ICT for Peacebuilding (ICT4Peace)

What will the future media landscape look like? How will Web 2.0 effect reporting and how will future media be consumed? What products and tools will journalists and other creators use? PodTech takes some of the big questions to ScobleShow’s Robert Scoble, Google Vice President Marissa Mayer and Web Strategist Jeremiah Owyang.

Here’s a video I came across that ends on an interesting note - the use of technology is contextual, and for all the hype on ICT, new media, mobiles and PC’s, content consumed through print on paper will continue to make a lot of sense for the forseeable future.

While I’ve written extensively on the potential for mobiles to complement PC based Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) mechanisms, vitiating the potential has to date been the lack of access to mobile services in remote areas because of a lack of or intermittent electricity. Statistics in Sri Lanka suggest that the household electrification rate in Sri Lanka ranges from 28 per cent to 36 per cent despite the fact that rural electrification programmes began over half a century ago. And the economies of scale and our own power generation problems may prevent remote communities from getting electricity to their villages for some time to come, given that CEB is reeling with the present load, leave aside projected future growth.

No electricity, no GSM towers, no mobile service. Even Dialog’s coverage in Sri Lanka has vast swathes of land with little or no coverage.

Enter Motorola in Namibia, where through its Reach GSM programme, it is piloting a novel approach to expanding mobile coverage that uses solar and wind power generation to power GSM towers. The question of financial viability notwithstanding, this seems to be a novel approach to expanding coverage with penetration deep into areas without electricity. In Sri Lanka, population density vs. mobile coverage in the South-East (compare this map with the Dialog mobile coverage map) would suggest that there is a sizeable market that is current without good access to mobile services (through Dialog anyway, couldn’t find coverage maps for Tigo or Mobitel). And if one of the arguments here was that towers are too expensive to construct and maintain using ever increasing electricity tariffs, then perhaps Namibia offers some inspiration? As Motorola notes:

This solution provides comprehensive voice and data communications using an efficient and reliable alternative to the costly roll out of electricity in remote areas. It is an ideal solution for both emerging and developed markets, providing cost-effective, environmently friendly power to enable wireless communications to a wider audience.

And it seems as if Motorola isn’t stopping there, with a concept note on the site demonstrating solar and wind power generation to service the demands of even a Metro WiFi network.

For pathbreaking services such as FrontlineSMS, this is good news, as it allows an ever widening footprint of mobile phones to progressively influence the manner in which remote communities communicate, with each other, and the rest of the world.

I had an interesting conversation with New Internationalist Radio recently on the uses of mobile phones in conflict transformation. I have suggested in the past that mobile phones are increasingly a means through which citizens can secure basic human rights, and accordingly need to be seen as devices that service basic human interests & needs.

The conversation centred around the potential of mobile phones for peacebuilding, and in particular, the manner in which they are used in Sri Lanka. I spoke on the current escalation of hostilities in Sri Lanka and the chilling effect its had on fundamental rights in general, but the freedom of expression and communications rights in particular, and how mobile phones both allow people to communicate in the worst of times, but are also cut-off regularly when military and political interests trump the provision of communications services to peoples in the North - East in particular.

Listening to the programme, I was surprised to hear from the producers of the podcast that Australia itself is contemplating shutting down mobile services as part of security measures for the upcoming APEC meeting. Clearly, it’s not just Sri Lanka that’s grappling with the vexed issue of fundamental communications rights vs. “national security”.

Listen to or download the podcast here, or subscribe to the feed here.

Technorati Tags: Cellphones, Mobile Phones, SMS, ICT4Peace, Peacebuilding, Conflict Transformation, New Media

Here’s an unsurprising story of curtailing free speech:

The Fijian military junta has targeted anti-regime web logs (blogs), and threatened to arrest the people behind them. On May 17, army commander Colonel Pita Driti announced that blogs “critical of the army and members of the government” would be shut down as they posed a “threat to national security”.

“There is still an active state of emergency and people must be aware that some freedoms need to be restrained, including freedom of expression,” Driti declared. “When we catch up with these bloggers, we will take them to our military quarters and explain to them how their remarks constitute a threat to the country.”

This is an ominous warning, particularly given the regime’s record. Since launching its coup last December, the military has detained dozens of prominent oppositionists, including former government members, activists in various non-government organisations, and others opposed to the trampling of democratic rights in Fiji. Many have been assaulted and one person has allegedly been beaten to death while in military custody.

So Fiji isn’t as idyllic as often made out to be. Small surprise that following a military coup late last year, voices of dissent aren’t tolerated in the country. In Defeating Repressive Regimes I was optimistic about the power of technology to support democracy even in totalitarian regimes, but that optimism was tempered by observations in The limits of online freedom and activism?

The question that’s larger than Fiji is to what extent repressive regimes will go to clamp down on free speech. While projects such as Witness can help document human rights violations, this hasn’t stopped Arab Governments and other countries worldwide, including some “democracies“, from using various means to quell the voices of dissent.

But to put things in perspective, the US Army recently banned blogging, and there are calls even in the US to “police the Internet” in order to prevent it being used by terrorists for their violent ends.

The difference here of course is that I don’t believe a blogger in the US is going to be “invited” to spend some time with the military on account of something written against Sen. Lieberman’s perspectives on web freedom. In Fiji it’s a different story - which is precisely why bloggers need to continue to voice their opposition against the despicable forces that try to silence them.

See also:
How to Blog Safely (About Work or Anything Else)
Handbook for bloggers and cyber-dissidents
Introduction to blogs and blogging
Building peace through ICT - Ideas for practical ICT4Peace projects

Technorati Tags: Fiji, Censorship, Blogs, Democracy

Internet filtering takes place in over two dozens states worldwide including many countries in Asia and the Middle East and North Africa. Related Internet content control mechanisms are also in place in Canada, the United States and a cluster of countries in Europe. Drawing on a just-completed survey of global Internet filtering undertaken by the OpenNet Initiative (a collaboration of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University, and the University of Cambridge) and relying on work by regional experts and an extensive network of researchers, Access Denied examines the political, legal, social, and cultural contexts of Internet filtering in these states from a variety of perspectives. Chapters discuss the mechanisms and politics of Internet filtering, the strengths and limitations of the technology that powers it, the relevance of international law, ethical considerations for corporations that supply states with the tools for blocking and filtering, and the implications of Internet filtering for activist communities that increasingly rely on Internet technologies for communicating their missions.

Read the full details here - I haven’t read this tome, but if Sri Lanka isn’t already in it, I suspect that the way things are going here, it may not be too long before we are.

Technorati Tags: Censorship, Sri Lanka, Internet, ICT

Webchat on: Threats to Journalists and Media Professionals.

Threats to journalists’ safety remain a very real concern all over the globe. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, seven journalists were confirmed killed in 2007 alone, with another seven deaths awaiting confirmation as of April 9. Although risks associated with war reporting are currently the biggest threat to journalists’ safety, publishing stories critical of certain governments also remains a safety risk in some countries.

On May 22 at 10 a.m. EDT (1400 GMT) (Sri Lankan time 7.30 p.m.), join Sherry Ricchiardi, associate professor at Indiana University’s School of Journalism and director of its international media affairs, for a webchat on dangers faced by journalists and media professionals around the world. Ricchiardi is on the Society of Professional Journalists’ international committee and the programming board of the International Center for Education of Journalists in Opatija, Croatia. She also serves a consultant to the Crimes of War Project in Washington and to the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at the University of Washington. (More)

If you would like to participate in this webchat, please sign up on the USINFO Webchat registration page. Please enter your preferred screen name; use of full names is not required.

If you have participated in any previous webchats, use the same e-mail. (You no longer need to enter a password.) You may submit questions in advance.

Accept questions and comments in advance of, and at any time during, the program. You also may e-mail questions without registering.

The transcript of this webchat will be available on USINFO’s Webchat Station, where information about upcoming webchats is also available.

Webchat FAQs

Looking forward to participating in this event, though during the signup I noted that the system seems to be only tailored to run on IE 5.0 or higher. This may be because this was the browser of choice at the time this system was developed, but to seemingly exclude the Linux and OS X community, to name just two non-IE user groups, in 2007 is quite unfortunate.

It also reminded me of FEMA’s Internet Explorer fiasco after Katrina, but unlike what happened there, this site does seem to work on Firefox on my Mac despite the warnings and I hope that on the day of the web chat, all the functionality is available as well.

Technorati Tags: Web Chat, Media, ICT

As reported in the Daily Mirror on the 21st of May 2007:

Dissident eJournalists expose broken ePromises

Moments before the awarding of certificates took place a dissident group of e-journalists, led by ‘Ravaya’ reporter Lasantha Ruhunage approached the head table and demanded to be allowed to voice the injustices faced by some of the participants at this program.

“We are protesting for valid reasons”, said Ruhunage, explaining that their batch had initially been promised that, the journalists who successfully complete their course will receive computers.”

Another cause for the dissidents to voice their opposition was the decision of the ICTA to hold their certificate warding ceremony at a five star hotel instead of using that money to purchase them computers. Yet the group had been informed that the funds utilized for the ceremony were not sufficient to buy PCs, and were told by the ICTA that the computers can be purchased with a discount of 50%, according to a letter distributed at the ceremony by Ruhunge and his allies. This course of action led to a state of disorder with several e-journalists refusing to receive their certificate and gift tokens from the Minster, despite being present at the ceremony.

Looks like ICTA promotes ICT4Conflict a tad more than ICT4Peace.

Technorati Tags: ICTA, Sri Lanka, Journalism

“We were going to have a baby and I wanted to share the pictures with family and friends,” Kahn said, “and there was no easy way to do it.”

So as he sat in a maternity ward, he wrote a crude program on his laptop and sent an assistant to a RadioShack store to get a soldering iron, capacitors and other supplies to wire his digital camera to his cell phone. When Sophie was born, he sent her photo over a cellular connection to acquaintances around the globe.

A decade later, 41 percent of American households own a camera phone “and you can hardly find a phone without a camera anymore,” said Michael Cai, an industry analyst at Parks Associates.

It’s interesting to hear the inventor of the camera phone, now 55, speak of the ubiquity of his invention and the manner in which it is being used. My work on Online Dispute Resolution using mobile phones, or much of the work of Witness’ Human Rights Video Hub would not be possible without Philippe Kahn’s innovation.

Technorati Tags: Mobile Phone, Camera Phone, Mobiles, ODR

So the remedy for what ails our democracy is not simply better education (as important as that is) or civic education (as important as that can be), but the re-establishment of a genuine democratic discourse in which individuals can participate in a meaningful way—a conversation of democracy in which meritorious ideas and opinions from individuals do, in fact, evoke a meaningful response.

Fortunately, the Internet has the potential to revitalize the role played by the people in our constitutional framework. It has extremely low entry barriers for individuals. It is the most interactive medium in history and the one with the greatest potential for connecting individuals to one another and to a universe of knowledge. It’s a platform for pursuing the truth, and the decentralized creation and distribution of ideas, in the same way that markets are a decentralized mechanism for the creation and distribution of goods and services. It’s a platform, in other words, for reason. But the Internet must be developed and protected, in the same way we develop and protect markets—through the establishment of fair rules of engagement and the exercise of the rule of law. The same ferocity that our Founders devoted to protect the freedom and independence of the press is now appropriate for our defense of the freedom of the Internet. The stakes are the same: the survival of our Republic. We must ensure that the Internet remains open and accessible to all citizens without any limitation on the ability of individuals to choose the content they wish regardless of the Internet service provider they use to connect to the Web. We cannot take this future for granted. We must be prepared to fight for it, because of the threat of corporate consolidation and control over the Internet marketplace of ideas.

The danger arises because there is, in most markets, a very small number of broadband network operators. These operators have the structural capacity to determine the way in which information is transmitted over the Internet and the speed with which it is delivered. And the present Internet network operators—principally large telephone and cable companies—have an economic incentive to extend their control over the physical infrastructure of the network to leverage control of Internet content. If they went about it in the wrong way, these companies could institute changes that have the effect of limiting the free flow of information over the Internet in a number of troubling ways.

The democratization of knowledge by the print medium brought the Enlightenment. Now, broadband interconnection is supporting decentralized processes that reinvigorate democracy. We can see it happening before our eyes: As a society, we are getting smarter. Networked democracy is taking hold. You can feel it. We the people—as Lincoln put it, “even we here”—are collectively still the key to the survival of America’s democracy.

Read the full excerpt on Time, and buy the book here.

Technorati Tags: Internet, Democracy, Al Gore, ICT, Commons, Net Neutrality

Technology drives the forces of globalization. But when we replace our computers and flat-screens with the newest in high-tech cool, what happens to the hardware we throw away? Welcome to the digital dumping ground, where the poor make a living off other people’s spare parts.

View Foreign Policy’s revealing photo essay, Inside the Digital Dump. For more information on the digital divide, and how ICTs on occasion only exacerbate social inequality and violent conflict, visit the Digital Divide Network.

For other compelling photo essays from FP, click here.

Technorati Tags: ICT, Waste, Digital Divide