ICT for Peacebuilding (ICT4Peace)

Chamath’s comment prompted me to upload a video of browsing Vikalpa on my Nokia 3110c. The video shows me using the 3110c’s built in web browser over a GPRS connection to view content in Sinhala and Tamil UNICODE. Nothing was installed on the phone by way of fonts or software on the phone in order for the text to render as accurately as it does. Vikalpa was made mobile friendly using MoFuse.

I’ll be interested to find what other phones support vernacular UNICODE rendering. When I tried this on other Nokia models (incl. the high end N-series) and other phones, bought from outside of Sri Lanka, the fonts simply did not render properly.

And the answer to Chamath’s question is yes, the 3110c natively supports Sinhala and Tamil SMS messaging, though I’ve never figured out how to type out a message in Sinhala. The entire menu system can also run natively in Sinhala and Tamil (and some Indian languages incl. Hindi). The Sinhala script is very legible and clear, more accurate in rendering in fact than Sinhala on my Mac.

A group of students at Stanford University in the heart of Silicon Valley have turned their attention towards a unique course that blends popular culture with the more time-worn principles of psychology.

The Psychology of Facebook is the brainchild of Professor B J Fogg, a pioneering persuasion psychologist who founded the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford.

“What we learn here isn’t just relevant to Facebook. The psychology that drives Facebook relates to other online success stories, including those blockbusters yet to be invented.”

“There is something enduring about what we are studying,” he declares, “whereas if you are learning how to programme a Facebook application, that then could change in 30 days from now. In fact it probably will; so that knowledge breaks.”

Read Learning what makes Facebook published on the BBC today.

A while ago, Sri Lanka’s Ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Dayan Jayatilleke left a comment on this blog in response to a post that looked at the investigation into the website of a registered Tamil political party in Sri Lanka well known to be partial to the LTTE, the Tamil National Alliance. In it he suggests that he was in favour of the judgement in Spain that banned Herri Batasuna, insinuating the same should be followed in the case of the TNA in Sri Lanka.

While jury’s out on that issue in Sri Lanka, Dayan may be elated at the news of the EU’s recent decision that makes “public provocation to commit a terrorist offence, recruitment and training for terrorism punishable behaviour, also when committed through the Internet” now a punishable offence. The EU decision notes that:

Individuals disseminating terrorist propaganda and bomb-making expertise through the Internet- can therefore be prosecuted and sentenced to prison insofar as such dissemination amounts to public provocation to commit terrorist offences, recruiting for terrorism or training for terrorism and is committed intentionally.

In these cases, courts or administrative authorities will be able to request internet service providers to remove this information according to national rules implementing the Directive on electronic commerce.

The Press Release of the EU decision ends of a self-congratulatory note, stating that it is “an excellent example of how the use of the Internet for terrorist purposes can be dealt with in a way which respects the freedom of speech.”

Bloody good and I mean that without the slightest reservation or hesitation. Terrorism must be prevented, curtailed and stopped for all the obvious reasons.

My question is what happens when States - member States of the UN - are those responsible for the acts of terrorism? Do the same rules apply then to content they post on their websites?

Funnily enough, the firm favourites du jour of the regime in Sri Lanka that include, inter alia, Russia, China and Iran all have rather peculiar attitudes towards inconvenient truths on the Internet and web. China’s attacks against Darfur activists this year, Russia’s epic attacks against Estonia last year and Iran’s fight against “immorality” on the web, that includes political content, suggest very much that it’s not only the terrorists the EU has in mind that are using the web and the Internet.

Cerno’s post encouraged me to go back to what I had written mid-last year on the lack of Sinhala language UNICODE support on Macs. At the time I was on Tiger, Safari 2 and Firefox 2. Here’s the same page as before on the new browsers:

Click for larger image - Safari 3 on left, FF 3 Beta 5 on right

Clearly, things haven’t improved with Safari 3, Firefox 3 Beta 5 and Leopard.

I’ve download several UNICODE Sinhala font files, including Sarasavi from the University of Colombo Language Technology Research Laboratory. I’ve used their online font conversion.

Yet nothing gets the rendering quite right on Leopard, though what I see is strangely much better than what’s rendered on Cerno’s Mac.

Anyway, I still have to Bootcamp it into Vista whenever I have to do any serious work with Sinhala.

Here’s a tip for Windows users - the rather unimaginatively EnSiTip English Sinhala popup dictionary extension for Firefox, which under Windows is really quite brilliant and I found on the LTRL blog.

WARNING: For folks who are so advanced with technology, I would have imagined that LTRL would have had the good sense to optimise images for the web. But no. The LTRL blog has gems like 2Mb+ JPG images which make the page a nightmare to load. Just don’t try it over SLT ADSL on a bad day…

In short, us Mac users are still out of luck. Which is such a pity, since in every other respect, Macs trump Windows hands down (my two year old Dual Core Macbook Pro gave a Windows Vista Experience rating higher than a Core2Duo Sony Vaio bought earlier this year).

Are ICTA / LTRL listening?

Kottu’s nearly all in Sinhala today because of the Sinhala UNICODE blog marathon.

Good stuff. In 2005, when Voices of Reconciliation was one of the first (if not the first) UNICODE standards based tri-lingual websites, questions were asked and accusations made that we were using / promoting a technology that had no future.

It’s good to see Sinhala UNICODE come of age.

For a PDF of Kottu today, click here.

For a very high res (and very long!) screenshot of Kottu today with aggregated content largely in Sinhala, click here.

I first wrote about the targeting of bloggers in Egypt two years ago. Things seemed to have got worse. There’s stuff happening in Egypt today that we need to be mindful of. Here are a couple of stories that are a must read to get up to speed:

• Christian Science Monitor’s prescient article on the blogging in Egypt from way back in 2005 that is still useful to read
• Global Voices Online has excellent coverage of recent events. See here and here. 
• Time Magazine’s analysis of why the regime is cracking down on Egyptian bloggers
• BBC story from February last year on the lack of freedom of expression in Egypt resulting in a blogger being jailed.
• As this AFP story notes:

“The call to strike had little impact because the young people who made it have neither experience, networks nor a popular powerbase,” said renowned political analyst Mohammed Kamel al-Sayyed. ”But you mustn’t underestimate it because it’s a first, set against the background of general discontent in the country,” he told AFP. Today’s younger generation recognises opposition forces other than the umbrella protest movement Kefaya whose popular demonstrations calling for Mubarak to step down grabbed the spotlight in 2005. Importantly, the Internet also provides a forum for anti-establishment surfers to disagree with each other. ”We didn’t manage to show ourselves, but the strike worked,” Rihan al-Kadi said on Facebook, to which Yahia Ewadah Hassun replied “No, the strike was also a failure, but that was because of the police.”

The UNESCAP 2007 Statistical Yearbook for Asia and the Pacific has some interesting figures on the growth of ICTs in general and mobile phone telephony in particular in the region.

Sri Lanka has more mobile phone subscribers per 100 population than Pakistan and India. Other interesting statistics include:

• Mobile phone growth is stifling fixed line growth across the region, but particularly in low income countries, SAARC member countries and least developed countries in the region (e.g. 97% of all phones in Cambodia are mobiles)
• Internet use is growing, though the statistics don’t register wireless broadband internet access (via mobiles).
• The Maldives, unsurprisingly, has the highest number of cellular subscriber per 100 population with Sri Lanka coming in second in South Asia.
• SAARC member states and least developed countries show the highest growth for mobile phone subscribers in the Asian and Pacific country / area groupings noted in the report. 

Not sure why in the report Sri Lanka doesn’t register any growth in (wired) broadband subscribers from 2004 - 2006, though it does show an increase in the number of Internet users. I thought SLT alone would have given out a fair number of ADSL subscriptions over the past two years.

It will be interesting to see the data that comes in for 2007 / 2008 on how the introduction and growing usage of wireless broadband connectivity (3G and WiMax) over mobiles and PCs impacts these figures.

For me, these stats are vital determinants in favour of strengthening and promoting citizen journalism and user generated content in the region.

The renowned Columbia Journalism Review has an interesting short article on the power of citizen journalism even under repressive regimes. Blogging the Coup by Dustin Roasa notes,

The debate over citizen journalism in the U.S. tends to dwell, tediously, on whether citizen reporters can supplant, rather than complement, the professional press. But in many countries around the world, where the press is under government control, corrupt, or simply incompetent, citizen journalists may be the only source of information that is reasonably credible. Without citizen reporters in Myanmar, for instance, it would have been impossible to know what was happening during anti-government demonstrations last year, while in the Middle East, bloggers have become a viable alternative to the heavily censored, state-run media.

I can fully identify with the switch from English to the vernacular that some bloggers in Thailand did in order to address an wider audience. In Sri Lanka, CJ in the vernacular is not just for a domestic audience. The readership and viewers of Vikalpa and Vikalpa Video respectively, numbering in their tens of thousands, come from the Sri Lanka diaspora in addition to those living in Sri Lanka. This is why in their own small way, Groundviews, VOR Radio and the two vernacular CJ sites noted earlier have become important sources of alternative narratives on the status quo in Sri Lanka - stuff won’t get published or broadcast in the local media.

From using mobiles to generate content on the peace process, human rights and democracy (a first in Sri Lanka) to exploring revenue models for those who generate mobile phone content, I have written extensively on the growth of citizen journalism in Sri Lanka and its potential to complement traditional media. Sure enough, there are challenges to citizen journalism in Sri Lanka, but as I noted over a year ago in an article published on Open Democracy,

There is no guarantee that Groundviews will foster a new social movement in support of peace. There is no guarantee it will secure peace, in any greater degree, on the ground and in the north and east of Sri Lanka, where it is needed most. There is no guarantee that hate speech will not take over the timbre of online debate. The more Groundviews is successful in fostering new voices in support of peace, the more it will become a target of concerted attacks to prevent its growth.

And it is here that our greatest challenge lies. Not in the technology itself, but in the creation of a social and political movement - one fostered by citizen journalism mediated through new media and new technology - that is able to maintain, in some small way, the hope of a just and lasting peace in Sri Lanka.

This hope fuels Groundviews, not as a simplistic magic bullet against terrorism, but as an increasingly important vehicle for ordinary citizens to record their views in support of democracy as the only way through which terrorism can be effectively combated.

An article on the future of e-government from the US proclaims that Web 2.0 will “transform service delivery, make smarter policies, flatten silos and, most importantly, reinvigorate democracy” and facilitate a shift “from monolithic government agencies to pluralistic, networked governance Webs that fuse the knowledge, skills and resources of the masses.”

Phew!

There are undoubtably great examples of e-government working meaningfully to empower citizens (and even non citizens). Two diverse examples are the British Government e-petition service and the US Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) blog, Evolution of Security. The British Government’s e-petition service statistics are interesting:

• Over 29,000 petitions have been submitted, of which over 8,500 are currently live and available for signing, over 6,000 have finished and 14,601 have been rejected outright.
• There have been over 5.8 million signatures, originating from over 3.9 million different email addresses.

In Sri Lanka however, e-gov remains just a great idea.

The only e-gov website I’ve personally used is that of the Department of Immigration and Emigration to renew my passport. Of the others, the less said the better. The Government of Sri Lanka Official Web Portal is a rather sad affair. The standard of English across the site is atrocious - but I’ll let that pass (try reading their “Descliamer” (sic)). E-Gov in Sri Lanka should after all be tailored first to the needs of those who speak Sinhala and Tamil. But tellingly, the site is only available in Sinhala and English - so much for constitutionally guaranteed language rights!

Worse, the site is replete with bad links and erroneous information. Try for example clicking on Disasters and Emergencies. . The NGO link has a hilarious misspelling (or maybe it was deliberate). The Health and Nutrition section has a link to yet another portal (a portal linking to a portal - and I thought e-gov was about efficiency?) which does not work. And just check out the link to Traditional Medicines of Sri Lanka (even though there actually is a Department of Ayurveda that the portal is blissfully unaware of). The list goes on. Sadly, the most useful website of them all - that of the Government Information Centre - is hidden behind a button called GIC - 1919, which makes sense only after you know what 1919 and GIC stands for. You know there’s something seriously wrong with e-gov when the humanitarian section of official website of the President of Sri Lanka has only a single mention of a human (though one wonders whether the person mentioned also fell into the animal welfare directives of the Mahinda Chintana).

In sum, e-gov in Sri Lanka is a mirror image of government - it simply does not work as it should. The problem here is one that Anthony Williams points to as well. “Single-window services constitute one-way information flows to the citizen. In today’s social-media environment, these one-way conversations fail to build credibility and trust in government. More importantly, they fail to harness the knowledge, skills and resources that could be tapped by government by using a more collaborative approach to service delivery and policy-making.”

The question then arises as to whether governments are really interested in this kind of two-way conversation with its citizens or indeed have the capacity (human, technical and financial) to moderate and fuel such discussions all the official languages of a country. Sri Lanka’s regime certainly isn’t. There’s simply no political will to create, to sustain and act upon any information that embarrass the incumbent regime. Forget about “G-Webs” as Anthony calls them - in Sri Lanka e-gov will only ever be a one way, top down, static website driven monologue. It’s always about “delivery” but never about feedback, participatory decision making, transparency or accountability - never mind what ICTA and the World Bank would have us believe.

Why for example is it that the monumental corruption in government as brought out by the COPE Reports fail to register on the Official Website of the Government of Sri Lanka? Try searching for “Cope Reports” and the answer is revealing. (Confusingly, Official Website of the Government of Sri Lanka is not the same as the Government of Sri Lanka Official Web Portal - so much for non-duplication of services).

I guess over 2 billion rupees lost to corruption in Government is really outside the remit of e-gov, save for the website of the Commission to Investigate Allegations of Bribery and Corruption (which also does not operate in Tamil). Mind you, this is the same government that then has the gall to accuse of NGOs of non-transparency and financial mismanagement.

From the non-functional and dysfunctional to the blatantly racist, Sri Lanka’s so called e-gov framework is a mess that does not in any way hold government more responsive, accountable and transparent to citizens.

The Daily Mirror carries an advertisement today to elicit photos shot by citizen journalists called “Informant”. Despite the growing challenges to media in general and citizen journalism in particular, it’s heartening to see traditional media (finally) in Sri Lanka waking up the potential of mobile phone totting citizens as first witnesses of certain events. 

As an aside, Daily Mirror’s website is the most technically evolved of all print media in Sri Lanka, offering things like RSS feeds which no one else does. A banner ad at the time of writing claims that the site gets 2 million hits a day, which is not really a useful metric to determine how many people read the content on the site, but I don’t doubt for a moment that thousands visit their site a day. Nothing much in the way of citizen generated content yet, but this should change in the future if “Informants” is successful.

Their blogging centre however is an unmitigated disaster - it looks a complete mess and the content is a jarring combination of Daily Mirror Editorials and individuals pitching in with their thoughts. The website itself has other flaws - the fonts and font sizes are terrible, the layout is atrocious, you cannot print anything easily and just try visiting the archives and then going to any other page (after a few visits to the archive it gets really fun).

Doesn’t anyone visit the NY Times website and learn about how it’s really done? More importantly, doesn’t anyone in the Daily Mirror actually visit their site?