Recommendations and ideas to strengthen best practices of Crisis Information Management at the United Nations, New York

This is an excerpt from Interim Report: Stocktaking of UN Crisis Information Management Capabilities that can be downloaded in full from here.

The authors strongly feel it is timely for the UN System as a whole to address, at a strategic level, issues of crisis information management and technology best practice and interoperability – to identify current knowledge of best practice, capabilities and challenges, and plot a way forward to improved response.

Respondents in the discussions felt that IM and KM strategies, frameworks and technologies were constantly evolving as well, making it important to create policies in the UN robust enough to handle current needs but flexible enough to accommodate change. Others noted the importance of using appropriate technology – hardware and software solutions – that could leverage existing (embryonic) IM / KM mechanisms and render them more meaningful and effective. This includes the need to develop of mechanisms and tools that work in austere conditions. Crisis information systems need to be developed that work robustly and are “good enough” to work in conditions of chaos, political instability, poor and intermittent network access, lack of physical security, with democratic institutions under siege and very little control over territory by a central government. Developed for these conditions, it is expected that the crisis information management tools can both scale up and be deployed in other conditions less austere, and also at the HQ level at the United Nations in New York.

Interim Report: Stocktaking of UN Crisis Information Management Capabilities

Sanjana Hattotuwa and Daniel Stauffacher

From October 2007 to February 2008, representatives from the ICT4Peace Foundation met informally with a number of high-level representatives at key agencies based at the United Nations in New York in preparation for a stocktaking exercise on crisis information management capacities and best practices. These meetings with heads of agencies, units and departments, IT administrators and key Knowledge Management (KM), Information Management (IM) professionals and consultants gave vital insights into some of the best practices and key challenges facing crisis information management at the UN including the gaps and needs that had already been identified, the challenges facing KM and IM and ideas for meaningfully addressing some of these challenges.

A draft report was tabled at a meeting held on 8th July 2008 in New York at the United Nations, where respondents and other high level participants were invited to engage with the preliminary findings and observations. Their input and feedback at the meeting and via email is incorporated in this final draft.

Download a copy here.

Behavioral patterns on Facebook: We are still intimate beings

The average male Facebook user with 120 friends:

• Leaves comments on 7 friends’ photos, status updates, or wall
• Messages or chats with 4 friends

The average female Facebook user with 120 friends:

• Leaves comments on 10 friends’ photos, status updates, or wall
• Messages or chats with 6 friends

The average male Facebook user with 500 friends:

• Leaves comments on 17 friends’ photos, status updates, or wall
• Messages or chats with 10 friends

The average female Facebook user with 500 friends:

• Leaves comments on 26 friends’ photos, status updates, or wall
• Messages or chats with 16 friends

Read more here.

Mobile GPS for location tagged micro-blogging?

I’ve been using Google Latitude in the US to plot my movements, wondering how powerful this technology is and can be in the future – for example, the potential for the system to auto-generate way-points on Google Maps, with links to Facebook / Picasa photos and YouTube videos all uploaded from the mobile.

The accuracy and speed of GPS (roaming on AT&T) in the US is significantly better and faster respectively than on Dialog in Sri Lanka.

Without being connected to the GSM network and on WiFi (on an unknown but extremely fast service provider in my hotel), my Bold places me on the Hudson in Up-State New York but around 1Km from my actual location.

Around 2 minutes after connecting to 3G on AT&T, the location is spot on.

From around a 1km radius to around 10m or less.

The iPhone with assisted GPS may be faster at pinpointing location, but the Bold does the job well enough. Where the two phones differ is in the plethora of social networking GPS applications available for the iPhone versus the paucity of such programmes for the Bold. Though both devices can tag geo-location to photos taken on them, the iPhone wins hands down in the quality of applications that leverage its (more advanced) GPS functionality.

Whereas the eye candy and functionality of Brightkite.com on the iPhone is the Rolls Royce today of location aware social networking apps on a high end mobile, Google Latitude’s appeal lies in its simplicity, tie in with Google Maps (and in the future, the multimedia platforms and other location data on Google data centres) and the ability to run it on a broader range of devices. Plus, it’s taken the wind out of the sails from technologies like InSTEDD’s GeoChat, which still has an edge over Latitude with a superior feature set, but one that with just one sweep can be adopted by Google.

Intend to use these emergent technologies in the near future for some work in Sri Lanka, where street level information is non-existent, but GPS tagged mobile phone notes from across Sri Lanka may prompt micro-blogging citizen journalism with pithy insights not captured by mainstream media.

Internet and Web based Citizen Journalism in Sri Lanka

Background paper to a workshop on Citizen Journalism I’m organising in the near future. Full paper with references as a PDF from here.

Many less radical institutions – governments, NGOs, think tanks – are struggling to address the same challenge, unable to respond to the rapidly shifting balance of power between the individual and the institution radically disrupted by the Internet. In today’s ultra-networked world, an unaffiliated individual with a laptop and an Internet connection is often more influential and resourceful than an organization with a staff of twenty and a fax machine was only twenty years ago.

- Evgeny Morozov on openDemocracy.net

Introduction

The overarching problems of a State riven by violent conflict, corruption, nepotism and the significant breakdown of democratic governance and human rights, especially in recent years, deeply inform the timbre of traditional media. It is a vicious symbiosis – traditional media is both shaped by and shapes a violent public imagination. The potential of Web 2.0 and new media in general and citizen journalism, mobile phones and USG in particular (e.g. YouTube videos, blogs, SMS and mobile sites) suggests that content that critiques the status quo, authored by civil society, can play a constructive and increasingly significant role in peacebuilding and stronger democratic governance in Sri Lanka. The renowned Columbia Journalism Review has an interesting short article on the power of citizen journalism even under repressive regimes. Blogging the Coup by Dustin Roasa notes,

The debate over citizen journalism in the U.S. tends to dwell, tediously, on whether citizen reporters can supplant, rather than complement, the professional press. But in many countries around the world, where the press is under government control, corrupt, or simply incompetent, citizen journalists may be the only source of information that is reasonably credible. Without citizen reporters in Myanmar, for instance, it would have been impossible to know what was happening during anti-government demonstrations last year, while in the Middle East, bloggers have become a viable alternative to the heavily censored, state-run media.

Citizen journalism on the web and Internet is seen in this short paper as a way through which all peoples of Sri Lanka, with something as basic as ownership of or access to a mobile phone, can hold to account the violence practiced by the Rajapakse regime, the LTTE, the TMVP and other armed groups in the country who policies and practices are inimical to democracy. Put simply, citizen journalism aims to be as much as a annoyance to them as they are to democratic governance. There are well over 300 blogs in English, Sinhala and Tamil now aggregated on www.kottu.org, Sri Lanka’s largest blog aggregation site. There is already a growing culture of vibrant debate on issues linked to governance, human rights, war and peace on the blogosphere that rivals the qualitative reportage in mainstream media (MSM). New voices on blogs like Dinidu de Alwis and Indi Samarajiva are speaking with a new voice, appealing to new audiences and capturing malleable minds of youth more familiar with web media than traditional print and electronic journalism.

Citizen journalist satire through Banyan News Reporters

In a recent post here I noted that,

In light of a Government unable and unwilling to investigate violence against journalists and independent media, satire is one way in which violent events, processes and individuals can be held up for public scrutiny more frequently.

Banyan News Reporters on Groundviews has taken off quite well and now features a couple of submissions looking at recent events and processes in Sri Lanka related to humanitarian aid and terrorism.

There are dangers of using satire. As this example from the New York Times highlights, it can be perceived as propaganda and be taken seriously. However, keen to ultimately see the development of a local variant of The Onion, I instigated BNR as a way to channel the creativity of citizen journalists to highlight individuals, issues and processes linked to war, peace and governance in a manner different to the usual prose published on Groundviews.

On the blogosphere and on Facebook, precursors to BNR can be seen in the likes of Mahinda Rajapakse’s blog and Facebook profiles for the President, Prabhakaran and the Leader of the Opposition. But as Indi notes, real life is often more absurd and bizarre.

Click here for a list of BNR submissions, or read the latest one on the LTTE’s air attack here.

By the way, Banyan News Reporters welcomes new satirical voices. Write in!

Blackberry reporting in real time

For a couple of hours last Friday night and into the wee hours of Saturday morning, my Blackberry enabled me to communicate to the world what I saw happening around me in Sri Lanka almost in real time.

An email sent to friends concerned for my safety was sent to Sree Srinivasan at the South Asian Journalist Association (HQ’d in New York) in response to an email asking for updates on the LTTE’s air raid.

Sree first published the updates as an anonymous source in Colombo and when I authorised him to use my name, published each update I sent on a SAJA web page set up specifically to monitor the attack.

Later on, as I was waiting for my flight to London at Katunayake, I collated all the updates and published them on Groundviews. It was one of the first accounts of the air attack on the web.

In Sri Lanka, the news of the LTTE’s air attack first came to many of us via SMS or calls to our mobiles from mobiles. Gone are the days when you tuned into the radio or TV for breaking news. A friend who was at the Taj Samudra, with a birds eye view to the action, called to say that he was with Shoba De watching the events unfold. Long before even wire reports, Kottu was alive with blog posts that either posted eye witness accounts, re-told news from TV, put out commentary on the attack that were quickly followed by counter-perspectives. Some posted later on critiqued the attack and its implications.I didn’t follow Twitter posts, but Indi’s had around three updates on his account (updated via his mobile) and the Daily Mirror Twitter updates (set up by Dinidu) mirrored their updates sent out via SMS.

Rhythmic Diaspora has an excellent account of what he accurately terms War in Real Time here.

Some technical notes:

• I could have updated my Twitter account and SMS from my Blackberry, but opted instead to stick to emails which gave more space to write what I saw.
• I’ve had a lot of connectivity issues when using Dialog’s 3G network on my Blackberry Bold (had the same issues with my Nokia E65, my first 3G phone, around one and a half years ago). Opting for reliability over speed, I switched to 2G network coverage through my trip to the airport. Experienced no network lag or outages for data.
• Need to explore the use of (the rather inappropriately titled, but extremely useful and robust) Letmeparty.com, in addition to my Twitter client. This website is used by JNW to update its website.

Tamil politics, “human rights extremists” and humanitarian crises: Web discussions trump MSM?

Groundviews has over the past month alone exclusively published thought provoking content that has explored facets of violence and a cataclysmic humanitarian disaster. Featuring a wide range of critical voices from NGOs, Government and the diaspora Groundviews is priviledged to host some of the most compelling content and discussions on the current situation in Sri Lanka that can be found on the web.

The most attention on the site by far over the past week has centred around DILEMMA’S AT WAR’S END: THOUGHTS ON HARD REALITIES by Michael Roberts, a renown Sri Lankan author and scholar. In addition to the numerous comments to the original article, a more substantive response was penned by Lionel Bopage, erstwhile General Secretary of the JVP and published here. This was taken into consideration when Michael Roberts published today a detailed response to the main critiques in all the comments he had received to date on his original article. Michael notes that,

Indeed, one could claim that the sins of commission and omission by the human rights lobby (HRL) stir the chauvinists more than any measured evaluation. HRL excesses animate the Sinhala extremists. Indeed, the position taken by the HRL also serves the interests of the LTTE and the pro-Tiger diaspora. But their motivation is, as I have stressed in my previous essay, quite different (quite laudable too) from that of the Tiger-apologists. Just because their position assists the LTTE-spokespersons at this moment does not mean that anyone can cast them as “members of the LTTE gallery” in the sort of logic that guides Bopage to brand me. The HRL must continue its work, but with less naivety – that is, they must pay greater attention to the specificities of context, and reveal greater political acumen, less extremism… The failure of comprehension displayed in Groundviews by Kumar David and Lionel Bopage is quite revealing. It displays a reading of the SL situation in Manichean terms. They themselves stand within a good, moral world opposed to war tout court and opposite them are the warmongers (both GOSL and LTTE). If you say anything in favour of the warmongers, you too are a heinous warmonger. I shall refer to this form of extremism in shorthand as HRE, human rights extremism (or extremists).

DILEMMAS AT WARS END: CLARIFICATIONS & COUNTER-OFFENSIVE can be read in full here.

BitTorrent traffic on Mobitel HSPA flows unhindered

As with SLT ADSL, BitTorrent traffic on Mobitel’s HSPA connection flows through unhindered. Read the Glasnost test report here. 

I tested this on a Zoom 890 HSPA package.

BitTorrent traffic on Dialog Wimax partly hindered?

 

Dialog Wimax strangely seems to limit BitTorrent uploads on some ports. Test results through Glasnost available here. I ran this on Dialog’s OfficeNet+ package.  

Earlier test with SLT ADSL posted here, which incidentally does not limit uploads or downloads.