ICT for Peacebuilding (ICT4Peace)

Peter Wynn Thompson for The New York Times

A recent NY Times article on advances in video conferencing and its use, fuelled in large part by rising transport costs, brings together two aspects I have studied from the frame of peace negotiations - inter-cultural mediation and virtual interactions.

The article notes:

There is a certain paradox in telepresence, in that it is all to simulate the richest form of human interaction: people talking to each other, face to face. And it is not a perfect substitute. Ms. Smart, the chief of human resources for Accenture, still travels about 10 days a month. “You don’t learn about other cultures in telepresence,” she said. “You get things from being there, over breakfast and dinner, building relationships face to face.”

Telepresence is all the new rage. To the companies that make telepresence solutions, the term video conferencing to describe their products is as outrageous as calling a Alfa Romeo 8C Compretizione just a car. It so is not.

Cisco was the first off the block with this new generation of virtual meetings that uses a combination of positional audio and video cues, high-def screens undergirded by good broadband connections to make the entire video conferencing experience that much more real.

But therein lies the caveat for those of us in Sri Lanka. We don’t have good broadband, severely vitiating our ability to save the planet by using these technologies (and even the more humble but for most situations quite capable Skype Video).

For the countries that can and do use telepresence (and Skype Video) the potential for its use in mediation needs more serious study. I know of a couple of Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) providers who are now keenly looking at incorporating Skype Video into their ODR products (some already have Skype VOIP built in). Richard Susskind at the ODR Forum in Liverpool in April 2007 spoke about telepresence, but a year on in Victoria at the ODR Forum this year, no one who demonstrated their products to my knowledge had video as an integral part of the feature set.

As a slight aside, although the iPhone 3G doesn’t support it, most 3G Nokia’s and other phones support voice calls, enabling even those in the field to connect using video. My greatest problem with video calls is that they just don’t work for me. For one, holding up a camera to one’s face and talking just makes one loud and obnoxious. The resulting jitter results in migraines for everyone else. And the quality is really still quite poor.

But the question is does telepresence or at its most basic, Skype video, have the ability to build bridges across cultures? Or more specifically, does it do this any better than say email, POTS or VOIP? I think so and disagree with the assertion that you don’t learn anything about other cultures through online video interactions. At the most basic, there are the visual cues. For sure, such cues are mediated through the webcam (which is not the same as the cues one would experience in a real world F2F meeting) but for the sensitive speaker / mediator, they are still valuable markers of those “in the room” that are simply not available through email, a teleconference or even on VOIP.

I’ve worked from a home office set up for over two years. Most of my interactions are over email, but because of the deteriorating security conditions in Sri Lanka, voice communications related to human rights protection and humanitarian work in particular now go through Skype. I rarely use Skype video, but have used it once or twice quite well late in the night.

Point is, I communicate daily with a range of people across the world, work on peacebuilding, innovate and produce multimedia content all from an abysmal “broadband” connection. I avoid rush hour / school traffic and don’t even have an office space anymore in Colombo.

On the other hand, I have already logged more air miles this year than I did for all of 2007 and I can’t see that decreasing. My experience with work at the UN at a high-level is one example of group discussions and the management of competing group dynamics that simply cannot be managed virtually.

So I take the point that telepresence even today cannot replace real world F2F. But here’s the rub - given how far telepresence itself has come from the underwhelming video conferencing of yore, just how long do you think it will take for the next generation of systems to say holographically project 3D images of people around a table?

We already have mobile phones with mini projectors.

How long before we can project avatars of our friends wherever we are?

After purchasing an Apple iPod Touch recently, I really am quite gobsmacked at how powerful a device this is. There are certainly chinks - the accelerometer is temperamental, the iPhone 2.0 software has crashed more in the space of a month than OS X on my MacBook Pro has crashed in over two years, some apps are more unstable than others (pointing to a lack of quality control at Apple that vets all apps) and the “push” email and other services through MobileMe kills battery life to the extent that it is rendered useless.

But in terms of a music player, a video player and a mobile web browser this device is simply brilliant. The Nokia N series or the E series with Symbian don’t even come close, though the new Opera for Windows Mobile does seem to incorporate some of the best features of Safari on the iPod Touch (haven’t tried it).

Two apps that really stand out.

One, the WordPress App for the iPhone (and iPod Touch). Quite simply, in both design and functionality, it just rivals any PC as a blogging platform. The only drawback is that it is not as integrated with mobile Safari as I would have liked it to be (the iPod Touch and iPhone suffer a great deal from the lack of inbuilt copy / cut / paste features within and across apps) but for basic blogging and even to put up photos, this really works and well. The app is available on the Sri Lankan iTunes Store.

Best of all - it’s open source and free!

The other is not free but is a visual feast as well as extends the range of music on the iPhone / iPod Touch to many times more than what’s stored on the device. The Tuner for the iPhone / iPod Touch works over most “broadband” connections in Sri Lanka and basically is a mobile internet radio client with a snazzy interface. The higher bit rate stations won’t play at peaktime on SLT’s ADSL “broadband” but this is not surprising. On Sundays though and in the night, all’s good and the higher bit rate stations (anything above 96kbps) sound very good. There’s a HUGE range of stations to select from and it just guarantees that you’ll never be at an airport or lounge listening to Yanni or Kenny G again.

Click here to download the app (link connects you to the iTunes App Store - you’ll need version iTunes 7.7 or above)

Working on my iPod Touch recently at a wifi enabled cafe in Colombo, I realised that I was checking email, blogging, listening to streaming music and could monitor the Vikalpa YouTube Channel, read the entire NY Times and Time magazine (even offline), all my newsfeeds and access reminders and OCR scanned notes (through Evernote) and keep up with the goz on Facebook all from this one device.

Magic.

Related to the incredible comment by our genius Inspector General of Police to record being raped using a mobile phone, the Sunday Times carried a timely cartoon yesterday.

Of course, it may be just a tad more difficult to record crime and rape in Jaffna using mobiles.

Deane kindly pointed me to the relatively new Government Information Department’s YouTube channel.

Along with the expected drivel, there’s also some great historical footage to be found (e.g. content from the Non-Aligned Movement Summit held in Colombo 1976).

Unsurprisingly, there’s only stuff here in Sinhala. Tamil, apparently, is not a language the Government Film Unit or the Information Department cares too much about. Perhaps that’s because according to Lankapuvath, Sri Lanka’s state owned news agency, everyone other than the Sinhala Buddhists are “lesser folks”.

It’s great to see the Government waking up to the possibilities of new media.

However, it’s really sad to see the all too familiar blinkered and exclusive Sinhala-Buddhist mentality inform the Informational Department’s understanding of and approach to a larger Sri Lankan identity online.

Inspired by a post on Burning Bridge to do a count of the number of times all the videos on the Vikalpa YouTube channel had been viewed, I was pleased to note that the videos had been collectively viewed over 104,000 times to date. The channel itself has been viewed over 5,000 times. 

Writing in October 2007 I said,

Coupled with VOR Radio, we want to explore ways through which digital media and mobile devices such as the N-series Nokia phones with their built in mobile blogging, multimedia, wireless and video editing features can be used to strengthen the voice of citizens in support of democratic governance, human rights and peace.

We’ve come a long way in the space of a few months. Featuring senior political figures, trade unionists and media rights activists, school and university students, IDPs and refugees, Members of Parliament, award winning human rights defenders and peace activists, rarely heard voices from Jaffna on ground conditions in the embattled region and exclusive footage of significant socio-political events, the channel features nearly 200 short videos in Sinhala, Tamil and English.

Currently featured on the channel is a professional English production on the life of Nadarajah Raviraj, a prominent human rights activist and Tamil politician assassinated in Colombo in 2006.

Nearly all videos have been filmed using a Nokia N93i camera phone to raise awareness on the potential of mobiles to strengthen democracy and bear witness to abuses of power, human rights violations and violence. 

We generated interest from / have been featured on Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), France24’s Observers initiative, Global Voices Online and Witness, the source of my inspiration for starting this initiative in Sri Lanka (though the videos are shot, edited and produced by a talented and brave colleague).

Some SMS based news services in Sri Lanka have a rather peculiar understanding of news - no reports received for example when over 1,500 Tamils were arrested and detained late last year perhaps because some operators place restrictions on the nature of news that can be sent over their networks. 

Particularly in this context, I’m very glad that JNW is now back on Dialog. The quality, timeliness and importantly, the accuracy of their news updates, from experience, is impeccable. JNW is the SMS based news and information service that started it all in Sri Lanka. Even though today one finds a range of SMS news services from Ada Derana to the Daily Mirror, none have really matched up to JNW. This blog was the first to highlight the service over two years ago when it launched and since then I’ve written many detailed posts on it, it’s business and revenue model and strategies for its growth and expansion. 

A programme that looks at JNW and its creator Chamath Ariyadasa can be seen below.

Read the story behind the video here and a review of JNW’s performance in reporting an event related to the on-going conflict in Sri Lanka and in emergency warning.

Instructions on how to subscribe here.

Google is making it easier to search for instances of key words and phrases used by the US presidential candidates in videos uploaded to YouTube.

With the help of our speech recognition technologies, videos from YouTube’s Politicians channels are automatically transcribed from speech to text and indexed. Using the gadget you can search not only the titles and descriptions of the videos, but also their spoken content. Additionally, since speech recognition tells us exactly when words are spoken in the video, you can jump right to the most relevant parts of the videos you find.  

Thing is, it’s not quite there yet. Searching for Sri Lanka for example brings up Obama’s well known reference to the country during his appearance at Google but also brings up a wholly unrelated video:

In late 2006 I saw for the first time real time video transcription during Strong Angel III that was far more impressive in that its accuracy was (at the time) higher than what one would have expected. For archived video, I would have thought that with all the computing power Google has at its disposal that the accuracy would be that much better.

It’s not as if the technology is new either. Podzinger used to do it, and very well, with audio (they’ve since made it into a full blown corporate product). Blinkx, started by Sri Lankan Suranga Chandratillake also seems to be doing it, though I’ve not used it myself. Search engines like PodScope are also based on similar technologies (the algorithms for text extraction from audio or video should be more or less the same). 

As Google admits:

Speech recognition is a difficult problem that hasn’t yet been completely solved, but we’re constantly working to refine our algorithms and improve the accuracy and relevance of these transcribed results.

My interest in this type of technology is to resolve (data) conflicts by holding politicians, amongst other influential figures in authority, accountable to what they say by making it easier to search through archives of their public statements (Ameritocracy is a great text only example of this). However, this technology can also give rise to conflict. The heading for this post comes from an error in the speech recognition that attributes “shit” to Barack Obama when he actually says “shift” (again during the Q & A session at Google HQ around 8 months ago).

Not good. 

Given that Barack speaks with an American accent and that the Google Gadget only indexes American politicians / public figures, I expected the algorithms catch the nuances of inflection and delivery unique to the regions of that country.

Perhaps an idea would be to make this participatory, so that the search results can be qualified by users thereby increasing the accuracy of the engine over time?

Using Safari on Leopard, I also found that I couldn’t go directly to the point in any video where the phrase was “found”, though this may be a chink with YouTube’s flash player.

Google’s on to something here and though it is certainly useful, there’s a long way more to go. And with the gadzillion servers they have at their beck and call, can’t think of any better company than Google to crack the audio / video transcription problems. 

In the meanwhile, let’s just hope that McCain’s camp doesn’t get too worked up over what Barack didn’t say…

The cult of Apple - customers camping outside the Manhattan Apple store to buy the iPhone 2.0. Photo taken by author on 9th July 2008.

I bought my iPod Touch around a month ago and was keen to play around with the new version of the phone software. The main challenge I faced was with iTunes registration - the US iTunes / Apps Store only accepts a credit card with a US billing address and there is absolutely no way to download the new apps without an iTunes account. Calling BT Options, from where I bought my Macbook Pro, didn’t help - they either didn’t know or didn’t want to tell how to access the iTunes store from Sri Lanka. Didn’t want to invest in a iTunes Gift Card because I wasn’t sure whether it would give me access to the Apps Store (I didn’t want to buy music).

After scouring the internet, came across a solution that I used to create a new account with my Sri Lankan VISA that worked perfectly. The downside is that the iTunes on my Touch doesn’t work anymore (says correctly that it isn’t supported in Sri Lanka) but everything else does - including the Touch based Apps Store as well as the version that runs on iTunes on my Mac.

Of course, to run the new Apps, you’ll need the software upgrade for the iPod Touch. It usually costs around $10, but I was able to download a torrent of the file and it worked perfectly.

Installing new apps is a cinch and I’ve already got the Apple Remote working with my iTunes library, which really is very nicely done. I’m in two minds about the new Facebook App. I loved the clean, fast and beautifully designed web based Facebook version for the iPhone / iPod Touch. The FB app incorporates the chat functionality but for me is less useful than the web based version customised for the device. There’s still no search for the Inbox on either version and on the App based FB, no easy way to get access to the photos of friends uploaded a while ago. The slideshow of the photos on the FB app look and feel better than the web version, so in sum, I think I’ll have to use both depending on what I want to do.

I registered with Apple’s new push email / push calendar service MobileMe and it too just works perfectly and as advertised. Change / add something on my Mac and it appears on my Touch and vice versa, almost immediately.

The new Evernote app is much better than the previous web-based version which was also tailored for the iPhone / iPod Touch. Evernote itself is an amazing product and has made my Rolodex / Business Card holders irrelevant. I now store everything on Evernote and it’s instantly searchable.

I also use the new NY Times app, which downloads all the articles to the device for offline reading / access. Takes a while on my SLT ADSL based wifi connection to get the content down the pipe, but once its done, I can go through the articles at leisure.

What’s struck me is how easy it is to read text on the Touch - the display is incredibly crisp, bright and clear. I’m comparing it to the first PDA I bought 4 years ago - a Palm Tungsten E and while that was certainly one of the best at the time, this one really is miles ahead of any other mobile display I’ve seen. Given the paucity of good movies on trans-atlantic flights coupled with the fact that I fly so often that I often know what’s on offer by heart on various airlines, I now just rip a few new / my favourite movies to my Touch and watch them on the flight - the picture quality and sound are both terrific and I love the fact that I now no longer have to pull out my Mac to check email or connect with friends via chat / Facebook.

On the downside, I’ve found that the horizontal orientation oftentimes does not work as advertised. It takes a while for the Touch to register that it’s been turned and even then, it doesn’t often re-orient the screen. A lot of the new Apps such as the FB / NY Times versions actually work better in landscape mode though. Another big problem is that the new MobileMe push-services really drains the battery. I have set up the device to check email every 15 minutes on 4 (Gmail / Google Apps based) accounts along with now a MobileMe account. Before, with just the Gmail / Google Apps accounts, the device had over 50% charge from a full charge when left overnight. Now, with the push email, I get a warning that the charge is less than 10% in the morning. I’ve read that this is more of a problem with the iPhone over 3G.

Overall though, I’m just amazed at this product. It really is magic to see it work esp. in New York, where touching the map gives you the location of where you are and if you want, turn by turn directions to where you want to go in the city.

A couple of years ago I said that devices such as this would revolutionise the practice of Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) which many practitioners at the time staunchly opposed (see iPhone and ODR - Open Sourcing, Open Standards and Mobile phones, cheap laptops, Open Source and ODR - The killer trio). At the ODR Forum in Victoria, Canada this year I challenged the audience to come up with apps that run on mobiles (including devices other than the iPhone, though the iPhone singlehandedly seems to have awakened most Americans to the mobile web) given what clearly is already a very large market.

I’m also amazed at just how much devotion, fanatical even, that Apple attracts as a technology and web services company. Before the launch of the iPhone 2.0, the NY Times Technology section was awash with articles on it. Some of that is down to marketing. Most of it is just a reflection of just how much buzz a single product from Apple can create amongst a customer base that is by all accounts, growing apace.

By happy coincidence I found myself in Manhattan on the week of the launch and it was really quite something to see people camping outside their flagship 5th Ave store days before the launch, just to be one of the first to get their hands on a device that save for the 3G functionality, is really not that much of an upgrade from the original iPhone. For those who were the first to buy the iPhone and were also first in line to buy the new iPhone 3G, this would also mean that they would have spent in excess of over US$ 800 just for the devices, leaving aside AT&T calling plans and actual data transfer / voice charges. Clearly, this is a cash cow for Apple and for the mobile carrier.

Single-handedly, Apple has revolutionised mobile devices and the mobile web. The new Apps are to me a trend that I had spoken of a few years ago - seeing the smaller screens of mobile devices not as a weakness, but a strength.

Can’t wait for the WordPress App that will allow me to blog through the device!

UPDATE - 15 July 2008

Thankfully, it’s not just me who found Apple’s MobileMe dod not live up to the hype. Worse, it killed by iPod Touch battery life to the point where I’ve just taken the push MobileMe email / calendar / contacts off my Touch and gone back to syncing the old-fashioned way through iTunes. Battery life now back to what it was.  

The Facebook app keeps crashing and reset my Touch once. I’ve now gone back to using the web based iPhone Facebook version, which works very nicely. The only real advantage I can see with the app is better photo viewing and the chat functionality. Everything else works / looks better with the web based version. 

Installed the Netnewswire app which is a, at the moment, far better than Google Reader. Got the iPhone / Touch version of Meebo going. Simple, clean and just works.

Download the complete works of Shakespeare to boot.

“Sri Lankan participatory media projects do not yet have mass audiences.”

Burning Bridges makes this statement in a recent post on participatory media’s impact on abductions in Sri Lanka.

I wonder though, should they?

Does it require a “mass audience” to make an impact? I think the answer to this depends on place, context, issue, content quality and other factors but I think that in some (or many?) cases of user generated content / participatory media / citizen journalism the fact is that it has an impact more than what one would associate with mere audience numbers. In other words, perhaps who is aware of CJ / reads it / bases their decisions on it is oftentimes more important than how many have access to and consume CJ?

As an aside, articles on Groundviews are republished regularly on the Daily Mirror, leading to one aspiration of mine to facilitate the creation of and publish citizen journalism of a standard comparable to and even on occasion exceeding mainstream English print media being fulfilled to a degree two years since I introduced the concept to Sri Lanka. Also noteworthy is the fact that blog posts / blogosphere content are increasingly featured in Sri Lanka traditional / mainstream media, oftentimes without prior permission of the original content producer.

But Groundviews is perhaps the wrong example. Many other blogs I read on Sri Lanka aren’t republished in a newspaper to reach hundreds of thousands, but I would argue that many of them have a loyal readership, that this readership often clicks through to links that the post refers to and that is from a large age and location demographic. As Burning Bridges goes on to note in this regard,

They do, however, have the attention of the policy world, and of elites in and diaspora from Sri Lanka. Increasingly, they have strategies to get their work into mass media outlets, whether as columns in newspapers, or as reports about their work. Cumulatively, they have managed to both raise the profile of the issue of abductions, and to help direct resources and energy into better research and monitoring. It remains a question as to whether they’ve managed to affect the political landscape.

That I manage to regularly frustrate, inter alia, the Government’s Peace Secretariat as evinced by their assertion earlier this year that I “provide solace and relief to terrorists” is a good thing keeping in mind the nature of the Rajapakse regime, which is largely and viciously intolerant of competing narratives on war, peace, human rights and governance in Sri Lanka.

CJ also has a long tail. Articles I’ve published two years ago are still being read and have, over the months, accumulated hundreds of thousands of page-views cumulatively. When speaking about affecting the political landscape, it’s important to think of what that actually means.

For me, affecting the political landscape is not necessarily change in our lifetimes. Sometimes, it may well be. But a violent ethno-political conflict that pre-dated by birth may well continue after my death (given the oftentimes truncated life-spans of those who articulate peace through peaceful means in Sri Lanka) with the point that someone needs to bear witness to the country’s social, political, economic cultural and religious timbre, amongst others. A living history as it were, from a defined perspective, that in relation to others can present richer, more multi-faceted versions of history than that which would otherwise be possible.

This is why I am interested in participatory media. I would be elated to realise political change on account of the content featured on say Groundviews, but I would not be dissapointed if this does not happen any time soon. The content on the site and the larger content on the SL blogosphere, including all of that which I don’t agree with, are deeply valuable in a country precisely for the reason that they offer a greater spectrum of opinion than what I find in traditional media today - which is silent by fear or coercion.

This is a larger debate on course, but I wanted to place the thoughts that occurred to me when reading Burning Bridge’s post:

• That as we move forward and media evolves / fragments, “mass audiences” may well be impossible
• The assumption that “mass audiences” influence political thinking to any degree
• The architectonics of partisan politics in Sri Lanka and how it has, in my mind, never been the case that the “mass audience” has determined our political future but the vision (good or bad) or a few political leaders
• That political change is measured in a timeline shorter than that which gave rise to violent conflict
• The lack of recognition of participatory media as witness(es) to events, issues and processes than traditional media cannot or will not cover
• That the State and the resources is has at its command is and for the foreseeable future will be stronger, more pervasive and dare I say, more convincing than most participatory media to most people who don’t have access to alternatives viewpoints through web media
• That the larger international human rights groups and NGOs rarely look at participatory media produced in the country and seek to strengthen these voices instead of their own
• That a “mass audience” without media literacy skills and fed on propaganda can be influenced by alternative media / CJ which they would invariably see as marginal and parochial
• That there is a desire for all participatory media to peg success with appealing to a “mass audience”, which ignores the many ways in which CJ helps strengthen conflict transformation
• That many still judge the effectiveness, reach and sustainability of CJ by the same yardsticks used to judge traditional media, without realising that new measures need to be created to more fully capture the dynamism and texture of CJ production, dissemination and consumption

Press reports indicate that Sri Lanka’s new Inspector General of Police has a novel idea for the use of mobile phones.

Inspector General Jayantha Wickremeratne, who assumed duties last week, says camera phones could play a bigger role in crime busting.

“If someone comes to rape you, use your mobile phone to record it,” he said addressing journalists in Sri Lanka’s hill capital, Kandy yesterday.

What an amazing idea! So all the victim has to do is to, among other things,:

(a) Ask the would be rapist to hang in there (no pun intended) while the phone is suitably positioned, the camera switched on and recording begins
(b) Take frequent time outs from the act of rape to ensure that the recording captures the rapist’s face and the actual act, without which of course the footage would be useless
(c) Ask the rapist permission to keep the possession of the camera phone and the footage of the rape, so that it can be subsequently used as evidence

I wonder what other ideas our genius IGP has up his sleeve?