The ICT4Peace iPhone app

Uncategorized 1 Minute

The ICT4Peace Foundation launched its iPhone app on Apple iTunes today. A launch announcement on the Foundation’s site notes,

The ICT4Peace Foundation is extremely pleased to announce the launch of the very first ICT4Peace app for the iOS platform. Our ICT4Peace app, designed for the iPhone 4 and compatible with the iPad, showcases the Foundation’s pathbreaking work in using Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) for peacebuilding and crisis mitigation, response and recovery.

The app features,

  1. Updates on the Foundation’s work, including our strategic interventions, papers, partnership and collaboration with the UN system and other leading international agencies
  2. The history of the Foundation
  3. The constitution of the Foundation, including members of its advisory panel
  4. Our publications, and links to key publications in the field of ICT4Peace by partners and others
  5. Our daily Twitter updates, responding to vital events, processes and issues in the domains of peacebuilding, crisismapping, crowdsourcing and research
  6. Shortcuts to our critically acclaimed crisis information management wikis
  7. A unique ‘You Report’ app, designed to help capture and crowdsource interesting stories and photos from the field of interest to the Foundation
For reasons best known to it, Apple didn’t make this easy. Cezar Neaga, the same person who designed and developed the Groundviews app for the iPhone, was nearly driven to insanity by the incredibly complex rules and conditions Apple imposed on the approval of this in the iTunes store. We persevered, and ultimately saw the app’s publication on iTunes.
It’s a really beautiful app, and I love the way Cezar’s integrated the persons behind the Foundation as well as shortcuts to its key crisis information management wikis. If you’ve got an iPhone, go ahead and download it. It’s free.

Published by Sanjana

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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