Automation vs. control

The title assumes that automation is about giving up, to whatever degree, control of a process. That’s a key tension in many of the systems I design for peacebuilding. Users like to know they are in charge of what’s happening, but complex processes are impossible to manage without some degree of automation, even if at the end of the day nothing really significant happens without human approval. 

One example – InfoShare’s OneText system on Groove Virtual Office. All the underlying asynchronous and secure communications architecture which made sure everyone’s files and data were up to date was completely automatic. On the other hand, users didn’t want the programme to access their personal folders on their PCs and automatically ferret documents and directories to share with other stakeholders. They wanted control over what was shared.

I felt the same way today when a few months after I switched to Leopard, I enabled Time Machine. I’ve been happy with the free and very easy to use iBackup to date, but I must admit that I’m careless about keeping my machine on at the anointed time for the scheduled backup to work. As I write this, Time Machine is silently and completely automatically backing up every single vital file on my machine to my external hard drive. The degree of faith involved in this is significant – I don’t take optical backups (I have around 41Gb of data which just takes too much of time to burn) and I am mortified about the restoration process if (when!) something goes wrong. Time Machine will do this every hour, every day I keep my machine on and connected to the external hard drive. 

It was David Pogue’s recent column that finally swung my decision. Given that I’m entrusted 6 years worth of emails to it and some irreplaceable photos and music, this had better be everything that Pogue and Apple say it is!

I’m mindful that humanity is already losing more information than it is backing up or frighteningly, has the capacity to backup. I just hope I won’t be part of that statistic. 

Peace and Conflict Timeline (PACT)

Disclaimer: I was heavily involved in aspects of the design of the new PACT website and gave advice on the development of many of its current features and functionality.

 

The Peace and Conflict Timeline (PACT) website by the Centre for Poverty Analysis (CEPA) is one of the most innovative I have encountered. It’s idea is original, it’s content very well research and it’s presentation immaculate. It’s rarely that you come across an idea that makes you wonder why no one thought of it before. PACT is one of them. 

While the PACT concept won it an award of merit from the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR) in 2007, the website at the time was an unmitigated disaster. One of my first emails to CEPA late December was a lengthy one with several detailed ideas on how they could improve the site. I’m happy to note that most of them find expression in the new avatar.

There’s really nothing comparable to PACT in the SL blogosphere or amongst Sri Lankan websites. At first blush, any serious researcher will find on PACT a wealth incidents and processes that are vital markers of the ebb and flow of Sri Lanka’s conflict. PACT’s central feature is its timeline, that stretches from the 1800s to the present day. It is exhaustively researched with 420 entries to date. But here’s where PACT really shines – the entire website is designed as a living conversation. Comments and feedback are actively elicited with details of events and processes that have been missed out, or alternatives narratives and perspectives to existing events to enrich that which is already on the site. PACT is a historical narrative that comes alive through new media.

There’s a clear list of issues the site covers on the right – clicking on any one of them brings up associated events. Else, you can browse through the timeline – clicking on a year brings up information related to that year. The site makes very good use of AJAX – everything is fluid and very responsive, even on a slow internet connection, aided by the absence of bandwidth hogging graphics. 

Well thought out submission guidelines will hopefully ensure that that the fringe lunatics, racists, trolls and nut jobs that usually latch on to sites like these are kept at bay. This is important since as PACT evolves, it will have to judge what to publish in terms of comments, keeping the overall tone of conversations on the site civil, progressive, interesting and light. This is my first worry – from what I know, PACT has little real institutional support in terms of human resources. Though it will largely be a site for reading / research more than discussion, the fact that it encourages feedback means that serious consideration has to be given to site moderation and what it will entail. I know from experience that many organisations haven’t the foggiest as to how much of work this really is. Do it badly or haphazardly and the entire site goes down. 

What’s also interesting is that the site allows you to subscribe to new events and new comments. New events don’t necessarily mean contemporary events since PACT will add events in the past as and when necessary. The ability to subscribe to comments and posts via RSS and email is great and avoids the common mistake of assuming that readers actually like to come to a website to access new content.

The first site ran on some half-baked home made content management system that was an unmitigated disaster. To this day I find it shocking that anyone at CEPA thought it was fit to go up the way it did. Mistakes have been learnt from and the new runs on the extremely robust WordPress (2.5.1) platform, which means that it is scaleable, can be accessed through a variety of devices, can be easily referenced and embedded in other blogs and just makes the content in it more easily accessible. Something for all Mac users using Safari to watch out for though. If you intend to register and write something to PACT using the WordPress, some plug in that’s active on it make it extremely unstable. Safari (3.1.1 on Leopard) crashed twice as I was trying to type in something, which is very unusual yet something to keep in mind. 

There’s another small problem. An incorrectly configured submission URL on the Suggest an event page actually prevents anyone from suggesting an event. In the absence of anyone from the general public suggesting an event, all that’s on the site are suggestions by the PACT team. What’s not entirely clear to me is why they remain as suggestions, with the only explanation being that the research needed to enter these into the PACT database is hostage to the limited time available for the administration of the site by the one person I know is behind it almost single handedly.

Three features I would really like to see on the site I’ve already communicated to those in charge. The first would be to plot on a map of Sri Lanka the locations of incidents in PACT. The geo-visualisation of incidents and events would give a user a perspective much wider and deeper than reading the same information in a textual format, just like the Mideast Conflict Timeline. 

Another is in the visualisation of information proper. I remember using Microsoft Encarta’s timeline and discovering a range of events and processes that I would not have pieced together as easily by reading just text. There’s actually a very powerful example of what I would like to see for PACT in the form of the Xtimeline website. For example, see this history of the microprocessor – beautifully done and extremely intuitive. 

Finally, a way to make PACT more social. The suggestion here is to include ways through which each post can be more easily integrated into a range of social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace. This can be very easily done by integrating Addthis to their site. 

PACT is a must for any researcher on our conflict and is one of those sites that really should be put as a shortcut on the desktops of PCs in libraries and cyber-cafes, so that people actually get to know of it and use it. Traffic to the site will never be comparable to a other sites on conflict including those such asGroundviews or Vikalpa, but what is offers is content that complements, strengthens and gives more insight into that which is published elsewhere. 

It is truly sui generis in this regard. Visit it today. 

Web media readership in Sri Lanka

Perhaps one reason allegations of web censorship are growing in Sri Lanka is because purely web based media shows a very high readership when compared to traditional (English) print media published on the web. 

Taken from Alexa.com, this graph (click on image for larger version) clearly shows that over the past six months, Lankaenews is the most popular amongst other well recognised Sri Lankan web media. None of these websites is a broadsheet or has a print media presence in Sri Lanka. Lankaenews gets significant higher pageviews than Infolanka, which in second place is in turn well above the rest. Lanka Dissent in third place seems to be tied with Tamilcanadian. In fact, Lankaenews gets even more pageviews that the Daily Mirror website, which I found very surprising (click image below to enlarge).

This is no mean feat, since the Daily Mirror website has a commanding lead over all other well read English news dailies in Sri Lanka (click image below to enlarge).

What would be interesting to gauge, impossible using Alexa, is the breakdown between domestic and international traffic on both Lankaenews and the Daily Mirror. I have a hunch that it may be in the case of both around a 60 / 40 split, with 60 percent coming from abroad and 40 percent local. 

In any case, what this clearly demonstrates is that in terms of readership, purely web based media can and do compete well with the traditional print media presence on the web. With its influence, reach and readership growing, small wonder that a repressive regime is getting worried about that which is published online.

With the Daily Mirror introducing citizen journalism aspects to its reporting and a revamped website along the lines of a blog, it’s quite clear that traditional media is learning from new media upstarts on the web. 

Where do you think this will all lead in Sri Lanka?

Independent media websites hacked in Sri Lanka?

On the same day The Island newspaper cited net terrorism (sic) as the cause for an outrageous gaffe in its Children Section came news that the Lanka Dissent website had been hacked into. I don’t for a moment believe that The Island was a victim of Internet “terrorism” but as an excuse it’s credence was strengthened at a time when questions are being increasingly posed as to whether the government of Sri Lanka is actively targeting independent media on the web. 

The Lanka Dissent website makes a rather serious claim in this regard:

The Defence Ministry recently set up an electronic media observation unit at a building adjacent to Standard Chartered Bank in front of the President’s House in Colombo to monitor websites reporting on the situation in Sri Lanka.

LD learns through reliable sources that this particular unit staffed with electronic and IT experts, is experimenting on how to disrupt websites.

It gives no further sources or proof to back up this claim, which if true is very disturbing. Further, the LD letter isn’t very well penned, shows no real understanding of the term “hacking” (it’s not always a pejorative term) and the four key points it makes can be seriously contested.

Point #1 on the Outreachsl.com website is conjecture and just conspiracy theories. Tissa languishes in jail, but his website is still up on the web, though its (for obvious reasons) not been updated from early March. I don’t know enough about Point #2, the “hacking” of the Daily Mirror poll, to comment. However, online polls unless carefully setup are often the targets of those who wish to skew the poll in their favour by repeated voting. So this may not have been “hacking” at all. Point #3 is so convoluted that it barely makes any sense. Point #4 on the alleged travails of The Island to wrest control of its emails from “hackers” is to me very suspect when juxtaposed against the incident that brought this supposed case of “net terrorism” to light. 

Anyway, LD’s emails have been broken into and it sees this as signs of growing web media repression. 

We wish to stress that this cannot be a ‘lone hacker’ enjoying his/her exploits. We have reason to believe this is an attempt in blocking local news going out into the local and the international community. This is an attempt at suppressing the remaining independent part of the Sri Lankan media and thus a serious infringement on the right for information and expression. Perhaps the beginning of official hacking in suppressing total dissemination of information.

There’s an element of hyperbole there, but as the Free Media Movement notes in a statement released today, LD’s concerns must be taken seriously in the larger context of media censorship and attacks against the press in Sri Lanka. It warns that if true, web censorship places us in the same league as China and Russia, which ain’t a place we want to be at or descend to. 

The FMM urges the authorities to immediately clarify the existence and nature of the electronic media-monitoring unit by the Ministry of Defence as noted by Lanka Dissent.

Thwarting independent media especially on the web and Internet is brings us in line with the reprehensible censorship and thinly veiled government sponsored hacking of countries such as China and Russia, now friends of Sri Lanka. Further, it is simply not possibly to shut off access to independent journalism unless like Myanmar after the Saffron Revolution, Information and Communications Technology in the entire country is shut down.

Though Tamilnet is still blocked and high powered members of the Government have called for outright bans on independent media, there’s a very active SL blogosphere and other independent media websites don’t seem to have been touched. Yet. Anyway, wouldn’t it just be more effective for a Government that certainly has no qualms in doing so to just physically roughen up or kill journalists it doesn’t like with a view to silencing dissent? Plausible deniability doesn’t work with IP blocks. 

As the FMM points out, it’s really quite difficult to shut down information flows and ICTs today. It’s easy on one level – a Government can just pull the plug – but it’s impossible to hide that you’ve done it. Every citizen is a potential reporter today. You’ll have to go down the path of Myanmar and shut every cellphone, ISP and shoot every carrier pigeon to completely halt information flows. Hell, even then information will get out. 

I may be very wrong, but I don’t think this regime is foolish enough to block websites on a large scale. Not because it doesn’t want to do it, but because it’s got more effective means at its disposal against those who promote inconvenient truths.

For starters, just ask Iqbal Athas or J.S. Tissainayagam.