation, national budgeting, tort reform, and social security reform? Far from neatly isolated problems, policy issues are complex systems that recombine and interrelate with one another. In particular, I will interrogate how videogames afford a new perspective on political issues, since they are especially effective at representing complex systems. Central to the process of creating and understanding such games is an understanding of “procedural rhetoric” — the way that a videogame embodies ideology in its computational structure. By understanding how games express rhetoric in their rules, we not only gain a critical vantage point on videogame artifacts, but also we can begin to consider how to design games whose primary purpose is to editorialize, teach, and make political statements.

Also see my own posts on Games for Peace, conflict resolution and political activism.

When I first reviewed JasmineNewswires a couple of months ago, they had just started their news through SMS service and I was not a subscriber. Soon after that post, I was offered a free subscription by JNW to evaluation further their novel system of breaking news and delivering information through SMS in Sri Lanka.

Firstly, the central questions I raised on their economic model remain - there is no impediment (save for one’s own conscience, and that’s a variable that’s hard to factor into business models!) against forwarding news alerts received through JNW. In fact, as their popularity has grown, a high profile incident - such as the assassination of a Tamil parliamentarian in Colombo recently, generated a flurry of SMS’s to my phone, all of which were forwards from those who were either subscribers, or to whom the message had in turn been forwarded to (in addition to the SMS I received from JNW as a subscriber).

As long as subscribers forward their SMS’s to others, JNW’s expansion through paying subscribers will be severely vitiated.

I’ve found their service to be reliable and accurate - their model is based on trust, and will break immediately and irrevocably if the news they send out is perceived to be biased, incorrect, late or any combination of these. JNW needs to be congratulated on what essentially is a one man news service model that links to stringers who are also responsible for delivering news to reputed wire news agencies, ensuring greater veracity and timely delivery. There have been some instances where JNW was hostage to network outages of their SMS gateway services provider, but as far as I can recall, I get around 2 - 3 SMS’s from them daily for the last couple of months.

JNW needs to branch off into specialised areas of news & features. Currently, as a subscriber, I have no control over the content that is “pushed” to my phone. A better model would be to allow the subscriber the freedom to choose between various news and information feeds that he / she can “pull” content from - on the model of Rasasa, which connects neatly to MSN and when I’m not online, to my mobile phone.

Some services seem to not have taken off - their web based synopsis of daily news-stories and headlines from the English, Sinhala and Tamil press, is not updated after the 17th of October. The JNW website itself needs to be upgraded, containing at present sections which are under populated, embryonic or dead - presenting an overall image of a start-up that’s not got it act together yet.

Which may well be the case - in conversations I’ve had with JNW’s visionary founder, it’s been a significant struggle to get JNW off the ground and keep it alive. While the innovation is evident, the economic model is very much uncharted territory, thus raising questions on the viability of JNW in the future. For my part, convinced that JNW does offer a unique and valuable service for civil society in Sri Lanka, linked up with JNW to provide content for Groundviews, a tri-lingual citizen media website I launched in Sri Lanka recently (linked closely to Deane’s desire to see “janatha-reporters” in Sri Lanka).

Proof of JNW’s growing popularity and maturity was seen in a short feature produced by Young Asia Television for No War Zone, where Chamath Ariyadasa and a couple of others debate the pros and cons of news via SMS, and their thoughts on JNW in particular.

The following thoughts spring to mind that JNW can use in the future to strengthen its impact, reach and economic base:

1. Enter into agreements with commercial, civil society and international agencies to provide SMS based updates to specific target groups (say for instance, updates on specific events, public rallies, campaigns etc)
2. Open up their service to international subscribers - there are many I personally forward JNW SMS’s to who are resident outside of Sri Lanka and would love to subscribe to JNW directly if they had the ability to do so.
3. Linked to the comments above, provide a way in which subscribers can select the news and information they receive - moving away from the present model of one size fits all, to a more subscriber / user oriented model - allowing for instance users to pull content from RSS feeds of their choosing
4. Expand their services to tri-lingual news - currently, their SMS’s are limited to English.
5. A stronger marketing campaign - perhaps viral - that strengthens the image of JNW amongst a larger group of civil society.
6. Daily Headline Briefs - morning news headlines of selected newspapers through SMS
7. Linking up with initiatives such as Groundviews (hint, hint!) to promote citizen journalism - using JNW’s technology to facilitate users generating their own content and posting it up from their mobiles

I’m sure Chamath has lots more ideas up his sleeve - stay tuned for another review of JNW in 2007.

UPDATED - 10th April 2008

Please read the following post in particular Revenue for content providers vis-à-vis new media and related posts below:

• SMS News Alerts in Sri Lanka - A short review of JNW’s new site and service
• Ideas on SMS news from New Mexico!
• News and information through SMS!
• News, analysis and information through MP3 - JasmineNews through podcasts

Yesterday, I launched two groundbreaking citizen journalism initiatives in Sri Lanka - Groundviews and VOR Radio. VOR Radio’s been around for a couple of months, slowly gathering content, while Groundviews is only just getting off the ground. Over the next year, I’ll have a core group of around 15 - 20 activists, civil society leaders, young bloggers, journalists, writers, artistes and thinkers - male & female, Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim, in Sinhala, Tamil and English - contributing their thoughts online.

I don’t know where this will go and how successful it will be, though the emails of support yesterday were indicative of some extremely vocal enthusiasm, across Sri Lanka and globally, at the launch of these two websites.

Why now? At a time when the government has just announced new anti-terrorism legislation which is in effect going to clamp down on progressive voices that seek to engage and transform violence, as well as media, and also at a time when a culture of impunity surrounds the erosion of human rights in Sri Lanka, launching websites purporting to strengthen progressive voices in support of peace and reconciliation can be taken seriously as a sign of dementia.

And yet, the potential technology offers at a time when mainstream media and real world activism is thwarted is significant. Citizen journalism itself is a powerful force. Coincidentally, Groundviews and VOR Radio launched on the same day at Reuters and Yahoo’s new citizen journalism collaboration, a variation of what was begun by CNN a while ago. Called You Witness news, the portal allows anyone to submit photos and multimedia content.

With the ubiquity of mobile devices that are multimedia capable, 2006 was the year in which major news services such as Reuters, Yahoo and CNN woke up to the possibilities of using citizens as reporters, given that increasingly, those first on the scene are witness or victims of the event that is newsworthy - such as the London bombings.

The possibilities opened up the introduction of new media and citizen journalism to a country in turmoil such as Sri Lanka are potentially significant, but vitiated somewhat by the inability, to date, to establish a standard way in which to input written content in Sinhala and Tamil into website. This is why Groundviews for instance, has a page devoted to the issue of installing vernacular fonts on PC’s - a convoluted process that will prevent many from entering content in the vernacular.

Given this limitation however, and the knowledge that efforts are underway to fix this issue, it’s important that the awareness of new media and citizen journalism is spread amongst both journalists as well as civil society. Journalists need to wake up to the potential of new media and stop seeing it as a threat. Citizens and civil society in particular need to wake up to the potential of new forms of communications that are facilitated by new technologies that allow them to feature, safeguard and strengthen democracy, human rights and peace. Collectively, progressive journalists and civil society can work together in new ways to establish alternatives to propaganda spewed out by parties to a conflict.

This is not to claim that new media and citizen journalism in particular are a panacea to the curtailment of media freedoms and the erosion of human rights. New technologies and ICT4Peace are a set of tools shaped by and shaping the context in which they are used. This complex dialectic is what interests me the most - and the subversive element of introducing new ways to communicate and share information in a country that is otherwise closing down all avenues for conscientious dissent, the presentation of alternatives to its own thinking, and the expression of views that it deems incompatible with national security or the interest of the State.

Clearly, we all have a responsibility to defeat terrorism - and VOR Radio and Groundviews offer the space to debate these ideas with a global and local audience, which is more than what any other mainstream newspaper or commercial radio can offer.

I don’t know what the future holds, but I hope you’ll join me in exploring the potential new media can have in transforming violence and conflict in Sri Lanka, and indeed, elsewhere in the world.

Many journalists in Sri Lanka will think I am quite mad if I tell them that within the next decade, they will compete with content produced and distributed by citizens , and may even lose their job because of it. To them, the technologies and websites shown in the diagram above are alien - they are ignorant of the ways in which new media and their millions of devoted producers & consumers are changing the journalism landscape as we know it.

Read the full article here.

Tune in and turn up the volume!

The Media Unit of the Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA), Colombo, Sri Lanka is pleased to announce the launch of the first tri-lingual civil society internet radio station in Sri Lanka - Voices of Reconciliation Internet Radio - streaming directly to your computer.

VOR Radio is based on Public Service Broadcasting (PSB) values and aims to enhance social, political and cultural cohesion in Sri Lanka through productions that feature the ideas and opinions of citizens rarely featured in mainstream media.

Productions are in Sinhala, Tamil and English with a special focus on civil society initiatives and perspectives on peace, reconciliation and democracy.

There’s already over 100 hours worth of programming on the website and we strongly encourage local and international CSOs and NGOs to provide us with more content on Sri Lanka, which can be hosted on VOR Radio absolutely free of charge.

VOR Radio is part of the citizen media network, including the Groundviews citizen media website, set up by the Voices of Reconciliation Project, conducted by CPA in partnership with IMPACS, Canada and supported by CIDA and AusAID.

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In response to many requests from civil society, NGOs, CSOs, humanitarian aid organisations including sections of the UN, local and international journalists as well as members from the diaspora to create a website on conflict and peace in Sri Lanka as seen through the eyes of concerned citizens, the Media Unit of the Centre for Policy Alternatives is pleased to announce the launch of GROUNDVIEWS.

Groundviews aims to be both a catalyst for those in support of peace, reconciliation and development in Sri Lanka, including internationals, to freely air their opinions as well as serve as a central portal for alternative news and information on peace and conflict in Sri Lanka. The website will accept and display short articles and features in Sinhala, Tamil and English. We encourage submissions from a citiizen’s perspective that are:

1. pithy & provocative
2. bear witness to the denial of justice, human rights & gross ceasefire violations
3. essentially humanizes and critiques conflict & peace through alternative cultural, social, economic and political perspectives.

Called citizen journalism elsewhere, this is the first attempt in Sri Lanka to create a means through which concerned citizens can regularly and safely write their own brief accounts of life in a violent country.

All content will be archived and indexed, making this website, over time, a valuable repository of alternative / citizens perspectives on conflict and peace in Sri Lanka.

Sign-up is fast and free and authors can contribute anonymously if desired. Note that content submitted will not be moderated or verified, and neither CPA nor I will not be responsible for the veracity of information on the site.

Over next year, this website will feature the voices of highly respected civil society activists, national and provincial journalists, academics, young scholars and researchers, leading Sri Lankan bloggers, youth activists, gender specialists, filmmakers and thinkers. Given the highly contentious nature of issues these authors will address, they may choose to post under their own names or under pseudonyms.

Either way, readers are guaranteed content that is fresh & engaging.

In earlier posts in this blog, I’ve mentioned the potential of Skypecasts to bring in large groups of people dispersed around the world to exchange ideas, as well as its potential for ODR. I’ve also, in the past, tried to use Skypecasts to hook in younger members of the diaspora to talk about issues related to peace and conflict in Sri Lanka, based on the potential of Skypecasts to offer a free and easy way to tele-conference with large groups of people.

I was wrong. Very wrong.

A recent Skypecast which I set up and attempted to conduct as part of my interactions with students at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in a class on Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) was an unmitigated disaster.

The call quality was wretched, users from all over the world joined in (there’s no way to configure a closed group), there were frequent bursts of static, the web interface to control conversations (mute controls) were sluggish at best, and dysfunctional most of the time, and as the convener, I had no control over the levels participation. The exercise lasted all of 3 minutes before we all just gave up.

Skypecasts in short, DO NOT WORK.

We resorted to Skype’s built in call conferencing, which worked well for a group that peaked at around 10 users. Call quality was markedly better and I can imagine that if all of us were on good broadband connections, the quality would have been even better.

It’s rather tragic that I honestly thought Skypecasts would be a catalyst for more democratic conversations across the globe. While Skype itself is a phenomenal programme, Skypecasts have a long way more to go before the technology can be taken seriously. One very strong recommendation would be to introduce a more structured method to conduct a Skypecast - so that it is not inundated with random users who just happen to join in with no understanding of the topic. Another would be the improve, drastically, the voice quality. It would also be interesting to offer a web based version of Skype - say Skype Light or SkypeWeb - that can be plugged into blogs & websites to facilitate voice calls to pre-designated Skype users (say the author of the blog) whenever he / she is online (without having to download and install Skype natively). I’ve always found the web based MSN Messenger very useful - it’s a cut down version from Live Messenger, but offers just enough functionality for me to carry out useful business when I am in an airport or fire-walled office that does not allow me to use the desktop version. I’d like to see the same happen with Skype.

The dramatic failure of Skypecasting held another lesson for me - that technology that looks good on paper really needs to be tested out before mission critical work. Skypecasts are in Beta testing, but in my opinion the technology is far too embryonic to be called Beta. It was my mistake to think that in its present form Skypecasts could be used for ODR and other purposes, though I’m still convinced that VoIP, largely driven by companies such as Skype and Vonage, is going to revolutionise telecoms as we have known it for the past couple of decades.