Groundviews wins a Manthan South Asia Award

I’m pretty pleased that Groundviews was awarded a prestigious Manthan Award South Asia under the e-news category. The grand jury’s evaluation of the site noted, “What no media dares to report, Groundviews publicly exposes. It’s a new age media for a new Sri Lanka… Free media at it’s very best!”

This year, Groundviews was the only Sri Lankan initiative featured in the e-news category and also the first Sri Lankan initiative to win an award in this category. The site was also shortlisted in the e-news category in 2008.

This is the second prestigious international award for the site. In 2007, the year Groundviews was launched, it won an Award of Excellence in New Communications from Society for New Communications Research.

We hit 1,000 posts this year, and what I wrote on the site at the time bears repeating in light of the Manthan Award,

Over three years, Groundviews has borne witness to that which traditional print and electronic media did not, and for well-known reasons, could not. Post-war for example, our path-breaking coverage of the situation facing IDPs in Menik Farm was picked up and featured on leading domestic and international media, including the New York Times, Al Jazeera and the BBC. The wealth of debate and submissions online already makes Groundviewsunique as an online resource and platform for engaging discussion in Sri Lanka. We are globally recognised as an authoritative voice on Sri Lanka and were the first to feature a mobile version, and the first to leverage social networking platforms like Facebook and  Twitter.

At a conservative average word count per submission, we now feature well over one and a half million words on the site of original content. Recently, we hosted the world premiere of a short film on one of Sri Lanka’s least known communities of African origin. Banyan News Reporters, a series of satirical articles on key issues related to war, human rights and peace has generated a cult following, and is sui generis in Sri Lanka as an innovative way to flag issues of significant concern in cycles of violence.  Groundviewshas commissioned award winning Sri Lankan poets and dramatists to bear witness to violence. The site has also featured compelling and innovative photojournalism that explores, post-war, hope for a just and enduring peace amongst our citizens. A series of articles commemorating the anti-Tamil pogrom of 1983 and the race riots of 1958, along with a series of short-form videos, remain invaluable resources for the student of conflict resolution and the discernible historian.

Over 160 authors have contributed to the 1,000 posts published on the site to date. There are over 9,300 comments to date generated by this original content, penned by from those as diverse as senior diplomats in governmentand retired civil servants to university students and those writing into online media for the first time in English. These comments alone feature nearly one million words. Framed by our progressive editorial guidelines, these comments are invaluable insights from citizens in Sri Lanka and from the diaspora unique to the site. For example, The Internment – A Collective Punishment? by Dr. Devanesan Nesiah has been read over twenty-four thousand times and mind-bogglingly generated well over sixty-thousand words of critical comments through over 140 responses to date.

Our 1000^th post is a significant milestone in a quest to define journalism as it should be in Sri Lanka, and a peace with dignity for all which we believe is so much more than the absence of war.

Keeping empathy alive: New media and storytelling on disasters

I delivered a presentation today at a workshop organized by South Asian Women in Media looking at media coverage of disasters. In the first part, heavily influenced by Nicholas Kristof’s Advice for Saving the World, I suggested story ideas and angles better able to generate and vitally, sustain, audience interest in disasters and their aftermath.

In the second part, I used my own experience in using new media to cover humanitarian disasters to flag new tools, platforms and techniques vital to journalists. I also noted how journalists could now avail themselves of a plethora of web and mobile based technologies to get, disseminate, archive information on and sustain interest in disasters and crises.

The presentation is available as a full colour, high resolution PDF here.

New Tactics in Human Rights: A catalogue of ideas and resources

The one time I have participated in a discussion hosted by New Tactics in Human Rights was around a discussion on leverage mobile phones for advocacy and activism. This page alone is well worth a visit to the website.

The group has now come out with New Tactics in Human Rights: A Resource for Practitioners a compelling manual looking at how new media, ICTs and campaign strategies inspired by human rights advocacy and activism from around the world can be leveraged to strengthen the protection of human rights.

The almost 200 page report, available for download here in English and a number of other languages, is essential reading for human rights activists and a vital resource in any library.

Visualizing a future President’s promises

As Sri Lanka heads into Presidential elections on 26th January 2010, we can expect both the incumbent Executive and former Army Commander Sarath Fosenka, the two leading candidates, make all manner of promises and statements through media interviews, speeches and their respective manifestos.

It’s tough to make sense of this tsunami of words. It is vital however for public interest journalism to bear witness, document and help citizenry understand the statements and promises made by those aspiring for the highest public office in the country.

Never done before in Sri Lankan journalism, I applied information visualization to analyze the key statements made by Sarath Fonseka to date. The resulting story is now on Groundviews – Visualising key speeches and submissions of Sarath Fonseka.

This is no different to what was done with Obama’s important speech recently, calling for changes in US policy and troop strength levels in Afghanistan.

Will mainstream print media follow suit and use visualizations to help voters understand the key policies and differences between the two leading candidates?

And in a country such as ours, if traditional media were to embrace these new models and tools for journalism (which are free to wit), would election campaigns be more open, accountable and responsive to voter demands? Would it be more difficult for candidates and the President elect to rescind or forget promises and statements? In seeing vital emphases, trends as well as silences through such visualizations, can citizens and journalists themselves ask better questions from candidates about their policies? Finally, how can institutions like the Sri Lankan College of Journalism embrace these new techniques in journalism, so that students passing out are not hostage to an archaic pedagogy and conception of journalism?

Communications tapping, taping and paranoia in Sri Lanka

An excerpt from a story published in the Sunday Leader, 29th November 2009, demonstrates the reach of communications surveillance in Sri Lanka, and the sheer paranoia of the Rajapakse administration that drives it.

Painfully aware of the chinks in their armor the former Chief of Defense Staff could exploit, the Rajapaksas have moved swiftly, decisively and of course, ruthlessly. The Sunday Leader learns that state intelligence has been tapping both the land and mobile phones belonging to Sarath Fonseka, his family, staff and senior aides for months.

Even ministers, officers at the Defence Ministry, and senior Presidential aides who are known to have associated with Fonseka, are now said to have had their phones tapped. And in the latest bout of paranoia following Fonseka’s formal announcement of his candidacy, it is reported that editors and defence correspondents who have had any contact with the General are now being wire tapped.

Of course surveillance of opposition politicians and anti government editors is simply the de facto state of affairs in this state of serendipity. But the extent of the government’s current bout of surveillance is Orwellian and reminiscent of the most paranoid and sinister of authoritarian dictatorships. And surveillance is not restricted to wire taps — several key opposition figures are now being constantly shadowed, kept in the sights of government operatives day and night.

Initially, phone tapping was handled by the rather shady State Intelligence Service (SIS) but the government’s need to eavesdrop is such that the Military Intelligence corps has also begun tapping phones, with assistance from the Army Signals Corps.
Headed by a Brigadier specialising in telecommunications, there are specialised groups within the intelligence corps for tapping, taping and reporting vital information to superiors.

Superiors inevitably from the Directorate of Military Intelligence (DMI) and SIS who report to the Ministry of Defence what they have heard and await further orders. The details regarding phone tapping were leaked to The Sunday Leader by an officer involved in the tapping. But despite the brazenness and openness of the surveillance now being conducted, under the law of this Lankan land the tapping of any land or mobile phone conversation is illegal.

Of course, it is well known that the law in Sri Lanka is somewhat optional. What is particularly outstanding in this case however, is that this abuse of individuals’ constitutional right to privacy are not being carried out for the security of the nation, but to secure the interests of the Rajapaksa regime.

Sarath Fonseka and his associates aren’t having their phones tapped because they pose a threat to the citizens of this nation, but because they pose a threat to the absolute power of this regime. And for all the talk of patriotism, that ultimately is the thinking that drives this regime — the nation recedes into insignificance when the administration’s interests are threatened.

And phone tapping isn’t the only instance where the national interest and this nation’s law has been subordinated to the government self interest.

Also read Intercepting mobile communications: A cogent case for truth-seeking and slow news?

Intercepting mobile communications: A cogent case for truth-seeking and slow news?

Even if most of us are powerless to completely evade it completely, the pitfalls of mobile phone intercepts are well documented and known. However, two articles recently published on the web can be read as somewhat justifying the use of material thus collected for truth seeking after an act of terrorism. Whether such use justifies ab initio the clandestine harvesting of voice and data from consumers is a debatable point, particularly in regimes significantly less democratic than the US and India.

England’s Guardian newspaper reports on its blog an experiment by Wikileaks to place on public record more than 500,000 intercepted pager messages, many from US officials, at the time of the World Trade Centre attacks in New York on 9th September 2001.

The experiment by whistleblowing website Wikileaks includes pager messages sent on the day by officials in the Pentagon, the New York police and witnesses to the collapse of the twin towers. Wikileaks said the messages would show a “completely objective record of the defining moment of our time”.

Emphasis mine. In a similar vein, the Lede of the New York Times reports almost a year after the horrific terrorist attacks in Mumbai that,

… Channel 4 News in Britain had obtained and broadcast excerpts from those intercepted phone calls, between the attackers and people apparently directing them. This audio was also used in a documentary produced by Channel 4 and HBO, which was broadcast last summer in Britain is airing in the United States this week.

The Channel 4 video is chilling, demonstrating clearly how mobile phone communications were central to the terrorist attacks.

Distracted by wide screen monitors?

Implications for advocacy against mobile phone and communications monitoring
We know that the terrorists in Mumbai used Blackberry’s to communicate with home base and monitor news reports. Does this knowledge justify the Indian government’s threat to hack into Blackberry communications a few months before the attacks last year?

Both examples above point to extremely sophisticated, wide ranging signals and communications intelligence regimes in both countries, able to access the communications of specific mobile devices and numbers post facto. As noted in the Lede,

Wikileaks would not reveal the source for the leak, but hinted: “It is clear that the information comes from an organisation which has been intercepting and archiving US national telecommunciations since prior to 9/11.

This strongly suggests that both data and voice of a wide range of numbers (maybe even of all consumers?) are being recorded either by the telcos themselves and / or by government intelligence agencies.

Given the increasing sophisticated and ubiquity of signals and communications intelligence, it is reasonable to expect that every terrorist act today gives cause for more encroachment into private communications. For example, this is clear even in the United Kingdom, when in 2008 it was brought to light that it was the intention of the British Government to create a database to record every phone call, e-mail and time spent on the internet by all citizens.

A common argument will be that these measures are necessary to protect the public in a context where terrorism relies on the same public infrastructure and communications channels to plans its attacks as ordinary citizens.

Will then a mark of democracy in the future be the open knowledge and contestation of these signals and communication intelligence regimes in the media by civil society, such as we find in the UK and US? If not, how can we discern between the ostensibly pro bono publico monitoring of communications in more robust democracies and the more sinister, parochial monitoring of communications in regimes like Iran, Saudi Arabia and China?

A case for slow-news?
Finally, I go back to the justification of Wikileaks to publish the records of pager messages sent after the World Trade Centre attacks. What it refers to as an objective record is actually a plethora of hugely subjective, partial and inaccurate messages. Any real time analysis of these messages could not have in any meaningful way contributed to situational awareness or policy decisions. As the Guardian notes, the messages “…show how panic and rumour began to spread on the day, and are likely to fuel conspiracy theories about the attacks.”

Dan Gillmor, using the more recent example of the shootings in America’s Fort Hood, writes about the need for a ’slow news’ movement. As he notes,

I rely in large part on gut instincts when I make big decisions, but my gut only gives me good advice when I’ve immersed myself in the facts about things that are important. This applies, more than ever, to news, where we need to be skeptical of just about everything we read, listen to and watch, though not equally skeptical. A corollary to that is increasingly clear: to wait a bit, for evidence that is persuasive, before deciding what’s true and what’s not.

It comes down to this: The faster the news accelerates, the slower I’m inclined to believe anything I hear — and the harder I look for the coverage that pulls together the most facts with the most clarity about what’s known and what’s speculation. Call it slow news. Call it critical thinking. Call it anything you want. Give some thought to adopting it for at least some of your media consumption, and creation.

Dan’s full blog post, which refers to the work of Ethan Zuckerman as well, is linked to national security, in that policy decisions to counter terrorism taken on the basis of communications intelligence may be based on information that’s inaccurate, partial and in some cases, deliberately misleading. This is especially the case in a context where with a shocked and enraged citizenry, a government is forced to act upon, and rate more highly, intelligence it knows is suspect. There is also the flip side, where in the immediate aftermath of a terrorist attack known to have been coordinated using public telecoms infrastructure and channels, an unscrupulous government can more easily justify and embed communications monitoring for its own ends.

As Dan notes, the answer could lie in media literacy. But media literacy is pegged to the freedom of expression, sufficient literacy, education and access to alternative media. Fabrice Florin’s NewsTrust.net offers one compelling model of news reporting that fosters critical appreciation of online content. There are others. Coupled with an education in critical thinking, they can be a solid defense against mobs and riots instigated by disinformation, misinformation and misguided government policies that exacerbate conflict and act as a force-multiplier to terrorism.

A billion for a billion: WFP tackles hunger through the web

You know its bound to fail, but embracing the web and social networking in the manner WFP has needs to be recognised, celebrated and supported as best one can.

As reported in UN Dispatch, the World Food Program launched a new campaign, a billion for a billion. The idea is to link the 1 billion internet users around the world with the 1 billion who are chronically hungry.

WFP offers a plethora of ways through which you can raise awareness of the campaign and through it, the challenge of meeting the needs of those who are hungry around the world. WFP uses an array of social networking tools, and more traditional multimedia techniques in its campaign. At first, it almost looks like an overkill, but there’s something here for everyone interested in financially supporting WFP’s endeavour, or creating awareness on it through Facebook and Twitter.

Heck, there’s even an international short form film competition in collaboration with YouTube.

Though very rarely found in massive projects such as this, some form of independent after action review would be useful in ascertaining what technologies and methods worked the best, and what failed. In both cases, learning why can be immensely helpful in the design and implementation of similar initiatives in the future.

Tamil not an official language in some e-gov sites in Sri Lanka?

I wrote in April 2008 that,

“You know there’s something seriously wrong with e-gov when the humanitarian section of official website of the President of Sri Lanka has only a single mention of a human (though one wonders whether the person mentioned also fell into the animal welfare directives of the Mahinda Chintana)…. From the non-functional and dysfunctional to the blatantly racist, Sri Lanka’s so called e-gov framework is a mess that does not in any way hold government more responsive, accountable and transparent to citizens.”

Lankanewspapers ran a story on 5th November flagging enduring concerns regarding the use of Tamil on government websites. The low resolution image below, taken from the story, notes a number of problems – from the complete absence of Tamil on some website to the incorrect use of the language in others.

If we seek reconciliation after thirty years of war, the least we can do is to implement language policies on all government sites? Perhaps ICTA is too caught up in its own rhetoric and the wasteful production of outrageous music videos to care?

Moomeo: A perfect site for whistleblowers and anti-corruption initiatives?

Moomeo is a relatively new site based on a powerful, simple idea. It creates a webpage out of any email sent to post@moomeo.com. This website comes with easy links to share it on Facebook, Twitter and anywhere else on the web. Importantly, it does not show the sender of the email, ensuring that her / his identity is a secret. However, Moomeo does have a clear disclosure policy, which means that your identity can be revealed if you use an email that is tied to your name, or a well known online identity associated with you. So rule of thumb, if you are going to send a potential explosive email, it’s best to do it from an email that cannot be traced back to you.

This caveat aside, Moomeo is a tremendously easy way to get sensitive information out into the public domain. Sites likes Wikileaks also Publishes and comments on leaked documents alleging government and corporate misconduct, but can be daunting for non-technical users to add information on to quickly and securely. Moomeo has a distinct advantage in this regard.

An example of an email I penned to test the system, and instantly available online, can be viewed here. Moomeo’s platform allows for comments, comment subscription via email and RSS and integration with leading social networks.

Moomeo supports attachments, does not need registration, and is free.

Who in Sri Lanka use this first? And will this site also be banned or blocked if, for example, revelations related to war crimes make their way on to it?

Journalism, civil society and mobile networks

Jude Mathurine from Rhodes University has an interesting presentation on the impact of mobile phone based use of social networks in Africa.

I’ve not yet come across a comparable study of new media’s use and impact in Sri Lanka, but the points on slides 3 and 7, noting that the Internet is still an elite medium in Africa, holds true here as well. Jude points to traditional media’s inability to grasp the potential of new media. Many examples of this can also be found in Sri Lanka, including for example this recent post of mine and the use of Wikipedia by the Sunday Times.

Jude’s more interesting submissions are in the slides that follow, looking at the growth of the mobile web in Africa and the use of SMS for citizen journalism. Mobiles in Sri Lanka are still used far more for entertainment and one-to-one communications than as a tool for participating in governance and public oversight. The participation in new forms of journalism through mobiles is not yet prevalent in Sri Lanka, where web access is still largely through PCs. Of late, several mobile phone companies have been running advertisements for mobile phone based Facebook access, but again, the potential of this for organising flash mobs, or even just the dissemination of information, is poor. Services such as JNW pioneered the use of SMS as a platform for the dissemination of news, but few NGOs have picked up freely available technologies like FrontlineSMS to aid their advocacy and outreach. Mainstream media in Sri Lanka remains locked into a PC dominated mindset at best – there is not a single traditional media site that is mobile phone friendly. LBO and Groundviews remain the only websites that render content automatically for mobile phone screens.

Jude’s conclusion that social media can be important space for public discourse on democratisation and development especially among youth is reflected in Sri Lanka as well, through existing examples such as Pissu Poona on Facebook and new forms of dissent online that emerged during and just after the end of war.

Best practices and potential for improved information flows in media and civil society is a field and desk research based report published by the Centre for Policy Alternatives I edited in December 2008 that looks closely at how civil society and NGOs in Sri Lanka can use traditional, alternative and new media techniques in their advocacy. Jude’s conclusions resonate widely and deeply in the recommendations proposed.