Micro-blogging election violence and malpractices in Sri Lanka

ICTs in general 1 Minute

Set up a quick and dirty way to get updates from Vikalpa’s islandwide network of citizen journalists on election violence and malpractices in the Eastern Province.

See Vikalpa for details and our Twitter site for updates from the field. As I note in the Vikalpa post:

“While we cannot check the veracity of each SMS we receive in a timely manner, we hope and expect that citizens themselves will actively engage with reports posted on our micro-site and alert us with clarifications, updates and alternative perspectives of their own.”

This is the first of a couple of other interesting experiments using SMS + mobiles, blogs, Twitter and Google Maps that I want to try out in the lead up to and on the day of the elections in the Eastern Province in Sri Lanka on 10th May 2008.

For those resident in the East or who receive information from the Province, please SMS Vikalpa on 0777312079 with your updates and news.

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.

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