Post-war ICT and media

My last column in the Sunday Leader enumerated some ideas post-war government and the ICT Agency could champion to strengthen media freedom and e-governance respectively.

One blueprint worth emulating in post-war Sri Lanka for more open, accountable government comes from Vivek Kundra, the new federal chief information officer in the US under the Obama administration. Data.gov is a great example of how information placed in the public domain can stimulate creative thinking to shared challenges and development. The NY Times has a good write up about this.

Post-war government in Sri Lanka can also re-look at RTI legislation and meaningful community radio. As I noted in my column,

Post-war Sri Lanka cannot be what it was before the war, or during it. Tarun Tejpal, award winning Indian author and the brains behind one of India’s leading investigative journalism websites Tehelka.com, said that they were silent when India was at war with Pakistan, but openly critical of the defence establishment and government once the war was over. We have a different recent history – where independent media tried and failed to report the war in the public interest, with many journalists killed with impunity and forced into hiding or exile. There is no place for the vicious war against free media in post-war Sri Lanka. Likewise, if war militated against Right to Know legislation, renewed agitation by civil society must result in its rapid establishment. If Bangladesh with a military regime and India with a billion people could do it, so can we. While it may be too much and too early to ask Government to give up its vice grip of State media, decades of opposition to and censorship of real community radio must end. I was in Nissankamallapura two weeks ago, a small, relatively remote village in Polonnaruwa, to help 48 villages that have collectively lodged a request to set up Saru Praja Radio to broadcast on 96.1 FM news and information produced by villagers for their own community. It is a remarkable venture by peoples who are no strangers to the human cost of war. Post-war Sri Lankan must foster the development of such hyper-local media – media made by and for regions in the vernacular – that can fuel equitable, endogenous and sustainable development, precisely what the government desires. All of this supports the need for post-war governance to be transparent and accountable. A fraternal cabal that passes today for government and overrides parliament is incompatible with our democratic potential. Initiatives such as the new Open Government initiative under the Obama Administration in the US are instructive in this regard, with examples such as www.data.gov and www.regulations.gov useful for our own ICT Agency to champion, adapt and adopt along with of course initiatives to empower local and Provincial government. Everyone knows what needs to be done, but the war has always been an excuse for non-implementation.

Negotiating ethnic hatred in Sri Lanka

Groundviews

Can we End this Cycle of Hatred? an article published on Groundviews, a citizen journalism site I edit in Sri Lanka, elicited this comment from someone called Ramanan:

Nice article. I see a lot of parents infesting the young minds in western world. I am a Tamil, living in the US for a long time. I went for a birthday party recently. The birthday was for a kid, whose dad is a friend of mine. I met another kid there, who is of Sinhalese origin, born and raised in the US. The kid asked me whether I am from India and I told him that I am from Sri Lanka. Next question was, “Are you Sinhalse”? When I said, “No. I am Tamil”, he told me that his parents have told him not to talk to tiger supporters. See the hatred here.

Actually, I should be the one who shouldn’t be talking to Sinhalese. My dad was burnt alive by Government backed Sinhalese thugs during 1983 riots. I should have vengance. However, I don’t think these few guys who did that don’t represent the community as whole.

The point is, both sides are putting hatred in their kids minds. If I hate you, you made me hate you. In my case, Sinhalese made me hate them. Still, I don’t.

How does one engage with and respond to such stories? How can we use these stories to help us heal?

Read the original article and leave your thoughts here.

The most read story on the BBC News website

The story on the killing of LTTE Supremo Prabhakaran is generating the most traffic on the BBC News website at the time of writing.

Radios vs. Mobile

One of the most frequent responses I hear, generally from the likes of media experts at UNESCO, when I submit with growing evidence that mobile phones are the first and only device used by millions of people to get information and increasingly access email and the web, is that radios by far outnumber mobile phones in the developing world.

This basis is then used to downplay the importance of mobile phones as a mechanism of information production and dissemination amongst ‘poor’ and rural communities in particular. Radios, I am told, are far more effective because they cost less than mobiles, have a lower TCO (total cost of ownership), run of cheap and replaceable batteries, are free to use once bought and by far have the greatest number of people tuned in. The arguments generally come from those who have been responsible for setting up what a decade or two ago were forward thinking community radio stations, at least in principle. They never took off in countries like Sri Lanka. As Nalaka Gunewardene notes,

Meanwhile, community groups are not being issued broadcast licenses. Senior officials have privately explained that they fear airwaves will be misused for anti-social or political purposes. They have not, strangely enough, voiced such concerns about profit-making companies, some of whose channels are openly-aligned with political parties. A globally persistent myth holds that community radio has been thriving in Sri Lanka for two decades. In reality, these broadcasters are nothing more than rural transmissions of the fully state-owned and state-controlled Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation (SLBC). Yes, these stations are located in remote areas, involve local people in programme production and broadcast to a predominantly rural audience. But the bureaucracy in Colombo tightly-controls content: nothing remotely critical of the government in office is permitted.

Lirneasia now gives us the best evidence that these aging experts are behind the curve.

This graph from their research is pretty self-explantory and bloody interesting. It suggest that in India, there are already more phones than radios. In every single country surveyed, there were more TV’s in BOP households that radios. Pretty much destroys some shibboleths.

Turning to the web for news on the war

Associated Press has an interesting story on how news, information and analysis of the on-going war in Sri Lanka for those in the diaspora is served by various websites and the Internet.

As the report notes,

The Web posts accuse the government of shelling populated areas and blocking the delivery of food and medicine. They rarely mention accusations by human rights groups that the rebels are holding the civilians as human shields and shooting those who try to flee.

Read the article in full here.

Bearing witness to carnage from space

Recent and raging controversies over the on-going shelling of civilians brings to the fore the use of satellite imagery in Sri Lanka to flag possible crimes against humanity. The most recent imagery comes from commercial satellites, with image analysis by Human Rights Watch that clearly indicates that shelling is taking place unabated.

The full report is available here.

The great leveller: Mobile phones in India flag potential for m-gov elsewhere too

The NY Times has a great story on mobiles in India. From 1997 to 2000 I experienced as a student how the introduction of cybercafes in Delhi – at the time far more expensive then their Sri Lankan counterparts per hour – changed the way I communicated with family back home and Indians communicated with family out of Delhi and abroad.

There are aspects the NY Times article does not touch upon, more disturbing. India has repeatedly asked Blackberry to allow access to its secure network. There is also the need to critically look at the impact of mobiles on strengthening the participatory nature of democracy, especially at local government level. It is not clear for example in Sri Lanka that heady mobile growth has contributed meaningfully to better governance at the grassroots or national level.Evgeny Morozov’s Texting Toward Utopia: Does the Internet spread democracy? is key reading in this regard, and a useful flip side to the optimism of the NYT article.

Is the LTTE really finished and the War over? videos watched over 37,000 times

Is the LTTE really finished and the War over? is a series of short videos in English, Sinhala and Tamil featuring promiment politicians, former LTTE members, academics and civil society activists. The 24 videos in this series have been viewed, just a few days after they were uploaded, well over 37,000 times collectively. Some videos alone have generated over 5,000 views to date.

The videos feature, among others,

• Prof. Rohan Samarajeewa
• Prof. Tissa Vitharana
• Victor Ivan
• Vinayagamoorthy Muralitharan
• The spokesperson of the JHU
• Amal Jayasinghe

Propelled by interest in its latest video series, Vikalpa Video is at the time of writing on the Top 100 list of YouTube channels globally. For a playlist of all the videos and for updates to the series click here.

ICT: Peace 2.0

The Chairman of the ICT4Peace Foundation has a great interview with the International Relations and Security Network on the use of Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) in peacebuilding.

The podcast is available here.

Vikalpa YouTube Channel in Top 100 list again

For the 3rd time since its launch, Vikalpa’s YouTube video channel has hit the Top 100 list. At the time of writing, it’s #31, though earlier this morning it was #29, the highest rank globally Vikalpa has attained to date.

Earlier this year, Vikalpa was on the Top 100 list for its coverage of Lasantha Wickrematunge’s assasination.

Today’s rank was propelled by a video series titled “Is the LTTE really finished and the War Over?“.

A video featuring the spokesperson of the Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU) alone was viewed over 3,400 times in less than 24 hours. The video featuring Prof. Rohan Samarajiva’s response to this question in English was also viewed over 1,600 times in the same time period.

The series also features a range of leading civil society activists, politicians and academics including,

• Vasudeva Nanayakkara
• Prof. Rohan Samarajiva
• Amal Jayasinghe
• Victor Ivan
• Prof. Tissa Vitharana
• Dr. Vickramabahu Karunaratna

Click here for a playlist of the videos, which are in English and Sinhala.