Information visualisation through Microsoft Photosynth: Potential for human rights documentation?

The video below really says it all. Sadly, Photosynth does not yet run natively on a Mac, but the concept behind this information visualisation is astounding. 

I’ve been following Photosynth’s development for a while (this TED video is a very early version – the programme now has more models and more features) and the potential this already demonstrates to change the way we see and manage digital visual data is quite remarkable. 

Just imagine how useful this technology would be in documenting sites of genocide, human rights violations or just neighbourhoods, places and communities at risk. A large problem of field level HR monitoring and violations logging is the lack of precise geographical coordinates (see earlier post on Geo-location and human rights) as well as, in many instances, a total lack of visual documentation.

A system that integrates Photosynth into its location database can over time create powerful visualisations of location data (from mapping the physical environs to complex walk-throughs of incident locations) that can help in HR protection, advocacy, activism and even in legal proceedings.

Using devices like an iPhone (that geo-codes photos taken), the Ricoh 500SE, a product like Eye-Fi Explore or even through geo-coding photos on Flickr (works great for batches of older digital photos or those that have been scanned in) you can get a wealth of image data to buttress other event and processual data related to HR abuses to create databases of great depth and scope.

This is something I’ll be both looking at closely and pursuing in my own work.

A week of remembrance – Compelling articles and videos commemorating Black July 1983

 

From 23rd to 30th July 2008, Groundviews published at least one article or video a day commemorating the anti-Tamil riots of July 1983. Well over 9,000 visitors read and engaged with this content over the past week alone.

Contributions, nearly all written exclusively for Groundviews, came from award winning poets and novelists, senior Government Ministers, Members of Parliament, renown scholars, human rights defenders, civil society activists, artistes, senior civil servants, a former Secretary of Defense and others. All the content is archived and accessible from a single place.

Complementing content on Groundviews are 35 short videos in Sinhala, Tamil and English commemorating Black July on Vikalpa YouTube Video, available by clicking the “Remember 1983″ playlist.

Vikalpa Video Channel made it to the Top 100 most viewed channels on the YouTube Reporters category earlier this week, a ranking driven by significant the interest in and traffic to the videos commemorating Black July.

Groundviews is Sri Lanka’s first and award winning citizens journalism website features an unparalleled range of ideas, opinions and analyses on humanitarian issues, media freedom, human rights, peace, democratic governance and constitutional reform.

The cost of sharing

Adding to the long list of articles covering the Global Voices Bloggers summit recently was one on The Economist that ended by noting,

“…Global Voices’ annual summit in Budapest this week, where hundreds of bloggers, academics, do-gooders and journalists from places like China, Belarus, Venezuela and Kenya were due to swap tips on how to outwit officialdom. The aim, says Ethan Zuckerman, a Harvard academic who cofounded Global Voices, is to build networks of trust and co-operation between people who would not instinctively look to the other side of the world for solutions to their problems.

That is a worthy if ambitious goal. Doubtless, authoritarian governments are in close touch too, sharing the best ways of dealing with the pestilential gadflies and troublemakers of the internet. But they will not be posting their conclusions online, for all to see. Which way works better? History will decide.”

I would argue that not everything that is developed in terms of tools, techniques and strategies to combat State censorship is or can be published online either.

Sure, there are the really useful general guidelines on a number of issues – such as blogging safely and using products like TOR to maintain one’s anonymity – but some techniques I employ and advice others on in Sri Lanka, based from my direct experience of using a range of ICTs in violent conflict and in a context of impunity and human rights abuses, are simply not those I can share on this blog, much as I would like to. 

The cost of doing so outweighs the benefits of public sharing.

Authoritarian regimes and governments vs. bloggers

A recent article on the Citizen Media Summit organised by Global Voices Online featured in the European Journalism Centre website is essential reading for activist bloggers in particular and citizen journalists interested in interrogating repression, violent conflict and human rights abuses.

The article on the EJC website suggests that,

• Blogging is a truly global phenomenon
• Bloggers are under increasing attack and the line dividing mainstream journalism and blogging / citizen journalism is increasingly blurred in the eyes of repressive States and governments
• The conversations are not just in English, but in the vernacular of regions and nations
• Blogging is being taken more and more seriously as a serious form of communication, even when the content cannot always be taken seriously
• Governments and repressive regimes can still control the Internet and web to a large degree
• Governments and repressive regimes are powerless, in spite of this control, to wholly contain the free flow of information since to do so is increasingly to draw attention to outright censorship that cannot be erased, whitewashed or covered up – expending significant political capital. 
• Bloggers and blogs are at the frontlines of democratic movements 
• And yet, they often do not have the same protection as mainstream journalists or mechanisms / institutions of support, lobbying, advocacy and legal remedies when they are incarcerated or under attack

Sadly, though overall a good read, the EJC’s article also demonstrates the rather unfortunate proclivity for rodomantade and brash optimism when it comes to the reach and influence of new media and blogging. It notes for example, 

The technology, the ideas and the processes that have made possible blogs, social networks, and collaborative projects like Wikipedia also give many unconventional thinkers previously consigned to the margins of public life a platform that enables them to be heard by a dedicated (if often tiny) audience. 

That to me grossly oversimplifies things and is just bad, over broad and ultimately meaningless analysis. Blogs and blogging, from production to dissemination and influence need to take into account, inter alia, class, caste and (party) political power centres and structures. Importantly, issues like language politics, ethnicity and other identity markers and their interplay with web based media production and generation as well as aspects such as gender (which does not even get a single mention in the EJC article) cannot be ignored when talking about the reach and influence of blogs and blogging as a means of communication.

More on this in my next post.

Skype not secure?

Particularly in light of the fact that Skype is used by human rights defenders, including in Sri Lanka, as a means of secure communications is the speculation that it has a back-door entry that allows third parties, such as repressive government and intelligence agencies, gain access to conversations. 

According to reports, there may be a back door built into Skype, which allows connections to be bugged. The company has declined to expressly deny the allegations. At a meeting with representatives of ISPs and the Austrian regulator on lawful interception of IP based services held on 25th June, high-ranking officials at the Austrian interior ministry revealed that it is not a problem for them to listen in on Skype conversations.

This has been confirmed to heise online by a number of the parties present at the meeting. Skype declined to give a detailed response to specific enquiries from heise online as to whether Skype contains a back door and whether specific clients allowing access to a system or a specific key for decrypting data streams exist. The response from the eBay subsidiary’s press spokesman was brief, “Skype does not comment on media speculation. Skype has no further comment at this time.” There have been rumours of the existence of a special listening device which Skype is reported to offer for sale to interested states.

Emphasis mine.

I first read about this on Heise Online and it’s generated significant interest on Slashdot. As TomatoMan notes on Slashdot,

Assume all communication that uses any kind of monitorable infrastructure is bugged. The capacity is there, and the desire is there. It is the way of things.

But as caluml (551744) reminds us,

I read a good presentation by people that had tried to disassemble Skype, and basically, Skype do so much to make it very, very difficult. Here’s a PDF version [blackhat.com] of it.

What do you think?

Vikalpa Video in the YouTube Reporters Top 100 for coverage of 1983 anti-Tamil riots

Screenshot taken at 9.15am, 30th July 2008 (+5.30GMT)

The Vikalpa Video Channel made it to the top 100 most viewed channels on the YouTube Reporters category this week. The interest in and traffic to the site was largely generated by over 30 short videos on July ‘83 available here.

To put this significant achievement in perspective, the global media giant Voice of America’s YouTube channel generated 2,452 views to date on the YouTube Reporters category. CPA’s Vikalpa Channel has generated 2,377 at the time of writing.

This is the second time the channel has made to the top 100 list. The first was in December ‘07.

Screenshot taken from here at 9.25am, 30th July 2008 (+5.30GMT)

Writing on Sri Lanka’s growing abductions, Burning Bridge noted recently that a video produced by Human Rights Watch on this disturbing issue had (at the time) only been viewed less than 2,000 times. Of the many possible reasons for this, one striking feature of many human rights / humanitarian advocacy in Sri Lanka is how little they leverage new media, social networking and well established (web) content management platforms for video like YouTube.

We’ve got well over 104,000 views to date and over 2,300 this past week alone for our videos, that are largely in Sinhala and Tamil and also feature notable figures from polity and civil society speaking in English such as TNA MP R. Sampanthan, Tamil Human Rights Activist Shanthi Satchithananthan and Convener of the Civil Monitoring Committee Mano Ganesan. 

I just need to find the time to sit down and write about the lessons learnt and identified as well as the technical and content generation and dissemination strategies adopted by us to make the channel what it is today and to take it forward in the midst of and as a response to the incredibly violent and difficult context for independent media in Sri Lanka.

Social and political change in the Arab world through new media

The European Journalism Centre (EJC) has a good write up of an event held recently in London that looked at the impact of new media, the web and Internet on polity and society in the Arab world. It notes that,

Keeping up or catching up, respectively, with world standards of communication infrastructure, the Arab and Muslim nations could not help but at the same time create opportunities for the distribution and exchange of news and opinion that did not exist before.

Some of the most interesting presentations on the impact of new media and (mobile) communications writ large I have witnessed are from the Arab world. Time and again I have been fascinated at how repressive regimes and hugely conservative (not to be necessarily confused or conflated with backward) cultures are grappling with the challenges posed by citizen producing, accessing and disseminating news and information through the web, mobiles and the Internet.

Over a year ago, I catalogued some of the most interesting blogs / bloggers in the Arab world based on a story by Gal Beckerman called the The New Arab Conversation. In the interim, many regimes have jailed or persecuted independent voices in the blogosphere that have dared to criticise them.

As the EJC notes the growth of new media in the Arab region,

…does not necessarily mean that the Arab nations are now on the fast track to European-style democratisation and open societies. Rather, they may be on the way to modernise their own traditions, however difficult and painful that might turn out to be in any given case.

ASEAN Ministers call for greater civ-mil coordination and information sharing in disasters but not for interoperability

The Chairman’s statement at the recently concluded 41st ASEAN Ministers Meeting notes quite strongly the need for greater civilian – military cooperation and information sharing in disaster preparedness and response. 

“The Ministers called for in greater civil-military coordination for major, multinational disaster responses through training, information sharing, and multinational exercises. They recognised that military assets and personnel, in full support and not in place of civilian responses, have played an increasingly important role in regional disaster responses.”

This is a timely and vital emphasis and complements processes such as the International Process for Crisis Management by the ICT4Peace Foundation that is facilitating a greater degree of information sharing and interoperability between and within agencies at the United Nations. 

Interestingly however, there is just one mention of “collaboration” in the statement and it’s not in relation to disasters or crisis management. It unsurprising to find the emphasis on coordination – which means that a single actor (most often a State) takes the responsibility for managing and preparing for disasters.

Collaboration involves relinquishing authority and inter alia, access to territory to international actors incl. foreign militaries and humanitarian agencies. Collaboration means access to infrastructure – physical and virtual – that shares information that agencies and States may be (at first) unwilling to disclose openly. Collaboration means grappling with agencies that come in and once embedded in the humanitarian effort, take the opportunity to critique the ability of State machinery to respond to the disaster, which opens up the regime to international scrutiny. Collaboration means that actors recognise that no one actor / agency / stakeholder has the power or ability in complex disasters to address all the needs of affected communities over the short, medium and long term.

Yet this understanding of collaboration versus coordination is fraught with very real political consequences. And ASEAN, being a ministerial level junket, is hugely conservative and Statist. Tellingly in this respect, although points 16 and 17 in the Chairman’s statement deal with Myanmar, there isn’t a word of condemnation for the junta’s monumental botch-up of the Cyclone Nargis relief efforts.

Since many countries in ASEAN are fixated with the exclusive understanding of and approach to territorial integrity, sovereignty and national security, it’s revealing that Point 9 states that:

In undertaking disaster relief cooperation, the Ministers agreed that several basic principles should continue to apply. These included the principle that the affected country has the primary responsibility to respond to the humanitarian needs of its people following natural disasters occurring within its territory in a prompt and effective manner; where needed, the affected country should facilitate humanitarian assistance from other countries and international organizations to achieve the overall objective of coordinated, timely and effective disaster management and relief based on identified needs; and that external assistance should be provided in response to a request from the affected country, and the disaster relief efforts should be under its overall coordination. 

While all this sounds great in principle, what this also means is that Myanmar’s brutal junta can do just as it pleases in response to another disaster, given that the mechanics of coordination lie with the State and that all external assistance is at its behest. 

On the other hand, the the UN’s R2P principles are also fraught with difficulties, as I’ve noted before on this blog in relation to a case like post-Nargis Myanmar.

What could help bridge these differences that are very real, impacts work on the ground and not just semantic?

Interoperability.

A word that does not feature in the statement. Information sharing cannot and will not work without interoperable systems and information sharing architectures.

To read more and just why interoperability is centre and forward in crisis information management as well as disaster prevention, mitigation and response, read the ICT4Peace Foundation report on a roundtable discussion held recently in Mumbai.

1.4 billion people access the Internet today – ODR providers need to wake up to mobiles

A new report finds a quarter of the world’s population accessing the Internet in 2008.  IDC’s Digital Marketplace Model and Forecast estimates that 1.4 billion users of the Internet is set to jump to 1.9 billion over the next four years, bringing internet access to roughly 30 per cent of the world’s population.

“The internet will have added its second billion users over a span of about eight years, a testament to its universal appeal and its availability,” said John Gantz, chief research officer at IDC. ”These trends will accelerate as the number of mobile users continues to soar and the internet becomes truly ubiquitous.”

Net-enabled mobile devices will help drive the global online trend, surpassing the desktop PC as the primary means of accessing the internet by 2012, according to the report.

Net-enabled mobile devices will help drive the global online trend, surpassing the desktop PC as the primary means of accessing the internet by 2012, according to the report.

Emphasis mine.

Two years ago, in response to a report that said that this figure was 694 million, I said that those in the developing world and especially in countries such as China access the Internet through Cybercafes and mobile phones. It’s great that market research agencies have finally caught up with what I’ve been observing and writing on for years. 

Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) is a field that needs to wake up and leverage this growth in non-PC internet and web access. Currently, there is only one application I know of that runs on a mobile device (the iPhone and even it is still in beta) and only one example from the Philippines that has SMS as an integral part of its operations. As I noted in Victoria this year at the 2008 ODR Forum, the iPhone alone has all by itself revolutionised the mobile web use and access in the US, a country not known for its use of mobile phones for anything other than voice calls. 

With the increasing global usage of the Internet and web, increasingly through mobile devices / phones, the business model for mobile ODR technology provisioning is strong. In 2004 I was openly challenged by an ODR service provider based in the UK for even believing that mobiles would make any appreciable impact on ODR. 

Today, the fact that there isn’t any enterprise level ODR solution that leverages mobiles / mobile devices is not just a great pity. 

It’s daft.

Face to Face mediation a thing of the past?

Peter Wynn Thompson for The New York Times

A recent NY Times article on advances in video conferencing and its use, fuelled in large part by rising transport costs, brings together two aspects I have studied from the frame of peace negotiations – inter-cultural mediation and virtual interactions.

The article notes:

There is a certain paradox in telepresence, in that it is all to simulate the richest form of human interaction: people talking to each other, face to face. And it is not a perfect substitute. Ms. Smart, the chief of human resources for Accenture, still travels about 10 days a month. “You don’t learn about other cultures in telepresence,” she said. “You get things from being there, over breakfast and dinner, building relationships face to face.”

Telepresence is all the new rage. To the companies that make telepresence solutions, the term video conferencing to describe their products is as outrageous as calling a Alfa Romeo 8C Compretizione just a car. It so is not.

Cisco was the first off the block with this new generation of virtual meetings that uses a combination of positional audio and video cues, high-def screens undergirded by good broadband connections to make the entire video conferencing experience that much more real.

But therein lies the caveat for those of us in Sri Lanka. We don’t have good broadband, severely vitiating our ability to save the planet by using these technologies (and even the more humble but for most situations quite capable Skype Video).

For the countries that can and do use telepresence (and Skype Video) the potential for its use in mediation needs more serious study. I know of a couple of Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) providers who are now keenly looking at incorporating Skype Video into their ODR products (some already have Skype VOIP built in). Richard Susskind at the ODR Forum in Liverpool in April 2007 spoke about telepresence, but a year on in Victoria at the ODR Forum this year, no one who demonstrated their products to my knowledge had video as an integral part of the feature set.

As a slight aside, although the iPhone 3G doesn’t support it, most 3G Nokia’s and other phones support voice calls, enabling even those in the field to connect using video. My greatest problem with video calls is that they just don’t work for me. For one, holding up a camera to one’s face and talking just makes one loud and obnoxious. The resulting jitter results in migraines for everyone else. And the quality is really still quite poor.

But the question is does telepresence or at its most basic, Skype video, have the ability to build bridges across cultures? Or more specifically, does it do this any better than say email, POTS or VOIP? I think so and disagree with the assertion that you don’t learn anything about other cultures through online video interactions. At the most basic, there are the visual cues. For sure, such cues are mediated through the webcam (which is not the same as the cues one would experience in a real world F2F meeting) but for the sensitive speaker / mediator, they are still valuable markers of those “in the room” that are simply not available through email, a teleconference or even on VOIP.

I’ve worked from a home office set up for over two years. Most of my interactions are over email, but because of the deteriorating security conditions in Sri Lanka, voice communications related to human rights protection and humanitarian work in particular now go through Skype. I rarely use Skype video, but have used it once or twice quite well late in the night.

Point is, I communicate daily with a range of people across the world, work on peacebuilding, innovate and produce multimedia content all from an abysmal “broadband” connection. I avoid rush hour / school traffic and don’t even have an office space anymore in Colombo.

On the other hand, I have already logged more air miles this year than I did for all of 2007 and I can’t see that decreasing. My experience with work at the UN at a high-level is one example of group discussions and the management of competing group dynamics that simply cannot be managed virtually.

So I take the point that telepresence even today cannot replace real world F2F. But here’s the rub – given how far telepresence itself has come from the underwhelming video conferencing of yore, just how long do you think it will take for the next generation of systems to say holographically project 3D images of people around a table?

We already have mobile phones with mini projectors.

How long before we can project avatars of our friends wherever we are?