ICT4Peace featured on The Communication Initiative

ICTs in general 1 Minute

Kier Olsen DeVries, Senior Editor of The Communication Initiative, with whom I’ve been occasionally in touch with for several years regarding my work in media, peacebuilding and ICT4Peace, wrote in to say that this blog well be featured for the next week on The Communication Initiative’s homepage!

The Communication Initiative (The CI) network is an online space for sharing the experiences of, and building bridges between, the people and organisations engaged in or supporting communication as a fundamental strategy for economic and social development and change. It does this through a process of initiating dialogue and debate and giving the network a stronger, more representative and informed voice with which to advance the use and improve the impact of communication for development. This process is supported by a web-based resource of summarised information and several electronic publications, as well as online research, review and discussion platforms providing insight into communication for development experiences.

From a time a couple of years ago when people scoffed at the very word ICT4Peace, I’ve demonstrated by example how ICT can secure & strengthen peace processes, peace negotiations, democracy, reconciliation and governance. Through the innovation of InfoShare and the experience garnered through years at the Centre for Policy Alternatives working with media and peacebuilding, the work we’ve engendered in Sri Lanka in ICT4Peace is ripe for scaling up and applying in other conflict zones as well.

Please get in touch – I’d love to hear about your own experiences in this new and exciting field of theory and practice.

Published by Sanjana

An Ashoka, Rotary World Peace and TED Fellow, I have since 2002 used, studied and advocated Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) to strengthen peace, human rights & democratic governance. I founded in 2006 and till June 2020 edited the award-winning Groundviews, Sri Lanka's first civic media website. From 2002-2020 I was a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Policy Alternatives. I pioneered both the use of social media for activism and online citizen journalism/civic media in Sri Lanka, including setting up South Asia's first Twitter and Facebook accounts for civic media, in 2007. Having started digital security training for human rights activists in 2010, I continue to advise civil society on digital hygiene, mass and personal surveillance, privacy and secure communications to date. I also curate a comprehensive digital archive of material linked to peace and conflict in Sri Lanka, since 2002. I specialise in, advise and train on social media communications strategy, countering-violence extremism online, web-based activism, online advocacy and grounded, context-based, platform-specific social media research. My work experience over two-decades spans five continents. Through the ICT4Peace Foundation and since 2006, I help strengthen information management during crises and work on countering violent extremism online. For over a decade, this included leading the Foundation's work on these lines with the United Nations and other multi-lateral organisations involved in peacebuilding, peacekeeping, and humanitarian affairs. Since 2008, I have worked in South Asia, South East Asia, North Africa, Europe and the Balkans to capture, disseminate and archive inconvenient truths in austere, violent contexts. I completed doctoral studies at the University of Otago, New Zealand, looking at the symbiotic relationship between offline unrest and online instigation of hate and harm in Sri Lanka and, in the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre in 2019, facilitated by leading research based on New Zealand's first ever Data for Good grant by Twitter.

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