ICT for Peacebuilding (ICT4Peace)

I read Colin Rule’s post and the article which it links to just after I read Java’s missive on the amount of abuse some of us face on (Sri Lankan) blogs. Colin and I have been associated with initiatives to introduce a modicum of civility into online discussions, a topic that interests me deeply.

This is also not the first time I’ve responded to a post by Java on this topic of online abuse in the SL blogosphere.

On the other hand, there was the recent story of someone killing himself because of content published online and ways that actually encourage people to be spiteful on social networking sites like Facebook.

I guess where I disagree with Paul Graham’s article is how it ends - “Most people don’t really enjoy being mean; they do it because they can’t help it.“

That may well be true in some cases. But most, if not all the instances of hate speech and abuse I face daily in response to what I write or edit are by those who engage in such behaviour by careful deliberation and choice.

For just one example out of many I have faced, I find it impossible to believe an Editor of a leading mainstream English newspaper in Sri Lanka couldn’t help but write this. Clearly, there are those in Sri Lanka who use a language of hate and harm to hide their own significant personal insecurities, fears and parochial aims. Perhaps like Java we should feel sorry for them,

“In the end, however, I guess we should feel sorry for these folks, as the dirt they dish out must fill their heads a whole lot – and that can’t be very pleasant for them.”

Also read:
A conversation with Indi Samarajiva
The end of Moju - But conversations go on…
Blogging Code of Conduct: Does one size fit all?

Statement on Respectful Online Communication

Bullard on blogging: How not to be civil online
Beyond O’Reilly’s online civility dictum: Fostering healthy debate on the web and internet

Mr. Hirsch said that the idea for TXTmob evolved from conversations about how police departments were adopting strategies to counter large-scale marches that converged at a single spot.

While preparing for the 2004 political conventions in New York and Boston, some demonstrators decided to plan decentralized protests in which small, mobile groups held rallies and roamed the streets.

“The idea was to create a very dynamic, fluid environment,” Mr. Hirsch said. “We wanted to transform areas around the entire city into theaters of dissent.”

Tad Hirsch, who created a system that allowed users to form networks and transmit SMS messages to hundreds or thousands of mobile telephones called TXTmob, received a subpoena to hand over all remaining records of communications using the system in August 2004 to organise protests against the Republican Convention.

Kind of thing you’ll expect to hear about in Sri Lanka or Zimbabwe.

In the Philippines, large scale demonstrations organized via cell phones and SMS were a major factor in forcing President Joseph Estrada to resign, thus bringing about change without large-scale violence. And this is the most known example amongst many others.

Question is whether these measures to interrogate new media / technologies with the aim of vitiating their subversive power can really, over the long term, make any real impact in a world where tech innovation is growing too fast for the parochialism of Governments to contain.

So there’s a new International Justice Centre in Second Life. Another great idea geared to service the few who can use Second Life. 100% useless for most of us who cannot.And let’s not forget what Time Magazine had to say of Second Life.

I am yet to be entirely convinced that Second Life repositories of knowledge and information are somehow more desirable and worth supporting than say web based portals. As the video from the event shows, the high profile launch was sparesely attended and even featured one streaker. I guess this is activism and awareness raising for some.

I don’t want to be too negative. For those who can use SL, it’s immersive and interesting to be surrounded by content on the workings of the International Criminal Court, the world’s first international human rights tribunal, designed to investigate and try those accused of committing some of the worst violations of human rights, including genocide, mass rape and war crimes.

Of course, the point is that the country in which the International Justice Centre is located in is also a country that does not recognise the ICC. The United States of America was one of only 7 nations (joining China, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Qatar and Israel) to vote against the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court in 1998.Wonder if the IJC wil stimulate any discussions in this regard.

To their credit, Global Kids has engaged in discussions on how best to use the new IJC in SL. Among the suggestions and ideas that came out of the forums:

• Education about the International Criminal Court should be the first priority. Many people don’t know what the ICC is, or have misconceptions about it.
• Integrate educational content into the environment. Immersive experiences can galvanize people to action.
• Aesthetics matter.
• Virtual demonstrations can have real world impact.
• There’s already lots of activity on social issues, but dispersed across the grid.
• Bringing real world events into SL is attractive to people because it enables them to attend events that they normally could not, and the backchannel conversations enhance the experience.
• It’s difficult to demonstrate and measure real world impact of virtual builds and experiences.
• Hold mock trials with different teams of university students
• People want to have fun. Integrate entertaining activities to draw people, like music festivals, art shows, etc.

These are vital, urgent and significant goals and I sincerely hope that they succeed in all this. However, living in a country where human rights abuses are rife and with my own significant experience in using technology to support peacebuilding, I have my doubts about using SL (and this is the vital point) to achieve some of these goals which may well be done better, cheaper, for a wider audience, in a more accessible and sustained manner, in more languages and with more interactivity and responsiveness.

I guess it’s revealing that most of the social and political activists who propound the use of SL as a viable platform to galvanise action, even in the real world, come from the US. And perhaps I am wrong to judge them by my own reality and access to technology. My concern however is that some of these initiative tend to get more than a little carried away by their own hype and forget completely just how atypical it is to have a PC and Internet connection able to run SL.

That said, what I found the most inteteresting in the video of the IJC launch above was not the event itself, but the art of defiance showcased in it. The sculpture with cameras for example reminded me of every single time I’ve visited Britain where even the Queens corgis seem to have CCTV cameras up their royal posterior. It is after all the country with the most amount of CCTV’s though it doesn’t seem to be doing much good. It’s great that people with a desire for social and political transformation are using all the tools possible in virtual domains like SL to raise awareness on real and vital issues such as Darfur, Myanmar and China and even the gross human rights violations by the US itself.

In Avatars and Politics: Using Second Life for political activism? I point to articles that are essential reading for anyone who is interested in the larger implications of initaitives such as the IJC.

I have no doubt that web and Internet activism influence real world change. Indeed, it is increasingly the case that the web and Internet are the only domains and last refuge of those who are at risk and persecuted.  But experiments with SL in countries like Sri Lanka have been a failure, simply because we do not have the necessary connectivity to use it to even a fraction of its potential.

And that’s a real pity.

Also read:

Second Life for Humanitarian Aid and Peacebuilding?
Strong Angel Island videos - From the Strong Angel III sim for Second Life
A Second Life for Journalism?
Second Life - Business, ODR, Language and Peace
Online Violence : Take 2

“…future monitoring efforts should make sure that precise locations are recorded first time. So, here are two questions for our five or so readers: what’s working well on this issue in the real world; and, what’s the most practical way to manage information about electoral boundaries?”

Some thoughts of the cuff, as one avid reader of Paul Currion’s blog and to a post that poses the question above.

• It’s not always possible, in fact rarely so that even today HR activists can get precise coordinates of a violation or incident. The accuracy of geo-location depends on anything from media reports to first or second hand accounts by witnesses to the violation.

• Place names are a problem for any system that records geo-location in English alone. In Sri Lanka, while most major cities and town have standard and well recognised names in English, the smaller villages as well as IDP and refugee camps have no standard spelling in English. This raises the real challenge of multiple records dealing with the same incident, persons or place. (The HR system we developed for Sri Lanka works in the swabhasha and we are working on building semantic intelligence further into the system wherein it will flag records that it feels are duplicates).

• Even with just place names, it’s possible to do visualisations that demonstrate patterns of HR violations amongst certain identity groups, in certain regions and in response to certain events or processes. These patterns, based on rough yet verified incidents, can prove very powerful instruments through which awareness and civil actions can be engendered and sustained to strengthen and proctect HR.

• Current crop of GIS location devices are too conspicuous. They can’t be hidden easily and HR activists lugging them around in war zones is simply a non-starter.

• Not always necessary to have precise place names. It’s a given that there have been more HR violations in cities in the embattled North and East of Sri Lanka than, say, for any city in the South over the 25 years of conflict. You may need precise geo-location if you have more than circumstantial evidence to take a specific perpertrator to court locally or internationally, but for most purposes of HR advocacy, awareness raising and protection, just having information of HR violations over time at a provincial level is better than none at all.

• Most of the really accurate geo-spatial datasets reside with government. If the government itself is a significant violator of HR, as is the case in Sri Lanka today, that pretty much means that these datasets are inaccessible for NGOs and civil society organisations working on HR protection. This means that they have to rely on what may be less acurrate publicly available datasets. With most donors unaware of the vital importance of supporting information services to back-stop HR advocacy, many NGOs can’t afford the significant costs associated with the licensing of commercially available GIS datasets. And with all sorts of varying ways of identifying the same or similar locations - from P-Codes to Post Codes, from old names to new names, from merged Provinces to de-merged Provinces and the entire relocation of towns and cities - what you really need are multiple layers (translucency) on all maps that indicate location data.

• Again, place means different things at different times and in difference instances. For some cases, just knowing that an incident happened in whatever place suffices. In other cases, it is of vital important to know the exact location of the place where the incident occured.

• Finally, as an aside, for myself and others engaged in HR strengthening through the use of technology, these are not just academic questions - they deal with real lives and a bloody reality. Some of our programmers, unused to the gruesome descriptions of a few real records they entered at the initial testing stages of our HR advocacy platform, had to take breaks from work to deal with their feelings. Our system was conceptualised, development and deployed to actively respond to a context where activists who use it are at high risk of losing their lives just for speaking out on HR abuses. We could have gone for the perfect solution or one that meaningfully helped them do their work and responded to urgent and vital needs in a manner robust enough to hold flagrant violators or HR accountable for their actions. Our choice was clear.

He told me that they have a house now and that he set up the Internet. Do you blog, I asked? No, he said. Do they censor what you write? Yes. They didn’t used to but then some guy ruined it. They read everything, and if you have the word “bomb” in a post or an email, they’ll make a copy of it and if you so much as say the word bomb on the phone, they’ll cut the line.

From a post on unpegged comes a quote that goes to show the extent to which the US military is still clamping down on the information produced and coming out of war zones such as Iraq.

As I noted in a post when this was reported in Wired magazine last year:

Aside from the excellent critique on Wired, this latest move quite clearly ridicules the SSTR initiatives fomented by the Dept. of Defense Directive 3000.05, and is an absurd reaction by those who quite clearly do not understand that information invariably finds ways to break free of regressive frameworks that seek to contain it.

The New York Times features an interactive info-graphic that is a sombre reminder of the human cost to the US Armed Forces in Iraq. From J.T. Aubin in 2003 to David Stelmat a few days ago, the first tab of the special section is devoted to all in the Army who have died in Iraq, that is now a shade under 4,000.

The second tab is an interactive timeline of the deaths. The two invasions of Falluja alone, we learn, cost over 400 deaths. Over half of those dead are between 18-24 and the majority from the US Army.

This powerful visualisation is a visceral reminder that wars today, fought and reported about like computer games most of the time, is still a costly, brutal affair - sometimes necessary perhaps, but always bloody. I wonder though how many people will change, or at the very least, register a slight shift in their opinion of the war in Iraq by looking at this. Compelling it may be, but I somehow feel that those in support of the war will look at it and use it to suggest that all these deaths should not be in vain, whereas those opposed to the war will look this as grim markers of of a war that has done little or nothing to help their government’s soi-disant war on terror.

What the NY Times significantly does not show are the numbers of private security contractors and mercenaries killed in Iraq. As noted in this article written a little over a year ago:

The dangers faced by contractors working in Iraq were laid bare last night by new figures showing hundreds of civilians employed by the Pentagon alone have been killed in the country since 2003. In a graphic exposé of a hitherto invisible cost of the war in Iraq, it emerged nearly 800 civilians working under contract to US defence chiefs have been killed and more than 3,300 hurt doing jobs normally handled by the military.

The casualty figures, gathered by the Associated Press, make it clear the US Defence Department’s count of more than 3,100 military dead does not tell the whole story. 

In Sri Lanka it’s clearly a different story. As Iqbal Athas notes:

“If you add up all the figures given by the government from the beginning of the separatist war until now, it would have wiped out the population of the north twice over,” says Iqbal Athas, consultant editor and defence correspondent of the Colombo Sunday Times and correspondent for Jane’s Defence Weekly.

“Similarly if one were to adopt the figures put out by the Tamil Tiger rebels, that would have depleted the ranks of the military considerably.”

Picture that.

Presentation made to class of Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) students at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in March 2008 on the invitation of Dan Rainey.

“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.”

Read my article in full here.

An  article in The Economist highlights the pitfalls of social networking platforms and technologies today and their possible evolution in the future.

“We will look back to 2008 and think it archaic and quaint that we had to go to a destination like Facebook or LinkedIn to be social,” says Charlene Li at Forrester Research, a consultancy. Future social networks, she thinks, “will be like air. They will be anywhere and everywhere we need and want them to be.” No more logging on to Facebook just to see the “news feed” of updates from your friends; instead it will come straight to your e-mail inbox, RSS reader or instant messenger. No need to upload photos to Facebook to show them to friends, since those with privacy permissions in your electronic address book can automatically get them.

The problem with today’s social networks is that they are often closed to the outside web. The big networks have decided to be “open” toward independent programmers, to encourage them to write fun new software for them. But they are reluctant to become equally open towards their users, because the networks’ lofty valuations depend on maximising their page views—so they maintain a tight grip on their users’ information, to ensure that they keep coming back. As a result, avid internet users often maintain separate accounts on several social networks, instant-messaging services, photo-sharing and blogging sites, and usually cannot even send simple messages from one to the other. They must invite the same friends to each service separately. It is a drag.

Dataportability seems to be a key initiative in addressing the information silos of social networks as they stand today noted above. See their fascinating video here or from below.

There is a delightful comment by a “Customs Official” on Lirneasia’s blog today that may, tragically, not be far from the truth as Rohan alludes to earlier in the thread.

Censorship is growing in Sri Lanka. It’s good to sometimes laugh about it since it helps to countenance a more stark reality.