Award Winning Citizen Journalism in Sri Lanka – Looking back at 2008

Over the course of 2008, Groundviews published over 250 compelling contributions from ordinary Sri Lankans, award winning poets and authors, renowned academics, diplomats, civil servants, leading civil society activists and others.

Sri Lanka’s first citizen journalism website and operating without any donor funding, content from Groundviews is consistently republished in mainstream media, academic journals, books, other leading news websites and blogs and widely quoted in presentations at leading workshops and conferences locally and internationally. Content published this year ranged from essays to poetry, photos to videos, serialised narratives to academic papers and unique perspectives of life on the ground from embattled cities in the North and the “liberated” Eastern Province.

The site welcomed well over 230,000 readers in 2008 with over 3,400 substantive comments by readers. Technically, Groundviews features the most secure and sophisticated commenting system on any media website in Sri Lanka and offers content over email, mobiles and news feeds.

Groundviews was the only website from Sri Lanka shortlisted under the e-news category at the prestigious Manthan Awards in 2008. The site is ranked 146,067 on the world’s leading blog aggregation site Technorati, out of the over 17 million blogs it indexes globally. Groundviews is also the first and to date only citizen journalism website from Sri Lanka to be featured and fully indexed on Google News.

Content published on Groundviews since its launch in 2006 demonstrates how professional web based citizen journalism can strengthen progressive, civil dialogues on highly complex and inflammatory issues and topics. The site regularly publishes content that will not and cannot be published in mainstream / traditional media in Sri Lanka today. In doing so, it shows that web based citizen journalism and media can meaningfully foster vital debates on war, peace, human rights and democracy even within violent conflict.

Some of the most read content / collections in 2008

• Remember – a collection of content exclusive to the site commemorating the anti-Tamil pogrom of July 1893 and the race riots in 1958.
• ETHNOS OR DEMOS? – QUESTIONING TAMIL NATIONALISM by Publius (the nom de plume of Asanga Welikala)
• Lt. General Sarath Fonseka: military dictator, saviour or both? by The Under Dog
• Is Sri Lanka China’s Georgia? by Chithirai
• My name is Cedric. Do you remember me? by award winning Sri Lankan novelist and author David Blacker
• Jaffna: Retrospect and Prospect by retired civil servant Somapala Gunadheera
• How does one BECOME Sinhalese or Tamil in Sentiment? by Michael Roberts asks us to question why we feel we are Sinhalese or Tamils
• Who is afraid of NGOs? by Chulani Kodikara looks at the consistent hate speech and attacks against NGOs in Sri Lanka over 2008

Many of these authors submitted other articles as widely read as those featured above. Clicking on their names on the site brings up a list of all articles submitted.

Some articles that generated a lot of comments and reactions from readers

• Defense and Devolution by Sri Lanka’s Ambassador to the UN in Geneva Dayan Jayatilleka
• What is the solution to the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka? by Titular Republic
• Why integration with India is the only long-term way out for Lanka by Prof. Kumar David, an electrical engineering professor who has published extensively, profesionally, and on the national question and socio-economics.

Poetry by local and international award winning poets on war, peace and other topics

• Read poems by leading Sri Lankan poets, many published exclusively and for the first time on Groundviews

Videos exclusive to Groundviews

• Lionel Bopage: Evolution of the LTTE and Prabhakaran’s role in the Tamil nationalist struggle
• TNA MP Mr. R. Sampanthan remembers the events of July 1983
• Prabakaran’s Role in Tamil National Struggle: Interview with Shanthi Sachithanandan
• Interview with Mano Ganeshan on abductions of Tamils in Colombo
• Withdrawal of the IIGEP (International Independent Group of Eminent Persons): Interview with Nimalka Fernando

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.

Tolerance and the Internet: Scenarios by 2020

The Pew Internet Project’s Future of the Internet III report, released recently, had the following scenario.

Social tolerance has advanced significantly due in great part to the Internet. In 2020, people are more tolerant than they are today, thanks to wider exposure to others and their views that has been brought about by the Internet and other information and communication technologies. The greater tolerance shows up in several metrics, including declining levels of violence, lower levels of sectarian strife, and reduced incidence of overt acts of bigotry and hate crimes.

55% of those polled disagreed with this prediction. 56% of experts polled also disagreed. More details here.

The PIP Future of the Internet report is US centric. No voices from the Global South can be easily found and it is questionable how many of the general respondents and even the experts have any meaningful experience in the use, adoption and adaptation of ICTs and mobiles in less developed regions, for a plethora of socio-political, cultural, religious, economic and other communal transactions and intercourse. That being said, the report has always intrigued me because of the insights it offers into ways the Internet and the web could possibly develop over the next decade.

Two quotes from the experts polled stood out for me.

Can anybody reading this actually bet anything meaningful on declining violence, sectarian strife, bigotry, and hate? Whatever the growth of the Internet has done, it certainly hasn’t solved these age-old problems. –Howard Rheingold, Internet sociologist and author; one of the first to illuminate virtual communities; author of “Virtual Reality,” “Smart Mobs,” and “Virtual Community”

As much as I wish this scenario were true, I’m afraid that it will take a lot more than mere technology to tame human nature. The base instincts that cause violence, sectarian strife and hate crimes are based on a fundamental “fear of the other,” which is deeply rooted and will take generations to curb through widespread educational programs, reinforced by daily practice, peer pressure, and law enforcement. There may be some progress towards social tolerance by 2020, but the significant advances described by this scenario strike me as wishful thinking. At best, we may see very limited progress in highly developed and affluent societies. –Fabrice Florin, executive director, NewsTrust.net, a nonprofit social news network that allows people to rate the news on quality.

Fabrice is, as I am, a member of the first cohort of Ashoka’s News & Knowledge Fellows. He is however vastly more experienced in the field of online journalism. Fabrice’s NewsTrust.net is an Internet platform that provides dynamic news feeds, news literacy tools, and a “trust network” designed to help people think critically about the information they consume. Members rate articles from online sources on actual quality—fairness, sourcing, and context.  Partner news organizations, which include Slate and the Huffington Post, embed NewsTrust’s rating tools on their sites.

Howard Rheingold has inspired many posts on this blog, most recently one on media literacy in the age of Web 2.0. Howard’s scepticism is well placed and a healthy, refreshing anti-dote to blinkered and parochial technological determinism.

However, I disagree with them both.

That the evolution of social networking, mobiles and the web in general leads to more self-referential, insular and viciously exclusive virtual communities is not an assertion that can be dismissed easily. Based on it, Fabrice and Howard are correct in eshewing the notion that the ubiquity of the Internet / web by 2020 will in and of itself lead to stronger social and political cohesion, reconciliation and democracy  especially in deeply divided and / or repressive regions such as Sri Lanka. I’ve covered this in a helluva lot of posts on this blog, such as the growth of hate speech and the decline of civility on blogs, the Burmese junta’s censorship in the wake of a large humanitarian tragedy, China’s great firewall and the growing threats to independent online media in Sri Lanka.

That said, to use an example from American politics, who would have thought even as recently as two years ago that Barack Obama would become the President of the United States? In the early 90’s, would the end of apartheid by the turn of the centure have been imagined? Around the world, there are hundreds of thousands of on-going processes and initiatives to use ICTs to support and strengthen peace, even within cycles of violence. Mainstream / traditional media is forever changed with the advent of mobile phones. As this NY Times article ends by noting,

“Today every citizen is a war correspondent,” said Phillip Knightley, author of “The First Casualty,” a classic history of war reporting that starts with letters home from soldiers in Crimea in the 1850s and ends with the “living room war” in Vietnam in the 1970s, the first war that people could watch on television. “Mobile phones with video of broadcast quality have made it possible for anyone to report a war,” he said in an e-mail interview. “You just have to be there. No trouble getting a start: the broadcasters have been begging viewers to send their stuff.”

There are many examples today of ICTs and mobiles helping fragmented polity and society heal, or at the very least, bear witness to abuses of civil liberties and acts of terrorism, including those promoted by the State.

• My own small initiatives using web media to promote peace through peaceful means and interrogate war suggest that  professional web based citizen journalism can strengthen progressive, civil dialogues on highly complex and inflammatory issues and topics. Groundviews, a site I created and edit, regularly publishes content that will not and cannot be published in mainstream / traditional media in Sri Lanka today. In doing so, it shows that web based citizen journalism and media can meaningfully foster vital debates on war, peace, human rights and democracy even within violent conflict. Never Again in Sri Lanka documents leading civil society voices, including those from religious leaders, decrying the anti-Tamil pogrom in July 1983. Vikalpa’s YouTube Citizen Journalism Video Channel (also see my post here about how it all started) has short videos in Sinhala and Tamil that have been watched tens of thousands of times.
• The ICT4Peace Foundation’s ICT4Peace Inventory documents nearly one hundred examples of tools and services that are used around the world today to prevent, mitigate and transform violent conflict amongst other uses.
• The example of Ushahidi (also read my interview with Ory Okolloh, one of the key brains behind Ushahidi)
• Adele Waugaman from the United Nations Foundation sent me earlier this year  a fascinating new report into how mobiles are changing the way in which we advocate for political change, prevent outbreaks of communal violence, deliver food aid, help save forests, mediate effectively in human animal conflicts and other uses.

Aside from these examples, ICTs literally help people understand each other and strengthen tolerance.

Translation

Who hasn’t used Google Translate or BabelFish, even though it is not yet perfect? Armies are now using real time translation to help strengthen situational awareness. There Americans aim higher – which expert consulted in the survey I wonder knew of DARPA’s plans for machine translation, which is “is to deliver, by 2010, software that can almost instantly translate Arabic and Mandarin Chinese with 90 to 95 percent accuracy.”

Mobile News

I now get timely and accurate news through JasmineNewsWires on processes and events that are important in Sri Lanka via SMS. As recently as  five years ago, rumours would have been quicker. Today, SMSs from repuated news services like JNW or LBO trump malicious rumours that rake up violence. There are now multi-lingual mobile based instant messaging solutions for use in disaster situations, amongst others, to strengthen understanding of needs.Ken Banks and his sterling work with FrontlineSMS is pushing the boundaries of what’s possible using mobile phones to engender a whole raft of progressive and sustainable social change.

Blogs, blogging and citizen journalism

Blogs and blogging have changed the way we bear witness and interact with (and indeed, define) newsmakers. Sites like NowPublic, Global Voices, Pro Publica show us how powerful citizen journalism can be at challenging shibboleths, received wisdom and the status quo. In addition, they showcase writing of merit on people, places, events and process that are vital to communities and readers but would be glossed over by traditional media and the economic interests that support them. Today, mobile phone help citizens respond to violence even in places as remote as Kashmir. The Pulitzer Centre encourages citizen journalism to submit short videos on issues that matter to their communities the most. YouTube itself is encouraging the submission of videos that seriously deal with vital issues such as peace and human rights. My own work in Sri Lanka used web media to commemorate an event this year that still is hugely emotive and traumatic in Sri Lanka. It has to date generated tens of thousands of readers. Short videos on the same event propelled a YouTube channel, that is Sri Lanka’s only example of such an initiative, to YouTube’s top 100 list of channels. Online media and social networking are changing social and political relations (primarily amongst youth) in many Arab and Middle Eastern countries, for the better. States can no longer easily clamp down on news and information and promote propaganda that’s uncontested and believed. Blogs are interrogating the violent history of a country such as Sri Lanka in a manner that’s not even imagined of by the State, and through such efforts, are helping a younger generation think of ethnic relations differently.

Social networking

Social networking combined with mobiles helped Barack Obama become the President of the United States. If that isn’t a cogent example of how the Internet can help strengthen tolerance and celebrate diversity, I don’t know what is. Amnesty International uses some viscerally compelling web videos that are a cinch to integrate to social networks to promote advocacy against human rights abuses by the world’s most powerful countries / democracies. And while most, if not all, social networks (e.g. MySpace, Facebook) are walled gardens, initiatives that are opening up these networks to federated identity management will redefine the way we organise virtually. Yes, it’s true that social networking brings out the worst in us, but who is documenting the rise of Facebook as a serious platform for serious work?

Online Video

Our work in Sri Lanka suggests that even in a country with comparatively poor internet bandwidth and high costs of Internet access, people are still extremely interested in video content on war, peace and governance.

These examples may not be on the radar of many who contributed to the Future of the Internet report, but that’s no reason to shaft them aside as unimportant markers of how the Internet can, and indeed already does help in strengthening tolerance, democracy and rights. Heck, even the Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2008, President Martti Ahtisaari, concurs wholeheartedly.

And lest we forget, there’s the work of Witness and in particular its Human Rights Hub. Its recent campaign on the images that were powerful narratives on human rights resulted in the following (accurate at the time of writing this post):

350,000+ views (that includes only what we can track!)
40+ bloggers picked-up the story and had conversations on their own blogs
247,000 web pages that reference the question and conversation – at the peak of the project
1,000+ responses to the question
925+ text responses
60+ video responses

Clearly then, strengthening tolerance through online video, blogs and social networking – to name just three channels on the Internet – shows great potential. I asked Daniel Stauffacher, the Chairman of the ICT4Peace Foundation (of which I am a Special Advisor) the following question a few years back,

“Do you believe that the better use of technology can strengthen peace processes to the extent that there will be more peace 5 years hence than today?”

He said,

“Yes indeed. ICTs and in particular web 2.0 will create even more transparency and efficient tools for actors in the field of conflict prevention, mediation, conflict resolution and peace building.”

Our full interview can be downloaded as a PDF here and Amb. Stauffacher’s view strengthen my own research into how ICTs can help complex peace processes and peacebuilding. It follows that as we put more information about our lives and become, in a very real way, digital selves who lead an analog life that’s seamlessly integrated with our digital avatars and identities, the Internet needs to be leveraged as a medium through which reconciliation, peace and democracy can be strengthened.

This requires political will, something that no one in the Pew survey points to. Perhaps the new office of the CIO in the Obama administration may influence the development of the Internet in a manner more conducive to better race relations in the US. The technologies used could well be adapted and adopted in other countries and regions. Citizen themselves can inspire and engender political will, holding rulers accountable for their actions in ways, enabled by new media and the Internet, that hark back to the tenets of direct democracy.

There is no guarantee that my vision of more tolerance amongst and within communities will be engendered by the Internet. But it is important for social changemakers to use the power and reach of the Internet, particularly over mobiles, to inspire ideas, dialogues and perspectives spur reconciliation, tolerance, diversity and through these, a more vibrant democratic tradition.

Mobiles to dominate Internet access by 2020?

From Network World,

By 2020, mobile phones will be the primary Internet devices for most people in the world, according to a panel of experts, who also predict that Web technologies will probably not lead to increased social tolerance.

“The mobile phone – now with significant computing power – [will be] the primary Internet connection and the only one for a majority of the people across the world,” the Pew Internet & American Life Project writes in a new “Future of the Internet” report. “Telephony [will be] offered under a set of universal standards and protocols accepted by most operators internationally, making for reasonably effortless movement from one part of the world to another.”

The Future of the Internet report, now in its third consecutive year, can be read in full here. Some key points from the report are,

• The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the internet for most people in the world in 2020.
• The transparency of people and organizations will increase, but that will not necessarily yield more personal integrity, social tolerance, or forgiveness.
• The divisions between personal time and work time and between physical and virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who is connected, and the results will be mixed in their impact on basic social relations.

Emphasis above mine and a point I will deal with in a subsequent post on this blog.

Excerpts from the feedback of respondents regarding the future of mobiles and the Internet can be found here. However, none of respondents look as if they are from or located in less developed countries / regions or those who can speak authoritatively on the usage of mobiles regions / countries outside the developed world. But that’s a general criticism of the Pew Report itself, which is extremely US centric. Always has been.

That said, the report is essential reading for anyone interested in future scenarios and what role mobiles will play in connecting all of us to what I sincerely hope will be a shared humanity over the next decade.

NYPD in the spotlight through YouTube

Initiatives like Witness have been doing it for years, but sites like YouTube resulting in a surge of new videos that expose Police excesses, corruption and brutality even in New York. 

A recent article for the NY Times (Officers Become Accidental YouTube Stars) explores the issue further and is in effect an article about citizens empowered through digital media to record what they experience and see. In the US, their right to record is constitutionally protected. But in other regimes, it’s more difficult to act as citizen journalists. Either way, new media and ICTs are bearing witness in ways that would not have been possible a few years ago, or even imagined a few decades before. 

YouTube may be 99.9% drivel, but a single video that exposes human rights abuse or violence and helps bring the perpetrators to justice is reason enough to encourage the use of mobile phones and online video to strengthen democracy and our active participation in governance.

What is love?

Source: AFP

Is Obama God? And with Jesus and Satan both out of favour with the web searching public, are we heading for a post-religious world to complement the post-racial US? Or does it mean that Scientology is increasingly in the public consciousness?

The Economist reveals the most popular search terms on Google over 2008.  

People may be searching for love, but I wonder if they find peace on the web?

Computing for Good

Georgia Tech’s College of Computing has posted details of its Computing for Good (C4G). C4G is introduced thus, 

C4G centers on the use of computing as a platform for improving the human condition. It draws on both the self-focused and altruistic sides of students by presenting computer science as a cutting-edge technological discipline that empowers them to solve problems of personal interest as well as problems that are important to society at large.

But wasn’t this what ICT4D was supposed to do?

The range of projects conducted is impressive and each one engaging, but there’s no independent verification, no links to further details, no local voices of partners or beneficiaries. There are also concerns of sustainability and resilience of the solutions provided by students in Liberia and Ghana in particular, where details are not provided as to how the systems developed were integrated into local processes, networks and organisations so as to ensure sustained use once the students had flown back to Georgia Tech.

“They are down on the ground working on a real problem – using technology to help in global health initiatives or to heal a nation coming out of civil conflict – not sitting in a lab at Tech,” says assistant professor Michael Best in the School of International Affairs in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts. “Students today want to do work where they can see its impact in real terms.”

The cynic may interpret the fact that Georgia Tech sees C4G as a way to get more students into Computer Science as the real reason behind the newly established programme of studies and practical experience. But taking it at face value, the programme’s benefit surely is in opening the eyes of generally insular College graduates in the US to experiences beyond what textbooks and classrooms at home offer, particularly for those who choose to travel outside the US and grapple with the challenges of implementing ICTs in post-conflict scenarios. The danger of this initiative however is that students maybe led to believe there are quick fixes through ICTs for deep rooted and long standing social, political, religious and other identity based conflict. Quick fixes are rarely resilient to change and endure the vicissitudes of peacemaking and peacebuilding. Quick fixes also run the risk of developing new platforms, services and products – when there already may be robust, open source and interoperable equivalents out there that can be adapted and adopted far more easily.

Reinventing the wheel can be excited for computer science students as part of their coursework, but hugely detrimental to processes and actors on the ground who use software that has no guarantee of support and training over the long term, and no assurance that the data collection can be integrated into other systems over time.

125 journalists in jail. 3 in Sri Lanka. Bloggers next?

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) came out with a disturbing report last week, in which it noted that out of 125 incarcerated as of 1st December 2008, 56 of them were online journalists including bloggers. As CPJ notes,

[it is] a tally that surpasses the number of print journalists for the first time. The number of imprisoned online journalists has steadily increased since CPJ recorded the first jailed Internet writer in its 1997 census. Print reporters, editors, and photographers make up the next largest professional category, with 53 cases in 2008. Television and radio journalists and documentary filmmakers constitute the rest.

“Online journalism has changed the media landscape and the way we communicate with each other,” said CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon. “But the power and influence of this new generation of online journalists has captured the attention of repressive governments around the world, and they have accelerated their counterattack.”

Bloggers in Sri Lanka aren’t recognised as journalists (save for a single statement by leading media freedom organisations in 2007) and do not enjoy the legal protection afforded to traditional media personnel. Independent online media websites have been increasingly hacked into this year. With traditional print media now embracing citizen journalism and with web audiences / consumers growing apace, there is no doubt that the regime’s attention will focus on the web and Internet in the future. Arguably, this already evident is some of the legislation it proposes for media regulation.  

CPJ also highlights the case of  Tamil columnist and editor J.S. Tissainayagam, detained and after a couple of months charged under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) in 2008. As the CPJ notes,

In a statement posted on its official Web site, the Ministry of Disaster Management and Human Rights said the journalist and “his business associates” had produced publications “designed to embarrass the Sri Lankan government through false accusations.”

The CPJ gets it slightly wrong here. The website of the Ministry of Disaster Management and Human Rights has no mention of Tissa’s case. That credit goes to the perennially priapic Rajiva Wijesinghe who responded, in his capacity of Secetary to the Ministry of Disaster Management and Human Rights, to a press release by Human Rights Watch (HRW), the Secretary General of the Governement’s “Peace Secretariat”. Rajiva is also the Secretary General of the Government’s “Peace Secretariat”, where his incredible response was published. In this response, it is noted that one of the charges Tissa stands accused of under PTA is for writing the following passage,

‘Such offensives against the civilians are accompanied by attempts to starve the population by refusing them food as well as medicines and fuel, with the hope of driving out the people of Vaharai and depopulating it. As this story is being written, Vaharai is being subject to intense shelling and aerial bombardment’.

Tissa isn’t the only journalist to languish in Sri Lanka’s prison system, but his case (also because he was the Editor of an independent media website) brings to light the appalling record of the Rajapakse regime to strengthen and safeguard human rights, including the freedom of expression. As Human Rights Watch noted on 3 December, 

Article 14 of the Sri Lankan constitution enshrines the right to freedom of speech. However, since 2006 the government of President Mahinda Rajapakse has increasingly intimidated and tried to silence the media, nongovernmental organizations, and others with independent or dissenting views of the government’s military policies and human rights practices. Senior government officials have attacked such critics as supporters of the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and traitors of the state. ”The government’s disregard for the basic rights and well-being of three well-known detainees raises even greater concerns for the hundreds of others detained under the security laws,” Adams said.

In an editorial I wrote on Groundviews a few months ago I noted that,

Salient points of Tissa’s case point to a larger and more chilling deterioration of media freedom in Sri Lanka under the Rajapakse administration. Tissa’s case in particular reveals a particularly twisted logic, and through it, confirms fears that the regime in the South now completely mirrors the intolerance of media freedom and free expression the LTTE is known and reviled for.