Crowdsourcing Obama’s inauguration

ICTs in general 1 Minute

obama-synthed

CNN, using Microsoft’s amazing Photosynth, aims to crowdsource a 3D vista of Barack Obama’s Presidential inauguration on 20th January 2009. This will be the most digitised Presidential inauguration in history, and I suspect many cable TV networks will rely heavily on the digital content generated by those present, in addition to their own content, in their coverage of this historical event. 

I’ve followed the development of Photosynth for a long time, captivated by its potential to revolutionise the way we manage and see photography. It still runs best on Windows, but a new Silverlight based plugin allows Macs to view synths. I haven’t tried Photosynth on Parallels, but I doubt if it will run better than the Silverlight plugin for OS X.

I am interested in and have briefly written on the potential of synths to capture locations of human rights violations and other sites of violence, a forensic tool crowdsourced as it were. It could be an interesting ethnographical tool for anthropologists, if one were able to distinguish photographs taken by various identity groups with a vested interested in the ownership of or access to a contested site (say a temple). 

Integrate Photosynth with Flickr, and you’ll also be able to find some interesting mashups of popular locations around the world, like the Pyramids or the Eiffel Tower, akin to the synth of the Roman Colosseum.

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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