Galle Literary Festival – Photos from the panel on blogging

Can’t remember what we are laughing at (perhaps Nuri suggested that Indi and I were the most loved bloggers in the SL blogosphere) but Dominic Sansoni has a better image of Indi’s singular handling of the mike…

Translating a question / comment from someone in the audience aimed at Iresha Dilhani.

Both photos kindly provided by Olivia Bonnal.

My thoughts on the panel can be read here (with links to other posts on the panel including David Blacker’s trenchant critique of it that’s attracted a great deal of interesting discussion).

Mobitel 3.5G HSPA + Huawei E220 USB modem on Leopard – Download speeds and experience

Repeated calls to Dialog’s WiMax call centre, meeting them face to face at the Crescat Lobby in December and repeated SMS’s to the General Manager of Marketing failed to get me a Dialog WiMax connection that worked as promised. Clearly, Dialog is too busy giving “wings to equality” to care too much about what must surely be one of the most lackadaisical and essentially useless marketing and customer care divisions amongst telcos in Sri Lanka.

Thought of going with Mobitel’s 3.5G HSPA service today. Walked in at around 10.30am to their shop on Duplication Road with my Macbook Pro and asked them whether the Huawei  E220 USB modem they offered (approx. SLR 22,000 – why are they so damn expensive?) was compatible with it. By the looks on their faces, it was evident that this was first time someone had asked them this question. To cut a long story short, I was told that someone, somewhere at SLT had figured out a way to get it to work (Huawei doesn’t support OS X officially) and that the salesperson I spoke to, a very amicable and helpful bloke, would get back to me with details of it on Monday.

Came home, did a Google search and found this page (link updated on 2nd September 2008 as the earlier one was dysfunctional)  which gave all the details and links I needed to get the E220 fired up on OS X 1.05 Leopard.

Second trip to Mobitel at around 4.30pm lasted around half an hour, in which time I was able to get my 3.5G HSPA connection with a minimum of fuss. My N.I.C was required in addition to billing proof, that I said should be in their system since I am an SLT subscriber as well as an SLT ADSL user. Clearly, their databases aren’t linked. Anyway, drove home, plugged the Huawei USB modem into my MBP, followed the instructions here and was in around 3 minutes flat connected to the internet.

So here are the results of the first test using CNET’s Download Meter Speed Test.

Mobitel 3.5G HSPA – 219.4kbps
SLT ADSL Business Package – 145.3kbps 

Both tests were conducted back to back at around 6.20pm.

Admittedly, this is far lower than what the salesperson told me when I specifically asked him what the real speeds I should expect were. On my connection, which is a 1.5Mbps downlink and 384kbps uplink, he said actual speeds would be around 500 – 600kbps down and 384kbps up.

Haven’t tested upload speeds yet, but it’s been my experience with my SLT ADSL Business Package that uploading happens at a much faster sustained throughput than downloads.

With a measly 1.5Gb for combined uploads and downloads, I’ll still have to use SLT ADSL for the bulk of my media and advocacy work on the web and internet, but the HSPA connection does offer the advantage of higher upload speeds and the ability to connect to the web at “broadband” speeds even when the lights go off (I have a wireless router at home).

Would be great to hear the experience of anyone else out there who uses Mobitel’s HSPA either through their mobile or though a USB modem.

One final link for OS X users. If you get Mobitel’s HSPA connection or Dialog’s HSDPA mobile broadband on a Mac, get CheetahWatch. It’s brilliant.

UPDATE

To set up the Huawei modem under Debian / LINUX check out the post here.

Interview with Dan Gillmor on Citizen Journalism at GK3

Interview with Dan Gillmor at GKP GK III in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 13th December 2007. I moderated a panel titled Pushing the envelop: New Media, Citizens Journalism, Human Rights and Development that had Dan on it at the Global Knowledge Partnership, GK III conference.

Interviewer: Ahmed Shifan from Young Asia Television

Clip 1 – What is Citizen Journalism?

Clip 2 – How did you become involved in Citizen Journalism?

Clip 3 – Citizen Journalism seems to be a growing trend in the world. So what now is the role of the professional media?

Clip 4 – What about the credibility of reports that are posted by Citizen Journalists?

Clip 5 – What is the future for Citizen Journalism?

Public-Private Collaboration for Humanitarian Action – OCHA Guiding Principles

In the section titled Corporate branding vs. humanitarianism – The imperatives of sensitive aid delivery on my final and detailed post on Strong Angel III, I placed on record the concerns I had with private enterprise entering into humanitarian aid.

For example, I vividly recall the representative of an extremely well known GIS solutions provider at the end of SA III who challenged what I said about the problems of corporate branding in disasters by stating that they would simply not be interested in humanitarian aid were it not for the fact that visibly branding their involvement gave their services and products greater visibility.

I was extremely pleased to receive intimation from UN OCHA today of the release of a new document, Guiding Principles for Public-Private Collaboration for Humanitarian Action. As noted in their Press Release,

The text is the result of broad consultations which started with a first draft being circulated to the OCHA-IASC Working Group for comment in December 2006. The revised text takes into account additional comments from IASC partners, NGOs and private sector. The guidelines have been further reviewed during the WEF-OCHA meeting which took place on 28 June in Geneva.

The Guiding Principles will be launched this week, on 25 January 2008 at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland. We hope that this framework will reduce obstacles for private sector engagement in humanitarian action and encourage better public-private partnership.

Read the document in full here.

Thoughts on the launch of InSTEDD

InSTEDD works with universities, corporations, international health organizations, humanitarian NGOs and communities. Together, we work to identify or craft and then field-test technologies for better data collection and analysis, more efficient communications, and more effective response. InSTEDD will, for example, be adapting new social networking capabilities for humanitarian coordination, and testing inflatable satellite dishes able to be carried in a backpack.

InSTEDD’s mission is to discover, develop, test, deploy and share information about technologies that buy critical time. Through better disease detection and response times, outbreaks can be contained and possibly prevented. Through better disaster response, more lives can be saved. Through collaboration better answers can be found. 

Introduction

I was delighted to hear of the public launch of InSTEDD from Dr. Eric Rasmussen , its CEO, last week. The full name of the initiative is admittedly a mouthful to say out aloud and the acronym begs the pun that they should have chosen another instead of InSTEDD.

Jokes aside, in close upon a decade of applied research, writing and embedded work in the field of ICTs  for peacebuilding, (violent) crisis management and disaster response, InSTEDD, in its constitution and vision, is by far the most significant initiative I have encountered.  I have no doubt that we will look back at the launch of InSTEDD this year as a defining moment in the creation of innovative approaches to and frameworks of ICTs to prevent, mitigate and respond to crises – man made or natural.

I have known Eric Rasmussen and some of his team at InSTEDD from our work in the 2004 Tsunami response (download After the Deluge : InfoShare’s Response to the Tsunami for paper on this work) and from our use of Groove Virtual Office in the One Text initiative in Sri Lanka.  Subsequent and frequent email conversations with them on shared interests in using technology to support and strengthen everything from Stability, Security, Transition and Reconstruction (SSTR) and civilian – military interactions to better humanitarian aid systems taught me a great deal.

Team

Eric Rasmussen, Robert Kirkpatrick and Eduardo Jezierski are just three at InSTEDD who between them have more practical, field experience and knowledge of ICTs for crisis management that exceeds collective wisdom of many larger organisations engaged for far longer in similar work, including some agencies at the United Nations (as I have discovered over the past year for myself).

ICTs that really work

InSTEDD already showcases some innovative technologies on its website. Of note is the Directory application they’ve developed atop of Facebook.

As noted on the website,

In the future, we’ll add features, including integration across multiple social networking sites, support for other mapping applications (the current Facebook application uses Google Maps), enhanced access to the service via text messages, and the ability to take portions of your social network within the Directory completely offline. 

This application reminded me of an email I penned to Scott Rechler at the Ashoka Foundation way back in May 2005 in which I said in response to a fundamental problem the Foundation was facing at the time – the inability to locate Ashoka Fellows around the world on a sustained and regularly updated basis,

If you are searching for a technology hybrid that allows you to plot where fellows are in the world, what they are doing, who they are doing it with, what they are using, what they need and most importantly, want fellows to update this system as often as possible, nothing is simpler than using the one device that most fellows will have access to and use far more frequently than their PC’s – their mobile phone.

It is easy to create vernacular (Spanish, Sinhala, Tamil, French, German, Swahili etc) voice menu systems that easily get the information required from Fellows (from toll free numbers where possible) and then give them access to this information through a website that plots all this information in real time if necessary on GIS maps and other ways that help nourish each other’s work by a greater awareness of the Foundation’s impact in a given region or context.

Another idea could be to link this tool with a site such as Dopplr, to which I was introduced to by Dan Gillmor during GK III in Malaysia late last year.

The most exciting aspect of InSTEDD is their emphasis on in-situ, field development.

We have named our lab a ‘Field Lab’ to remind ourselves that InSTEDD will not be sitting back and designing in a perfect world. The people who will use our technology face complex challenges: extremes of temperature, weather, transportation, exhaustion and information overload. Our work will be useful only as long as we stay closely connected to real world conditions..

I only wish more organisations followed suit. It’s not always easy to follow and understand the language of expression on InSTEDD’s technology products site, but what is stated is simply (a long overdue) paradigm shift in the manner in which ICT solutions for crisis response is conceptualise, designed, tested and deployed.

As noted in their site,

We each have some experience in the field, and we’ve all been offered “solutions” that are nothing of the sort. Often those solutions are so fragile they won’t work in the field for more than a short while, and so InSTEDD has banned the word “solutions” from the office

This resonates fully with my own approach to and belief in ICTs for humanitarian aid and peacebuilding as articulated here – Complex Political Emergencies and humanitarian aid systems design

Some concerns with the Facebook Directory Application

Though the Directory application has a clear disclaimer that information on it will not be shared beyond that which is made possible by Facebook, it’s still the problem for me. Facebook is not a platform I trust with mission critical and highly confidential data and though I have begun a citizen journalism forum to complement Groundviews on it, I’m still to be convinced that it is a platform that demonstrates the potential for mission critical applications without compromising information security.

As a recent article published in the Guardian notes,

And does Facebook really connect people? Doesn’t it rather disconnect us, since instead of doing something enjoyable such as talking and eating and dancing and drinking with my friends, I am merely sending them little ungrammatical notes and amusing photos in cyberspace, while chained to my desk? A friend of mine recently told me that he had spent a Saturday night at home alone on Facebook, drinking at his desk. What a gloomy image. Far from connecting us, Facebook actually isolates us at our workstations. 

Final thoughts

Just as with InfoShare’s path-breaking human rights reporting tool, that once we develop it further this year we want to release free to the global human rights community, the essential reason I am so excited about the launch of InsTEDD is capture by Eric’s inaugural blog post as its CEO,

… I look forward to hearing from those who can help us design and build simple, robust, effective, and free tools for the humanitarian community.

I’ve been waiting for someone with the intellectual and financial wherewithal to say that for a very long time.

Galle Literary Festival – Thoughts from the panel on blogging

I was part of the panel at the recently concluded Galle Literary Festival that looked at whether blogs and bloggers can, or should, be taken seriously.

The panel was far removed from what I was asked to prepare for and expected. I thought Nuri Vitachchi took more time than necessary to introduce the panel (well over 10 minutes) especially since it evident to me that it was largely an audience who knew us through our writing. Besides, our mug shots and descriptions were printed in the GLF programme that everyone who attended got a copy of.

I also didn’t get any sense that Nuri had his pulse on the pulse of the Sri Lankan blogosphere that’s rich and varied and hardly of the tame and civil nature that coloured the general demeanour of the panel! It’s one thing to read the blogs of the panelists to get to know what they are about, quite another to place them in the larger context of the timbre of the blogosphere and mainstream party politics in Sri Lanka. Nuri was more or less familiar with our work and writing, but didn’t show a grasp of how we were perceived by others in the blogosphere and elsewhere, such as the media.

This to me makes a very strong case for the GLF organisers to think of a moderator who knows the SL blogosphere, politics and the traditional / new media interplay far better to conduct the panel on blogging next year. I am also disappointed because the tough questions to prepare us for the panel discussion, sent in advance by Nuri, were never asked. Some of them were:

• Blogs can be awful timewasters. But yours is different: Give us an example of a way your blog has changed people’s lives.
• Give us an example of the way your blog has changed your life.
• Blogs are all about the democratization of the media — true?
• How do you see the media changing — will newspapers disappear and blogs
  ever take over?
• Statistics show that more than 99.99 per cent of blogs produce no tangible
  revenues or measurable advantages to their writers. Doesn’t that mean that
  the overwhelming majority of bloggers are wasting their time?
• Blogs have trivial influence compared to traditional media. Newspapers sell
  hundreds of thousands of copies and TV shows are watched by millions. But
  most bloggers get a few hundred or a thousand hits. So why should we blog?
• Many bloggers are moving to networking sites — how do the two relate to
  each other?
• There are now more than 100 million blogs, it has been calculated. That
  means not many readers each! Comment.
• What was your most successful posting?
• Your least successful posting?
• Where’s the future of blogging?

These are questions that I’ve dealt with extensively on this blog (and frankly more than anyone else I know of in the Sri Lankan blogosphere and academia) and in my published research on new media and ICT that I would have loved to have had openly contested in public.

I also felt that, and not just of this panel but for many others I attended with around 5 to 6 people, the time allotted for the discussions was woefully inadequate. The really interesting questions that came at the end – on how we moderate comments, on how articles changed perspectives (or not) and what impact we really had really couldn’t be answered meaningfully. For example, Indi’s take on comment moderation (which is largely to let anything go) is for reasons we simply didn’t have time to go into detail completely different from the reasons behind and the style of comment moderation on Groundviews.

“I also got asked out quite a bit, once I got back to Colombo, and even had a one night stand on the strength of a comment I made on a blog forum. Blogs have made me angry, they’ve made me think, they’ve made me laugh, and they’ve got me laid. Blogs are to me everything that the blog session at the Galle Lit wasn’t. Stilted, boring, one-sided, and in the end, a waste of time, is not how I would describe the Sri Lankan blogosphere.”

David Blacker’s clearly getting more out of blogs and blogging than most of us are – but he does have a point. The job of the blogosphere, I read somewhere recently, is to be outrageously outspoken about everything. Bloggers are sometimes mistaken, but never in doubt.

And as many have pointed out, the panel could have addressed far more the interplay between traditional media and the content on blogs within the Sri Lankan context, since much has been said, written and done elsewhere on this topic. Rajpal Abeynaike, Editor of Lakbima, and his inane comments for example would have been an issue I would have loved to engage with him in public, as I am sure many others would have too judging by the number of times he was mentioned by those in the audience as the epitome of everything wrong with the traditional media’s approach to and understanding of blogs, bloggers and blogging.

All in all, kudos to the organisers for having a panel on blogs at a literary festival. It’s a brilliant idea that I hope will be improved upon and becomes a regular feature of GLF’s in the future.

UPDATE

David Blacker’s post on the event has some interesting discussion debating the pros and cons of the panel. In response to some of the points made there I said that,

Hi David,

It was good to see you again in Galle.

I’m just glad the thing happened and in a way it’s served it’s purpose. I’ve seen far more attention on the topic of the panel after it was held than before it. If the panel wasn’t up to scratch, I apologise as someone who was up there and partly responsible to wake you all up (I was after my second mohito and fifth gin and tonic for the day and all geared up for verbal abuse). But it’s tough to be provocative when the general thrust of the discussion meanders aimlessly, with the moderator a supine servant of inconsequence.

While more diverse views are desirable and should be encouraged for the next GLF, it’s difficult to be really representative without being tokenistic. More importantly, I believe GLF organisers / the moderator needs to look more at how those on the panel are located within the context of blogging and blogs in Sri Lanka than who is really on it.

What I found lacking was that Nuri didn’t really know how our respective blogs and writing was perceived in the larger SL blogosphere, traditional media and civil society – whether we perceived ourselves to be “serious” bloggers or not. Had he pushed us to respond to the questions he himself sent us in advance, or re-articulated some of the criticisms directed against us by fellow bloggers we all know of, I think we would have had a more interesting discussion and also fleshed out the faultlines between some of Indi’s attitudes and writing, my own and others on the panel.

I’m very happy that a literary festival recognises blogging as part and parcel of its proceedings. Having a fringe event is just that – a peripheral affair that is often shafted, literally and metaphorically, to a corner. I think there is merit in mainstreaming blogging into future GLFs. This is not to say that Rohan is wrong – having a parallel event to complement an official session on blogging that’s informal, boozy, with more tech so that people can interact with others not at the event and in real time, is a great idea.

Sanjana

Other posts on the panel:

• GLF : Were we taken seriously?
• Snapshots of the Galle Lit: #1 Bloggers Take Themselves Way Too Seriously
• Can Blogs Be Taken Seriously
• Can We Be Taken Seriously? – Part 27
• Galle Lit Fest

Ushahidi – Testimonies of violence in Kenya on the web

“Google Earth supposedly shows in great detail where the damage is being done on the ground. It occurs to me that it will be useful to keep a record of this, if one is thinking long-term. For the reconciliation process to occur at the local level the truth of what happened will first have to come out. Guys looking to do something – any techies out there willing to do a mashup of where the violence and destruction is occurring using Google Maps?”

Ory Okolloh, aka Kenyan Pundit, is who started it all.

Ushahidi is quite frankly an inspired and inspiring use of ICTs, including mobile phones, to bear witness to, record and facilitate action against the most dispiriting post-election violence in Kenya. It is one of the best mashups this author has seen dealing with the reporting and documenting of post-election violence and communal unrest, as well as a tool that facilitates international and local help to affected communities and victims.

I’ve passed this website around to a few people as the first meaningful application of an idea I first touted in 2006 talking about SMS, MMS and Google Maps mashups:

Rather than think of Citizen Media only as a text based initiative, mash-ups that match SMS location data with MMS / SMS messages onto a map, allowing users to browse through locations and messages related to that location, but also see an interactive timeline of the development of message clusters on a map, would have tremendous applications in mapping violence, confidence in peace, IDP movements and a whole raft of other issues.

As White African notes,

At the beginning of a project like this the technology portion can seem to be the hardest to get off the ground. In the end, it’s just the tool, and the hard work will come from people in the field who are working with NGO’s to keep this information accurate and to chronicle as much of it as they can..

The tool allows for those on the ground to send in situation reports and alerts via the web and mobile phones. At the same time, the Kenyan government was warning mobile phone users of possible prosecution if they use SMS to cause public unrest, “The Ministry of Internal Security urges you to please desist from sending or forwarding any SMS that may cause public unrest. This may lead to your prosecution.”

Others note the importance of going beyond technology to address the needs and concerns of those on the ground,

While blogging, emails, Twitter and the internet are doing a great deal of good getting the news out of what’s going on in Kenya to the rest of the world, I find myself troubled. You see, the communication that needs to be happening is at the grassroots level. Everyday Kenyans do not have access to any of these services. Let’s put our minds and capabilities towards solving real problems for people beyond the technologically elite.

While in principle agreeing that a technocratic approach to conflict resolution has its significant short-comings, I don’t agree with the sentiment above.

This suggests that the information presented on Ushahidi (Swahili for testimony) is somehow removed from the “real problems of real people”. As far as I can gather, Ushahidi is no work of fiction or a figment of the collective imagination of a few bloggers. By plotting violence, communal needs and actual incidents on a map, this becomes a vital record for the Kenyan State, NGOs and the international community including humanitarian agencies to know about and effectively plan for exigencies on the ground.

It is not just those who are connected (the “technologically (sic) elite”) who benefit, but all citizens, esp. those who don’t have access to technology. Those who choose to bear witness  and report violence may be individuals empowered to do so using ICTs ranging from PCs to mobiles, but important to recognise is that they do so on behalf of others as well. Technology facilitates actions and responses for ALL victims of (post-election) violence, not just those who send in the reports and who have mobiles or PCs.

I had the rare opportunity to meet and talk with Ory Okolloh at the Global Knowledge Partnership in Malaysia late last year and wish her the best in this and all her ventures to bring about an end to violence in her country.

For another idea that could be helpful in Ory’s case, take a look at this. For a more detailed account of the evolution of Ushahidi, read Global Voices Online.

Given the intimate place of cellphones in our lives, why do we get rid of them so quickly?

That’s a question an article in the NY Times poses and has an interesting answer for,

“Somewhere during the last 100 years, we learned to find refuge outside the species, in the silent embrace of manufactured objects,” Jonathan Chapman, a young product designer and theorist at the University of Brighton, writes in his book “Emotionally Durable Design.” … “The mobile phone occupies a kind of glossy, scratch-free world,” he says. Whereas a pair of jeans gains character over time, a phone does no such thing. “As soon you purchase it, you can only watch it migrating further away from what it is you want — a glossy, scratch-free object.” You might leave the plastic film over the display for a few days, just so you can take it off later and “give yourself a second honeymoon with the phone,” he says. But ultimately everything that first attracted you to it only deteriorates. You start looking at it differently. “It’s made of some kind of sparkle-finished polymer and it’s got some decent curves on it, but so what? The intimacy comes more from the fact that, within that hand-held piece of plastic, exists your whole world” — your friends’ phone numbers, your digital pictures, your music — and that stuff can be easily transferred to a new one. So you “fall out of love” with the phone, Chapman says.

The Afterlife of Cellphones also looks at the recycling of mobile phones and issues of e-waste and the dumping of inappropriate and often environmentally hazardous IT equipment in the developing world.

Also read Inside the Digital Dump that’s a photo essay from last year that complements the content in this article.

Time magazine on Second Life

Time Magazine recently ran a piece on five of the worst websites that mentioned Second Life as one of them. Not entirely sure why – since Second Life isn’t a website, but the article begins:

We’re sure that somebody out there is enjoying Second Life, but why?

and ends,

The corporate world’s embrace of the place as a venue for staff meetings and training sessions does seem to lend Second Life a layer of legitimacy. But maybe it’s a case of some CEOs trying too hard to be hip. 

Ouch.

But perhaps it’s time we recognised Second Life for what it is – (yet another) software platform that fails to leverage virtual reality for serious purposes and also that it has only hitherto been propped up by a multimedia marketing campaign that now shows signs of failing.

And yet there are still some of us who will continue to think that Second Life actually provides scope for more meaningful interactions to take place, say in the world of public diplomacy, peacebuilding or political activism. I’m not entirely convinced, but I would like to believe that perhaps Second Life is ahead of its time. What’s cool today is augmented reality on mobile devices, which seem to hold far more potential in my mind than virtual reality on PCs.

The problem with mobile phones that grab our attention

Our opportunity: remembering to find the OFF switch on our devices, now and then, and tune in to the present with engaged attention.

I believe attention is the most powerful tool of the human spirit. We can enhance or augment our attention with practices like meditation and exercise, diffuse it with technologies like email and Blackberries or alter it with pharmaceuticals. In the end, though, we are fully responsible for how we choose to use this extraordinary tool.

Linda Stone’s recent post, Fine Dining with Mobile Phones is deeply instructive for the design of ICT mechanisms for peacebuilding and is linked to a post by Ken Yamosh I pointed to in 2007.

For example, the series of ads for the Blackberry shown on Sri Lankan TV (done in India I believe) give the impression that one has more time for family and leisure when one gets a Blackberry. Not so. You become a hostage to work and what is more, raise expectations of quick responses even on weekends and at night. When these expectations are unmet, frustration builds up along with stress to meet them in the future.

Problem is, switching off is easier said than done.