This TED blog post flags the crisis information wiki on the Pakistan flooding I created and curate for the ICT4Peace Foundation. Upwards of 20 million people are suffering from the massive flooding in Pakistan, according to the United Nations — more than the number affected by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the 2005 Kashmir earthquake, [...]
Archive | September, 2010
Daily Mirror’s online woes reveal an industry issue
It’s not the first time the Daily Mirror website has crashed recently. In the chaos that reigned just after the presidential election in Sri Lanka in January this year, the website was almost completely inaccessible. As I noted on Groundviews in February in a post looking back at the coverage of the post-election madness, In [...]
The Internet Freedom Fallacy and the Arab Digital activism (via sami ben gharbia)
A seminal essay on the chutzpah of the US administration to believe it can, often sans any sensitivity towards or understanding of local dynamics, through direct action, policies and practices, strengthen internet freedom globally. Introduction This article focuses on grassroots digital activism in the Arab world and the risks of what seems to be an [...]
ICTs for Risk and Crisis Management: Technical and ethical challenges
Realised that though I had blogged about my interview at the Global Risk Forum held in July 2010 in Davos, Switzerland, I hadn’t uploaded the presentation I delivered at the panel discussion. I do recall that I was the only one in a panel of 5 that kept to time. Rather than go into a [...]
TOR, Haystack and online security
The debacle over Haystack, the internet filtering circumvention tool developed for dissident Iranians, is amongst other places on the web, covered in detail in the Economist and on Slate. The author of the piece on Slate, Evgeny Morozov (like myself, a TED Fellow and who almost single-handedly held Haystack’s claims to public scrutiny from the [...]
New media for crime and judicial reporting
My latest lecture to mid-career journalists at the Sri Lanka College of Journalism (SLCJ) focussed on how new media can the crime and justice beat, and reporters covering court cases (esp. high-profile ones in the media spotlight, at least one of which we have on-going in Sri Lanka). Using technologies like Google Maps to plot [...]
Comments on Blogs and Bullets: New Media in Contentious Politics by USIP
A couple of months ago, close friend and mentor Colin Rule shared with me a draft of what is now a public report produced by the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) titled Blogs and Bullets: New Media in Contentious Politics. It is an interesting report to read in full, if only for the graph [...]
Constitutional reforms conducted in the dark: The failure of e-gov in Sri Lanka
“Parliament makes a vital contribution to democracy at many levels simultaneously. Within the institutions of government, it is the representative body through which the will of the people finds expression, in which their diversity is manifested, and in which the differences between them are debated and negotiated. At its best, parliament embodies the distinctive democratic [...]
How to and not to write about ICT for peace
First, how not to. Facebook and social media offer the potential of peace by Kathleen Parker, published in The Washington Post, is just bad journalism. Kathleen writes as if the subject is only something she has only read about in, and experienced through cheap tabloids. There is no depth, no critical gaze, no context. It [...]
Vital content supporting a principled, informed opposition to proposed 18th Amendment now on Groundviews
Opposing and bearing witness to the incredible capitulation of politicians and parochial expediency over principle, Groundviews features critical content from a range of perspectives opposing the proposed 18th amendment to the constitution. Frankly, few entertain any hope that the 18th amendment will be struck down. From insidious statements and outright lies by the President to [...]
