FrontlineSMS on Facebook

ICT for Peacebuilding 2 Minutes

FrontlineSMS Facebook Group

Ken Banks, whose life and work I admire a great deal, recently emailed me about joining the FrontlineSMS Supporters Group on Facebook. I am yet to be convinced that Facebook is, beyond the hype, truly capable as a serious collaboration and socio-political activist site, but I along with others have had to ditch initial scepticism in the face of the exponential growth of users on Facebook (and its multi-billion dollar valuation and Microsoft stake).

All this aside, what grabbed my attention the most was what Ken told me in his email:

“I believe there is great potential in leveraging the Facebook community to connect them directly with NGOs in the field, rather than via a head office in London, New York or wherever. I have a number of plans on how to do this, some of which are pretty exciting and innovative”

He goes further in a recent blog post on the FrontlineSMS Facebook group, where he avers:

Maybe one key advantage of Facebook is that once you’re registered you can show your support for multiple causes or interest groups with a couple of simple mouse clicks.

This thinking seems to be in line with a recent article in the New York Times on how social networking technologies such as Facebook are helping to alleviate poverty.

What do you think? Fact or fiction?

Having started my own Facebook Group on ICT4Peace I’ll be looking forward to Ken’s ideas and innovation on how best to leverage communities of practice on Facebook and also to the development of FrontlineSMS, that I’m very keen to deploy in the field in Sri Lanka in support of a number of initiatives ranging from Citizens Journalism to human rights monitoring and reporting.

Also read these posts on FrontlineSMS:

And these on mobiles supporting and strengthening socio-political transformation and peacebuilding:

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.

Published