Senior academics commend citizen journalism in Sri Lanka

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The unique Special Edition Groundviews ran a year after the end of war in Sri Lanka was recently critically acclaimed recently by Prof. Sasanka Perera from the University of Colombo.

Fire and Storm: Essays in Sri Lankan Politics is the latest book by Prof. Michael Roberts. Michael was trained in history and the social sciences at Peradeniya University in Sri Lanka. Read a fuller description of the author on his blog and watch a recent interview, produced for broadcast TV and featured on Groundviews here.

Referring to the bloody end of war in Sri Lanka, when original content and debates on Groundviews interrogated stark ground and political realities, Michael has this to say of the site and citizen journalism in Sri Lanka in the introduction to the tome:

“It is to the credit of the Centre for Policy Alternatives website, Groundviews…. that it raised this Catch-22 situation in full-frontal style on 3 May 2009: “would killing 50,000 civilians to finish off the LTTE bring peace?” When, predictably, this question was misunderstood, the Groundviews editors clarified the issue thus: “This post intends to interrogate extremism. The numbers in the quote are really peripheral to the argument, which exists today, that to finish off the LTTE, collateral damager is not just unavoidable, it is even a prerequisite. What do you feel about that?” It is to the credit of some measured voices who spoke up at this point, among them several Tamils (with pseudonyms, but speaking as Tamils), insisting that the defeat of the LTTE was a vital goal and that “we” should be ready to accept civilian casualties of even 50,000, though hopefully somewhat less. This debate, suitably edited, is worth reproduction in print as an outstanding example of citizen debate and citizen journalism that beats the Sri Lankan newspapers by a proverbial mile.”

Emphasis mine. The post in question can be read in full here.

Prof. Roberts and Prof. Perera flag something interesting over 2009 and 2010. For the first time in Sri Lanka’s media history, the most engaging content interrogating key political and social issues was produced or published not by mainstream media, but by citizen journalism, notably voices featured on Groundviews as well as the site’s own original reporting.

Since 2006, Groundviews has published content mainstream media has been unwilling or unable to cover, guided by a set of content curation, discussion and comment moderation guidelines unique to online media in Sri Lanka, from the time of the site’s inception to date. I know of no other site in Sri Lanka, both during war and after it, that features a similar and sustained level of content (from prose and poetry to satire and photography) and reader generated debate interrogating war, human rights, politics, corruption, peace and other key issues. The International Federation of Journalism (IFJ) agree. A short excerpt from their most recent report reads,

“The citizen journalism website Groundviews (www. groundviews.org) did some of the most telling early reporting on the conditions within the IDP camps, alerting national and international opinion to the growing conditions of squalor and distress following heavy rains in August and then October 2009. The website’s reporting was accompanied by a poignant commentary on the level of concern of the mainstream media in the situation in the camps.”

It’s an exciting time to be a citizen journalist in Sri Lanka.

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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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