The Sahana Free and Open Source Disaster Management System in Haiti by Chamindra de Silva and Mark Prustalis appears in ICTD Case Study 2: ICT for Disaster Risk Reduction published UN-APCICT/ESCAP. Though more than half of the essay is a generic description of Sahana, Section 6 onwards deals with the deployment of Sahana in Haiti [...]
Archive | July, 2010
New media and political movements worldwide: Colin Rule’s presentation at USIP workshop
Friend and mentor Colin Rule recently participated in a USIP organised discussion on new media and political movements worldwide. The C-SPAN video of the session is now up. Colin’s comments are very interesting, and not just because he mentions Groundviews at the beginning of his submission! Beyond his comments on new media per se, Colin also [...]
Interview with Beyond Profit on citizen journalism and new media in Sri Lanka
Beyond Profit, which describes itself as a new social enterprise magazine and based in India, interviewed me recently over my TED fellowship based on new media initiatives in Sri Lanka. “Citizen journalism is not just about Groundviews and Vikalpa. It is about citizens bearing witness to what they experience – the good, the bad and [...]
The farcical fast against the United Nations in Colombo
Media coverage On 6 July, after the first images and video footage of a National Freedom Front (NFF) mob, led by senior government minister Wimal Weerawansa, violently agitating in front of the UN compound in Colombo hit domestic and international media, we noted on our Facebook fan page, “When this is in fact such a [...]
France: A significant disconnect between global internet advocacy and domestic policies?
AFP runs a story today on how France and the Netherlands are keen to establish international guidelines to prevent private firms from exporting high-tech equipment that could be used for Internet censorship. As the report notes, “We must support cyber-dissidents in the same way that we supported political dissidents,” French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner told [...]
Phoning in blog updates from the field: More power to investigative journalists?
WordPress.com, my blogging platform of choice (if only because it fully supports Sinhala and Tamil) has come out with a feature that is quite interesting, posting via voice. As noted on WordPress, Post by Voice is a way to publish audio posts to your blog from your phone. You call a phone number, enter a [...]
Guide to mobile phone audio recording
Just last week, a colleague resorted to her mobile phone when her digital recorder broke down during an interview. The resulting audio was satisficing, or in other words, good enough for her work. I’m a huge fan of mobileactive.org’s guides for, inter alia, mobile activism. Their latest guide is Mobile Audio Recording in the Field [...]
Interview on crisis information management at Global Risk Forum
In my capacity as Special Advisor to the ICT4Peace Foundation, I was part of a panel looking at ICTs and risk management at the Global Risk Forum held recently in Davos, Switzerland. The so-called Red Chair interview was an opportunity for panellists and speakers to briefly share their thoughts on video. My own submission was [...]
The end of war in Sri Lanka: A unique and definitive compilation of content
Download the 162 page compilation of content as a PDF in high quality (25.4Mb), or low quality (3.7Mb). The low quality version is good enough to read, but the photos will look and print much better in the high quality version. From 19 – 27 May 2010, Groundviews ran a special edition on the end of [...]
