Election monitoring using ICT – Metrics, programmes and services

ICTs in general 1 Minute

Some data and programmes used in and from CMEV’s election monitoring platform.

  1. Email updates sent during the course of the day – 15,500 via local SMTP server
  2. Data sent (via ADSL) – approx. 750Mb
  3. Data sent (via SLT 3G HSPA) – approx. 150Mb
  4. Data received (via ADSL) – approx. 1Gb
  5. Data received (via 3G HSPA) – approx. 200Mb
  6. Websites and services used – WordPress, Google Maps, Twitter, Internet Archive, Technorati, Reinvigorate, Facebook
  7. Programmes used – Quicktime 8 Pro (podcast recording), Garageband (podcast production), Safari 3.1, Firefox 3 Beta 5 (running on projector in operations room with key information), Skype, Call Recorder for Skype, Twhirl, Maxbulk Mailer
  8. Programmes that failed – CC Publisher (hugely unreliable and miserably slow on Leopard)
  9. Assumptions that failed – Didn’t get half as many SMS updates as we thought we would even though CMEV designed a superb SMS template for incident reports. Coverage of all major telcos in the East just shy of urban areas ranges from poor and intermittent to wholly non-existent. Towards evening, services became even more erratic.
  10. Assumptions that worked – More interest in maps than (textual) reports
  11. # of time my Macbook Pro / OS X crashed during the day – 0

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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