ICT for Peacebuilding (ICT4Peace)

As reported here, Sahana has won the 2006 Free Software Award for Projects of Social Benefit awarded by the Free Software Foundation.

The Free Software Foundation, founded in 1985, is dedicated to promoting computer users’ right to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer programs. The Free Software Award for Projects of Social Benefit is presented to a free software project that intentionally and significantly benefits society through collaboration to accomplish an important social task.

As noted in the press release:

Richard Stallman, President and Founder of the Free Software Foundation, in presenting the award said, “We were inspired to create this award when we heard of the tremendous good the Sahana project was able to achieve through the use of free software. With this award we give recognition to their efforts.”

The founding team, made up of Sri Lankan technology workers, worked around the clock for three days to produce the first release of the software that was quickly adopted by their country’s government. The software resolves common coordination problems that arise during a disaster and thus facilitates the search for missing people, aid and volunteer management, and victim tracking across refugee camps.

Sahana is built completely on donated funds and volunteer effort coordinated by Lanka Software Foundation. It has been officially deployed by the governments of Sri Lanka, Pakistan, the Philippies, and Indonesia. It was also part of the Strong Angel III, a test of US civil and military disaster response.

Some photos here.

Just after posting my last entry on Sahana a few days ago, I discovered I was at a meeting in Geneva with one of the co-authors of the report, Bartel Van de Walle.

The world’s a small place.

Even at SA III, I suggested to Chamindra that Sahana modules could help in the development of support systems for human rights protection, conflict transformation issues such as reconciliation processes and peacebuilding in general. For example, I’m looking closely at some of the Sahana modules (such as the Camp and Victims Registry’s) to see whether they can be integrated into a human rights advocacy, reporting and violations mapping system that I’m helping develop and wrote overall concept note for in Sri Lanka.

It would be interesting to engage Chamindra and the Sahana team on issues of information / data security, since that’s one of the key questions I get asked (getting mistaken all the bloody time for being closely associated with Sahana’s development - which is flattering, but untrue) from those interested in using it for more than humanitarian purposes, but are wary of what they perceive to be a model not robust enough for field and HQ deployments in severe conflict zones such as that which Sri Lanka has become over the past year.

Perhaps an idea for an interview with Chamindra on this blog in the near future!

Congrats to all those at Sahana.

A new journal article on Sahana - “a free and open source disaster management information system developed in Sri Lanka in the immediate aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami” - sheds new light on the nature and application of FOSS in humanitarian aid.

I’ve long been a fan of Sahana’s vision, and given below are some of my links to articles on the system I’ve penned before and an interview at Strong Angel III with Chamindra de Silva, a chief instigator of and contributor to Sahana.

The ACM paper has this diagram on Sahana’s deployment which I found interesting, particularly because it places Government agencies and NGOs in the same WAN of trust. In theory of course this is fine, but with the recent allegations of a rather serious nature against the government of aiding and abetting the abduction and disappearance of children in the East of Sri Lanka in particular, it would be less than desirable to have sensitive Camp Registry and Victim information that can be accessed by paramilitary groups (working with the State armed forces) who may use this information to do more harm than good and, at the very least, are not known for their partiality to information security.

I’m not sure about access protocols and internal data security in Sahana, but clearly, placing both the Government and I/NGO in the same network of trust is downright dangerous in Sri Lanka today. The central problem that arises thereof, and not limited to Sahana but all ICT4Peace and humanitarian aid system particularly in conflict zones is how to both keep the information generation, storage and dissemination as open as possible, but also as secure as possible. It is a challenge I’ve noted earlier and that I am very interested to discover how Sahana will grapple with in the future.

I wish them well.

See also:
Strong Angel III - Interview with Chamindra de Silva from Sahana
Open Source Disaster Recovery: Case Studies of networked collaboration
Humanitarian aid and peacebuilding

Growing up in conflict does one of two things – it teaches you the limitations of violence to engender sustainable social change, or it compels you to enter the cycle of violence itself. Especially when the well-springs of hope have run dry, violence is often perceived to be an effective way to change the order of things. The internal logic of martyrdom and suicide terrorism may be inexplicable to those outside terrains of hopelessness, but easier to understand when juxtaposed against the backdrop of a perceived lack of alternatives and indoctrination. ICTs, often touted as a panacea for development, fail to make any sense for those enmeshed in violent conflict, those touched by its long tail and those who fall outside our circumscribed vision or oftentimes, our urbane westernised bias.

This is why I have proposed a deep and meaningful exploration into the way ICT can help engender peace and conflict transformation. I am interested in how democracy and peace can be strengthened in countries such as Sri Lanka, Nepal, Colombia, Timor Leste – how they could be made more resilient to the mercurial actions and policies of political leaders and non-state actors that often sow the seeds for more conflict, how they could give voice to the voiceless and marginalised, how they could strengthen the participation of youth, children and empower women in reconciliation.

Many mature theories of conflict transformation and peacebuilding were developed before the information age. Many of today’s leading peace theorists and practitioners are those who grew up in a generation markedly different from that which exists today, in terms of their access to information technology. Today’s world of connectivity enables the flow of information and knowledge in ways unimaginable even a few years ago. No longer are news services cut off from the frontlines of conflict. Citizens with mobile phones are the new reporters of our information age. The web is ubiquitous and multi-lingual. I was interested in how these developments could engender a radical revision in the way peace processes are designed and implemented.

The world over, ICT4D has demonstrably failed to live up its early promise. In many regions, the lack of emphasis on the socio-political and economic foundations of violent conflict has led to assumptions that in turn have influenced theories of development that simply don’t fit to local needs and are by definition unsustainable. They are, as a noted Sri Lankan commentator once observed, pilots waiting to land – meaning that pilot projects driven by donors stand little chance of scaling up once funding dried up. This is why we need to look at ICT4Peace as a mechanism through which the use of ICTs can be constructively critiqued and strengthened.

We need to look at peacebuilding in all ICT initiatives, not as a passive after-thought, but as an active, committed and sustained exploration that fleshes out the complex interplay between peace and development. This need for mainstreaming ICT4Peace within the well-established ICT4D discourses was recognised at the second phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in November 2005 in Tunis. Paragraph 36 of the Tunis Commitment states that:

“We value the potential of ICTs to promote peace and to prevent conflict which, inter alia, negatively affects achieving development goals. ICTs can be used for identifying conflict situations through early warning systems preventing conflicts, promoting their peaceful resolution, supporting humanitarian action, including protection of civilians in armed conflicts, facilitating peacekeeping missions, and assisting post conflict peace-building and reconstruction.”

The recognition at a global policy level of the importance of ICT in engendering peace is a significant boost ICT4Peace, as was the publication of a report titled The Role of ICT in Preventing, Responding to and Recovering from Conflict by the UN ICT Task Force.

However, sustainable social transformation in the midst of violence is a difficult process to envision, harder implementing, even harder to sustain. Cognisant of these challenges and yet recognising the need to address them head on, in 2003 I helped form a small organisation based in Sri Lanka, called InfoShare, to help further the practice and theory of some of the ideas I had for the use of ICT in peace processes. Our work has no historical precedent. I have since conducted extensive and groundbreaking research into the possibilities of using ICT for all aspects of peacebuilding. However, as Robert Frost would say, we have miles to go before we sleep.

It is inevitable that advancements in technology find their way into peacebuilding - we are not even scratching the surface of what is possible today. The future of ICT4Peace, however, is pegged to the availability of funding to explore ways that technology can best help communities transform violent conflict. To date, donors, international agencies and local bodies are reluctant, at best, to approach ICT4Peace initiatives. This needs to change, and soon.

Precisely because of its growing importance and global recognition, ICT4Peace is no longer the domain of geeks or early visionaries. Ranging from Online Dispute Resolution (ODR), inter-cultural mediation, and virtual secure spaces for international collaboration to decision support systems in peace negotiations and advanced information visualisation, ICT4Peace spans a gamut of technologies, theories and communities of practice. From mobile phones to PC’s, from wireless to wired, from the village to the city, from citizen to politician, the future of ICTs in general, and ICT4Peace in particular, is invariably entwined with how well it vitiates violent conflict that mars our world today.

So much of ICT these days is about the use of big words. The core vision and raison d’etre of ICT4Peace however is quite simple.

It exists to generate hope, where little or none exists.

And that’s something truly worth supporting, for all our futures.

This article was originally written for Flightplan 1.5.

See also:
What is ICT4Peace?
My research on ICT4Peace
Our Common Humanity in the Information Age: Principles and Values for Development

From a fellow Sri Lankan blogger came the tip about Microsoft’s ascendant social consciousness - i’m™ initiative.

i’m is a new initiative from Windows Live™ Messenger. Every time you start a conversation using i’m, Microsoft shares a portion of the program’s advertising revenue with some of the world’s most effective organizations dedicated to social causes. We’ve set no cap on the amount we’ll donate to each organization. The sky’s the limit. There’s no charge, so join now and put our money where your mouth is.

i’m is about making a difference. Not in a huge expensive way, not in a time-consuming way. But in a simple, effective way.

You won’t have to change your conversation to change the conversation. With every instant message you help address the issues you feel most passionate about, including poverty, child protection, disease, and environmental degradation. It’s simple. All you have to do is join and start an instant messaging conversation. We’ll handle the donation.

Once you’ve signed up, every ad you see in your message window contributes to the grand total we send to the causes.

Nowhere on the site does it say just how much of money Microsoft will donate to the causes & organisations mentioned in the initiative, which leads one to assume that Microsoft intends to leverage the millions of users using its Live Messenger service to generate revenue that goes beyond tokenism.

I’m skeptical.

This is Microsoft Corporation, no the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation we are talking about, where money talks loudest. I recall my experience with the stillborn Microsoft Humanitarian Systems Group (MHS) initiative, for which I even wrote a paper on the future of technology in humanitarian aid. The i’m™ initiative is a different take to MHS on corporate social responsibility - the central difference being that it’s not a concerted, well articulated and planned process to develop a social consciousness within Microsoft or its huge user base (as was tried with the MHS process), but is instead social advocacy for the lazy and the average user who doesn’t really give a damn about any of the causes mentioned in the initiative, but joins up nevertheless because it’s cool, it’s new, it’s free, it’s unobtrusive, and it makes one feel good.

Like SETI@home users aren’t really encouraged to actively partake in social activism, but are merely encouraged to download, install and proclaim through their blogs and IM conversations the fact that they are more socially conscious than say, a user of Adium or Yahoo! Messenger.

The inherent hypocrisy (not for a moment discounting that Microsoft through this initiative will generate much needed funding for all the organisations that are part of it) of the i’m™ initiative is that Microsoft’s perennially bug ridden software that claims to unleash human potential, actually, in most cases, thwarts it by forcing users to deal with security nightmares and system crashes that severely vitiates the potential of computing in general, and connecting to the Internet and web in particular. No amount of branding their leading IM programme will absolve the larger corporation of the singularly horrendous experience that users have to face, but take for granted because of a perceived lack of choice, when using their operating systems or software (with the hardware required to run VISTA and the new office, way beyond the purchasing power of millions of users, Microsoft’s claims to have finally made an OS and office suite that is truly intuitive, useful and stable also run aground - since millions simply won’t have the computing power to run the new software, or will be forced to upgrade perfectly decent computers just for the sake of functionality that should have been there in the first place). Microsoft’s penchant for locking in consumers into development cycles that take years, and with no guarantee of a better product with each avatar of a programme, is frustrating and ultimately bedevils human progress and innovation.

Microsoft needs to do more, not less, to step up to its global role as a corporate entity capable of changing, for the better, the lives of millions of people - and not all users of its products. To do so requires genuine commitment and vision - on the lines of Foundation that its maker set up - and not just a passing cursory nod at social activism through branding. In asking us to put its money where our mouth is, Microsoft invites us to ask it to do more to support causes and organisations that through technology but also through education, livelihood creation, healthcare and other means, helps communities help themselves.

Clearly i’m™ initiative is a start, but to paraphrase Frost, Microsoft has miles to go before it can sleep.

An article from FT highlights that it’s not just China that’s blocking web and Internet access. Repressive regimes elsewhere in the world, and notably, in the Middle East, are responsible for an increasing trend in blocking access to websites dealing with rights, freedom of expression, social networking and even sites like YouTube.

Elsewhere in the world, there are examples of how innovative techniques, such as the use of mobile phones in Zimbabwe, is beating the reach of the censor. Even in the Middle East, reports indicate that the growth of blogging is increasing the terrain for democratic debate and dissent online, despite the best efforts of governments to clamp down of those who engage in such activities. And while HRW’s Human Rights Report in 2007 reports damned the Chinese government for its restrictive policies on the web and Internet, there are good indications that new websites are helping citizens capture gross rights abuse in their countries, which would have otherwise gone undocumented.

One of the countries the FT story doesn’t highlight is France, which as recently took very disturbing moves to limit the nature of content citizens could post online, creating quite a stir amongst internet rights activists. And though last year I went into detail on how the web and internet could overthrow repressive regimes, Julian Pain from RSF tempered the heady optimism with a dose of reality.

In short, citizens in many countries around the world are desperate for a revolution, and it is still my firm belief that technology, though it may not be neutral, will secure and strengthen the work of pro-democracy and pro-rights activists far more than it will aid governments clamp down on them.

All it takes it one photo or a single mobile.

Inspired by the Creative Commons and the innovation & freedom it brings to the oftentimes ossified realm intellectual property rights, I was very interested to learn of their new Version 3.0 licenses.

VOR Radio, which was launched with a Creative Commons 2.5 license, will be shortly upgraded to a 3.0 license.

I’ve also made this blog, and Groundviews, now come under (different) Creative Commons licenses. Because of the nature of Groundviews, I began with a license that I hope I can with the passage of time and the gradual acquiescence of the content providers (authors), change into a more open license. This blog on the other hand allows for the re-use of content, so long as it with full attribution.

As it noted on their website:

Too often the debate over creative control tends to the extremes. At one pole is a vision of total control — a world in which every last use of a work is regulated and in which “all rights reserved” (and then some) is the norm. At the other end is a vision of anarchy — a world in which creators enjoy a wide range of freedom but are left vulnerable to exploitation. Balance, compromise, and moderation — once the driving forces of a copyright system that valued innovation and protection equally — have become endangered species.

Creative Commons is working to revive them. We use private rights to create public goods: creative works set free for certain uses. Like the free software and open-source movements, our ends are cooperative and community-minded, but our means are voluntary and libertarian. We work to offer creators a best-of-both-worlds way to protect their works while encouraging certain uses of them — to declare “some rights reserved.”

Thus, a single goal unites Creative Commons’ current and future projects: to build a layer of reasonable, flexible copyright in the face of increasingly restrictive default rules.

Here’s an interesting video that explains it further.

From MacWorld comes this disturbing news:

The French Constitutional Council has approved a law that criminalizes the filming or broadcasting of acts of violence by people other than professional journalists. The law could lead to the imprisonment of eyewitnesses who film acts of police violence, or operators of Web sites publishing the images, one French civil liberties group warned on Tuesday.

This is a classic instance where an overbroad definition of a specific problem is addressed through legislation that serves to undermine media freedom and the freedom of expression in general. Ostensibly brought about to curb happy slapping, the French laws essentially criminalize the activities of citizen journalists unrelated to the perpetrators of violent acts. A citizen who happens to capture an act of violence or brutality directed against another citizen - especially by the French Police, noted for their excessive use of force - now stands the risk of imprisonment, which is clearly a absurd position to espouse through legislation.

As further noted in the Macworld article:

The government has also proposed a certification system for Web sites, blog hosters, mobile-phone operators and Internet service providers, identifying them as government-approved sources of information if they adhere to certain rules. The journalists’ organization Reporters Without Borders, which campaigns for a free press, has warned that such a system could lead to excessive self censorship as organizations worried about losing their certification suppress certain stories.

This is clearly a disturbing precedent.

Question: There are various technological tools available now – new cell phone technology, the Internet, etc. How can women make the best use of these different technologies? How do we ensure that women who have access to technology such as cell phones or the Internet or women who become members of iKNOW Politics share the knowledge they have with other women?

Answer: Women must get together and share their knowledge, whether it’s over work, or being with children, or just creating small groups to share various kinds of information and mutual support. In some villages, for instance, the woman who has access to the only cell phone around actually rents it out to people. The phone then becomes a new power tool. It is critical for this woman to share physical access to her cell phone, teach someone else to use it, or take information from it and do what women do very naturally — gather other women together to talk and share information.

As American women, however, we need to be careful not to superimpose our image of how to do things on women from other countries. But, information must be shared. A woman who gets power – either because she has a particular position in society or government or because she has a cell phone – can’t become a queen bee! Women must help other women. I have this saying that I use quite frequently, which is that there is a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other. A woman with power must understand that, in actuality, her role is to help others. For a woman who wants to be at the center of power, she must understand that her power is actually maximized by encouraging more women to participate in the system.

This exchange between former US Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and the new iKNOW website is an interesting assertion of the power of technology to empower women across the world.

Lest we forget, this is the same woman who in 1996 claimed that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children under the regime of “smart sanctions” by the then US administration was “…a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price is worth it.“

Clearly, she not that much wiser today. Stressing the need for “objective information” later on in the interview, Ms. Albright seems blithely unaware that all information is subjective, from creation to consumption.

That said, her powerful voice in support of the iKNOW initiative will hopefully propel the active participation of women, oftentimes marginalised and under-represented in governance mechanisms, in part through the increased use of technologies such as the Internet and web. iKNOW also has a useful collection of material related to gender, women, governance and peacbeuilding here.

As noted here, iKNOW Politics the first virtual network linking women in politics throughout the world, was launched today at the United Nations in New York. Short for the International Knowledge Network of Women in Politics, iKNOW Politics is the first online space specifically designed to make governance work better for women and to advance the role and number of women in political and public life.

Anyone interested in iKNOW should also visit Women, War and Peace portal of UNIFEM and the Women Waging Peace Network and read Peace Work: Women, Armed Conflict and Negotiation, edited by Radhika Coomaraswamy and Dilrukshi Fonseka.

From Media Helping Media comes the story of how mobile phones are, in a small but powerful way, subverting the media censorship in Zimbabwe. I found the following particularly resonant for what Jasmine Newswires is attempting to achieve in Sri Lanka.

As we depend on donor funding we have limited resources. Will we soon get to the stage where we’ll have to say no to requests to receive the news? The other challenge is to précis the complexity of Zimbabwe’s news stories into 160 characters, including spaces. As the economy goes into meltdown and in-fighting escalates in the ruling party, no simple news comes out of the country. We’ve also just started podcasting, with the help of a colleague who’s putting our programming into an MP3 format for free. It’s proved surprisingly popular. What we now know is that you can have the ideas to make your business more effective and improve information delivery, but without the hard cash it’s not going to be easy.

Jasmine Newswires, who I’ve critically looked at twice before in this blog, silently started their newest offering in an expanding smorgasbord of news and analysis through SMS and their blog on the web.

For full disclosure, I was part of a team of experts who headed a small group of persons in charge of selecting innovative proposals from a pool of applicants to a small grants scheme facilitated by INTERNEWS in Sri Lanka. We found the JNW idea of developing their SMS based news service, still one of a kind in Sri Lanka, into Sinhala, Tamil and English podcasts, to be a cut above the other proposals. Although it’s taken far longer than expected, pointing to the difficulties of multi-lingual news gathering, translations and the need to maintain professional standards in their service, JNW alerted a few of us of their new podcasts last week, and have now opened up a new page on their website where anyone can subscribe to the podcasts online.

The first podcasts (and there are three at the time of writing this) point to the potential of doing short, pithy podcasts on the news that JNW sends out daily via SMS. However, they also flag how much more JNW needs to develop these podcasts if they are to be taken seriously by an audience of consumers used to more professional productions through international media such as Australia Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), VOA or even local initiatives such as VOR Radio.

Firstly, there’s the obvious deficit of presentation, that I hope the new website of JNW, in the process of development I’m told, will address. There’s no brief yet comprehensive overview of each podcast in terms of what it is about. Although there’s a file-size next to each podcast, there’s no mention of the length of the programme.

There’s also no branding. JNW needs to brand its products through jingles, a decent intro and extro and perhaps a signature tune that plays in the background as the news reader speaks. Without such branding, these fail to leverage the brand awareness of JNW as an increasingly trusted and known SMS news source in its podcasts, that sound generic and amateurish.

Rather than go with the one size fits all approach, JNW needs to target specific audiences with its podcasts. Financial market information for instance may not interest someone outside of the CSE or business. News on human rights violations may not necessarily interest someone working in the realm of international money markets. As I noted in an email to Chamath a short while ago:

a) diversify your news stories b) strategically begin to target specific audience / markets c) respond to their needs with a basic service menu plus a couple of market specific offerings. So for instance your basic services / info menu could be:

1. Two Daily updates from AP, Reuters, Factiva
2. One Sports Update
3. One Financial / Stock Market update
4. One Misc. update (can be entertainment, research, analysis etc)

From this, say for the CSO / NGO market you can add the possibilities of:

1. Four daily updates (news)
2. Morning geo-political situ update
3. One update on Peace & Conflict Research (can link up to InfoShare Research Unit blog)

plus

any one of the 2 - 4 of the original menu set. Other options can be added at a premium.

JNW, in trying to be all things to everyone (which may have worked as a new startup) will soon begin to frustrate its subscribers with an overload of information that is mass produced and sent to everyone, with no real emphasis on the sectors they each work in.

With regard to the podcasts in particular, targeting specific audiences can make them attractive to content providers such as mobile phone companies, who can charge a premium for consumers to download a podcast of their choice every morning on handsets capable of handling MP3, or indeed, provide a service through which one can dial up and listen to the podcast for all handsets on the market.

JNW can also license out their technology, once they’ve honed it sufficiently, for large organisations to create their own in-house news and information services - especially those with large field operations with operatives and aid workers often cut off from other media.

Finally, they need to work on their announcer / announcing - who seems to be on the same steep learning curve as JNW is at present.

I’m clearly a fan of JNW’s SMS news service, but feel that they soon approaching a tipping point as a business where they will have to clearly outline strategies for future development in order to maintain their existing customer base, attract VC, and diversify into content provision for several distinct markets, through SMS, the web and podcasts.

Visit Jasmine Newswires here, and subscribe to their podcast here.