Multimedia Crisis Guides from US based Council on Foreign Relations

From Bill Warters we learn of an excellent new initiative by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), which has been actively developing a series of interactive Crisis Guides that help explain complex international conflicts and crisis quickly and engagingly.

The full series is available here.

The guides are beautifully produced, with compelling content and good narration. Each production is extremely well researched, and a list of resources referred to and used in the production are also available.

An invaluable resource for students of contemporary politics and world affairs, exemplifying the best use of multimedia technologies on the web to educate.

“My 104 characters did just fine.”

The New York Times has a fascinating story on how Twitter was used to circumvent a court imposed gag order on an important story related to shady activities of a multinational corporation. The article ends by noting that,

There is a danger in overpraising a tool like Twitter at the expense of the words it amplifies — in essence, extolling the chisel rather than Michelangelo. But last week’s events show that a variety of Internet projects, including Twitter, are making it harder for the traditional gatekeepers to control of the flow of information. Certainly, The Guardian was in full celebratory mode last week. “Twitter’s detractors are used to sneering that nothing of value can be said in 140 characters,” Mr. Rusbridger wrote about his initial tweet. “My 104 characters did just fine.”

Read Twitter and a Newspaper Untie a Gag Order.

Computer models for predicting conflict outcomes

From Bill Waters came a great heads-up on a paper that informs a model to predict the outcome of conflict. Political scientist Bruce Bueno de Mesquita uses rational choice theory as the basis of this tool, which I would love to see with a dataset populated with Sri Lanka’s conflict metrics.

Bill also points to a detailed paper entitled Game Theory, Political Economy, and the Evolving Study of War and Peace by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita’s that is well worth a read.

Question is, even if (and this is a big if) war is based on rational choice theory as expounded here by this political scientist, can the same be said of peacebuilding?

War and war games

Image courtesy IGN.

Great article on More Intelligent Life on why war games based on (recent) history foster so much of controversy. As I noted in response to the post,

I would not be surprised if the identical game, with some new ahistorical maps based loosely on the Iraqi war theatre goes into production. The mistake seems to have been made in marketing the game as a re-enactment of a complex, violent chapter in the Iraq conflict. If one were to have called this something else, the controversy would be non-existent.

War games, much like Summer blockbusters, are films to escape from, not engaging with war. One aspect you’ve not dealt with are the so-called Serious Games and how they are being used to help promote conflict resolution.

For an article published about two years ago in the media on how serious games are helping conflict transformation, click here.

Nokia Siemens in Iran: Shame or all’s fair game for telcos?

Deep packet inspection is bad under any regime, no matter how benevolent. When a regime such as Iran today gets access to technology with the potential of DPI, you have a justifiable uproar on far more serious and urgent implications than delayed music downloads.

Global media over the past week pointed to Nokia and Siemens as having provided the Iranian regime with technology to detect and filter information they found inconvenient. According to a widely republished and quoted Wall Street Journal article on 22 June that the newspaper stands by, a system installed in Iran by Nokia Siemens Networks provides Iranian authorities with the ability to conduct deep-packet inspection of online communications to monitor the contents and track the source of e-mail, VoIP calls, and posts to social networking sites such as Twitter, MySpace and Facebook. As quoted by Wired, the newspaper also said authorities had the ability to alter content as it intercepted the traffic from a state-owned internet choke point.

Commenting on the story was Ben Roome, a spokesperson for Nokia Siemens Networks who noted in a blog post that,

I do want to say to the people commenting here if we’re (I’m) aware of the situation in Iran. We are (and I am), and it is mainly because of mobile phone video, photos and calls from across Iran, communicating events first hand as they happen, that we are so aware. As I said above: we had a choice as to whether we bring the Iranian people this mobile connectivity, in the knowledge that telecoms networks in Iran are required to have the ability to monitor voice calls as they do all over the world. We made that choice and believe there is a net benefit to the people of Iran.

The point made is that the world is angry about Iran, and sees horrific videos such as the murder of Neda Soltani, because of the ICT networks and foundations facilitated by Nokia Siemens Networks. The over one hundred comments to date on Ben’s blog post reveal the frustration and anger of people who point to the culpability of Nokia Siemens Networks in the violence that has gripped Iran today.

I suggested to some colleagues this morning that one can look at this issue from the perspective of power and accountability. The power of these DPI systems in Iran pale into insignificance with the capacity of what, for example, the US and its allies can monitor and intercept domestically and globally. But there is, at worst, retroactive judicial oversight in the US even when the Executive runs amok combined with the enabling Freedom of Information legislation. What can and should business do when this accountability and oversight is not present, and yet government’s ask for powerful technologies that can be used to undermine human dignity and human security?

But let’s not kid ourselves – you don’t do any business with a regime like Iran expecting them to give a free reign to rights, dissent and democracy. Is that a reason to not do any business? Not. Is that a reason to be up front to consumers about the business one does? Perhaps. Is that a reason to brush away a moral responsibility for the death of Neda Soltani?

Definitely not.

Post-war ICT and media

My last column in the Sunday Leader enumerated some ideas post-war government and the ICT Agency could champion to strengthen media freedom and e-governance respectively.

One blueprint worth emulating in post-war Sri Lanka for more open, accountable government comes from Vivek Kundra, the new federal chief information officer in the US under the Obama administration. Data.gov is a great example of how information placed in the public domain can stimulate creative thinking to shared challenges and development. The NY Times has a good write up about this.

Post-war government in Sri Lanka can also re-look at RTI legislation and meaningful community radio. As I noted in my column,

Post-war Sri Lanka cannot be what it was before the war, or during it. Tarun Tejpal, award winning Indian author and the brains behind one of India’s leading investigative journalism websites Tehelka.com, said that they were silent when India was at war with Pakistan, but openly critical of the defence establishment and government once the war was over. We have a different recent history – where independent media tried and failed to report the war in the public interest, with many journalists killed with impunity and forced into hiding or exile. There is no place for the vicious war against free media in post-war Sri Lanka. Likewise, if war militated against Right to Know legislation, renewed agitation by civil society must result in its rapid establishment. If Bangladesh with a military regime and India with a billion people could do it, so can we. While it may be too much and too early to ask Government to give up its vice grip of State media, decades of opposition to and censorship of real community radio must end. I was in Nissankamallapura two weeks ago, a small, relatively remote village in Polonnaruwa, to help 48 villages that have collectively lodged a request to set up Saru Praja Radio to broadcast on 96.1 FM news and information produced by villagers for their own community. It is a remarkable venture by peoples who are no strangers to the human cost of war. Post-war Sri Lankan must foster the development of such hyper-local media – media made by and for regions in the vernacular – that can fuel equitable, endogenous and sustainable development, precisely what the government desires. All of this supports the need for post-war governance to be transparent and accountable. A fraternal cabal that passes today for government and overrides parliament is incompatible with our democratic potential. Initiatives such as the new Open Government initiative under the Obama Administration in the US are instructive in this regard, with examples such as www.data.gov and www.regulations.gov useful for our own ICT Agency to champion, adapt and adopt along with of course initiatives to empower local and Provincial government. Everyone knows what needs to be done, but the war has always been an excuse for non-implementation.

Radios vs. Mobile

One of the most frequent responses I hear, generally from the likes of media experts at UNESCO, when I submit with growing evidence that mobile phones are the first and only device used by millions of people to get information and increasingly access email and the web, is that radios by far outnumber mobile phones in the developing world.

This basis is then used to downplay the importance of mobile phones as a mechanism of information production and dissemination amongst ‘poor’ and rural communities in particular. Radios, I am told, are far more effective because they cost less than mobiles, have a lower TCO (total cost of ownership), run of cheap and replaceable batteries, are free to use once bought and by far have the greatest number of people tuned in. The arguments generally come from those who have been responsible for setting up what a decade or two ago were forward thinking community radio stations, at least in principle. They never took off in countries like Sri Lanka. As Nalaka Gunewardene notes,

Meanwhile, community groups are not being issued broadcast licenses. Senior officials have privately explained that they fear airwaves will be misused for anti-social or political purposes. They have not, strangely enough, voiced such concerns about profit-making companies, some of whose channels are openly-aligned with political parties. A globally persistent myth holds that community radio has been thriving in Sri Lanka for two decades. In reality, these broadcasters are nothing more than rural transmissions of the fully state-owned and state-controlled Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation (SLBC). Yes, these stations are located in remote areas, involve local people in programme production and broadcast to a predominantly rural audience. But the bureaucracy in Colombo tightly-controls content: nothing remotely critical of the government in office is permitted.

Lirneasia now gives us the best evidence that these aging experts are behind the curve.

This graph from their research is pretty self-explantory and bloody interesting. It suggest that in India, there are already more phones than radios. In every single country surveyed, there were more TV’s in BOP households that radios. Pretty much destroys some shibboleths.

Two new sites for dissent

Came across two new sites for dissent and critical perspectives in Sri Lanka have cropped up recently.

Forgotten Diaries was started in June ‘08 and only has a handful of posts. However, the content in these posts is very thought provoking, though judging by the paucity of comments, it is unlikely that this blog is well known.

Just Dissent is brand new. Begun in March 2009 it already has content in English and Sinhala which is largely linking to wire reports on the web. The latest post at the time of writing, I am a Traitor, challenges apathy and encourages pro-active participation to strengthen democracy.

The idiom in Just Dissent is more immediate and visceral, whereas the prose in Forgotten Diaries, which features content from In Mutiny, is more measured. Both however offer new sites for debate and discussion for those connected to the web and interested in civic identity, nationalism, democracy and conflict transformation.

That’s two more valuable spaces in a context where independent media and the freedom of expression are almost non-existant.

ICTA’s E-Sri Lanka music video and the Year of English

Never mind that the Chief Operating Officer of ICTA Reshan Dewapura and our President don’t see eye to eye when it comes to IT literacy rates in Sri Lanka. For the President, our IT literacy rate is 23%, whereas for Reshan it’s 16%. IT literacy as some have pointed out is a politically dependent variable.

The President has declared 2009 as the year of English and Information Technology. This is a good thing, since many in his own administration stand to benefit immensely from the emphasis on developing competancies for good governance. I was interested to note that the President says,

English, on the other hand, will be our language to reach out to the world and access the global pool of knowledge and technology. As the national initiative on English gathers momentum and achieves desired results, I visualise in fact a trilingual Sri Lankan society in the long run. My policy framework, ‘Mahinda Chintana’, clearly lays down our policy on language. The inalienable link between language and culture is recognised and respected. To the people of my country, Sinhala and Tamil are not mere tools of communication. They encapsulate our values and world-views, give expression to our inner feelings and define our cultural categories. They embody the soul of our people. They confer to us our distinct identity. (Emphasis mine)

This is a very good basis of appreciating the pronouncement from Gen Sarath Fonseka that Sri Lanka belongs to the Sinhalese.

But back on to ICT and the video, of the millions that must have been spent producing this ostensibly to promote ICTA and its work, I’m not entirely convinced that it was the best use of resources? The video for example doesn’t feature at all real footage of real ICT use. Images of children listening to iPods is great optics, but far removed from reality. What about the superb work and thought leadership of Horizon Lanka Foundation and its work in Mahavilachchiya? Are there not visuals here of real strides in the adoption of ICT by rural communities not worth highlighting?

I don’t find the video particularly appealing or meaningful, but it may be addressing a different target group. What is tragically ironic however is the cover in which ICTA chooses to distribute the DVD and another CD soundtrack, has gems like the following:

“…Enabling each Lanka proudly raise his head like a ship’s strong mast
For the gamut of knowledge overflowing in the world through vast
Will be at finger-tips of the man ‘e-Sri Lanka’ will recast”

I have no idea what the devil this means. Perhaps ICTA’s aim here was to suggest that the programmes it promotes nationally are those that are most needed first within its own offices?