The ICT4Peace Foundation, the Swiss Confederation and the European Commission’s Joint Research Center are pleased to announce and invite you to participate at the 3rd International Conference of Crisis Mappers (ICCM) in Geneva on 14-15 November 2011. Sponsors include the World Bank. The draft agenda is available here, and you can register here. The purpose of ICCM 2011 Geneva is [...]
Archive | June, 2011
Production + loss = conflict: Information generation and archival
A recent post on Mashable reminded me why I started a personal project to archive websites in Sri Lanka during and after the ceasefire agreement (2002 – 2006). To even begin to understand the amount of information we are creating is impossible – there’s just too much of it, and the graphic above is based [...]
Online impersonation redux
The recently concluded MIT Civic Media Conference as well as the panel I was on at the 2011 SAJA Convention repeatedly referred to the case of the Gay Blogger in Damascus as a central challenge for journalists reporting on contexts where there is little or no independently verifiable information other than what is published online by [...]
Twitter for Newsrooms: What’s missing?
Twitter for Newsrooms is a new resource from Twitter clearly aimed at journalists who to use the platform. It’s basic stuff, but useful for journalists coming to Twitter for the first time, and I am inclined to translate this into Sinhala and Tamil for my classes at the Sri Lanka College of Journalism (SLCJ). There [...]
How to beat a web censor, but how censors could still shut down a site
After the arbitrary block of five websites, largely critical of Government, in early November 2011 and confusion over the requirement to register news sites, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) flagged this blog post as one that can help those at risk. As the CPJ article notes, “Sanjana Hattotuwa is one of the driving forces [...]
Groundviews blocked and unblocked
An email I sent to the readership of Groundviews today, following a bizarre disruption to site access over SLT ADSL in Sri Lanka on 20th June. ### On 20th June, for a number of hours in Sri Lanka, Groundviews was completely inaccesible over Sri Lanka Telecom (SLT) ADSL broadband connections. Since it began operations in [...]
Curating vital news: Using Bundlr & Storify to document serious war crimes allegations
Nigel Nugawela, my friend and co-editor of Groundviews, in a great example of how web platforms can help with curating and keeping track of vital news, used Bundlr to create this ‘bundle’ of news anchored to the hugely controversial and disturbing Channel 4 documentary, Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields. I’ve used Storify a number of times [...]
2011 Southeast Asia Civil Society Statement on Internet Governance
The 2011 Southeast Asia Civil Society Statement on Internet Governance has two vital clauses on censorship and cybersecurity from the perspective of civil society activists. Internet censorship We are concerned by increasingly sophisticated blocking or filtering mechanisms used by states for censorship. The lack of transparency surrounding these measures also makes it difficult to ascertain [...]
My TED Talk
Recorded at TED 2011, Long Beach, California.
A ‘gay girl in Damascus’ is actually a callous white American man
Image courtesy The Telegraph I first wrote about the purported abduction of Amina Abdallah Arraf The ‘abduction’ of a gay activist in Syria: A cautionary tale for media. In what can only be called a bizarre twist, the author of A Gay Girl in Damascus turns out to be a Tom MacMaster, an American 40-year-old graduate student. The New York’s Times [...]
