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?

From the 23rd to 30th of this month, Groundviews will feature articles that remember the anti-Tamil riots of July 1983 and 1958. Almost all exclusively written for Groundviews, the authors will range from award winning poets to renown academics, novelists, Members of Parliament and others from civil society.

A special archive for these articles can be accessed here.

The ICT4Peace Foundation’s ICT4Peace wiki, that I manage, was featured in the Communications Initiative ICT4D section recently.

As noted on the wiki, the ”inventorisation” process revolves around the use of an edit-able wiki to share information about how ICTs - e.g., personal computers, mobile phones, and the internet - are being used to facilitate effective and sustained communication between all stakeholders involved in crisis management, humanitarian aid, and peacebuilding.

For more details of the Foundation please visit it’s website.

Please also see this disclaimer reg. the opinions, ideas and content on this blog and my work with the Foundation. Though it’s a fact that I started to think about and actually put into action initiatives to promote and support peace through ICTs, the Foundation’s work with the UN and other national and international actors is breaking new ground on how multi-lateral agencies and governments see and use ICTs for peacebuilding, peacekeeping, conflict prevention, mitigation, transformation and post-conflict reconstruction. 

It’s a very nice fit for me, even though my interests and practice in ICT4Peace are larger than the specific foci of the Foundation at the moment. 

An adaptation of an essay by Daniel Stauffacher (Chairman of the ICT4Peace Foundation) and I will be published in the official Commonwealth Ministers Reference Book on behalf of the Commonwealth Secretariat.

The Reference Book is the Secretariat’s primary communications tool to promote opportunity and potential within the 53 Commonwealth countries and is distributed to all Key Commonwealth Ministers, from Trade to Transport by the Secretariat. The publication will include approximately 35 articles that will be Sub-divided into logical sections that are designed to assist all Commonwealth Ministers and their respective officials in policy development, project initiation, procurement and control, as well as the day-to-day management of ministries/departments.  The Reference Book will also feature relevant, objective case studies on solutions that illustrate effective methods of dealing with a variety of problems and challenges experienced by modern-day Ministries, as well as a complete directory of all Commonwealth Ministries.

Download our essay, ICT for disaster management in the Asia-Pacific region, here.

Download the original essay with all references written for the UN Global Alliance on ICT and Development (GAID), here.

Last week I captured through my mobile phone camera the user account, password and URL of a confidential human rights monitoring and advocacy database. The users had plastered these details on a public notice board for easy reference, in a manner that could be viewed by anyone who came into the office.

It hadn’t occurred to them that this wasn’t entirely the best thing to do. These are computer literate, committed and experienced human rights activists, who have no interest whatsoever in jeopardizing the information in the database and are acutely aware of the consequences of information in the database falling into the wrong hands. Yet, this sort of practice is common - in another Sri Lankan human rights advocacy organisation, users had actually posted up access details on Post-It notes that were stuck to the monitor!

InfoShare’s significant experience in the design and deployment of highly secure ICT solutions for peacebuilding / human rights protection suggests that network intrusions and data leaks are often the result of the monumental carelessness and oversight of end users rather than any sophisticating remote hacking by a third party. Sustained user education on security is vital and the design of information systems with multiple safeguards against this sort of bad practice.

As I told the colleague responsible for this particular oversight, good IT security hopes for commonsense but plans for the risk of disappointment.

Burning Bridge has an excellent write up on the information and media landscape in Sri Lanka and its role in conflict and peacebuilding. 

Though new, the blog already has some other excellent posts on the intersections of information and conflict. 

Disclaimer: I was heavily involved in aspects of the design of the new PACT website and gave advice on the development of many of its current features and functionality.

The Peace and Conflict Timeline (PACT) website by the Centre for Poverty Analysis (CEPA) is one of the most innovative I have encountered. It’s idea is original, it’s content very well research and it’s presentation immaculate. It’s rarely that you come across an idea that makes you wonder why no one thought of it before. PACT is one of them. 

While the PACT concept won it an award of merit from the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR) in 2007, the website at the time was an unmitigated disaster. One of my first emails to CEPA late December was a lengthy one with several detailed ideas on how they could improve the site. I’m happy to note that most of them find expression in the new avatar.

There’s really nothing comparable to PACT in the SL blogosphere or amongst Sri Lankan websites. At first blush, any serious researcher will find on PACT a wealth incidents and processes that are vital markers of the ebb and flow of Sri Lanka’s conflict. PACT’s central feature is its timeline, that stretches from the 1800s to the present day. It is exhaustively researched with 420 entries to date. But here’s where PACT really shines - the entire website is designed as a living conversation. Comments and feedback are actively elicited with details of events and processes that have been missed out, or alternatives narratives and perspectives to existing events to enrich that which is already on the site. PACT is a historical narrative that comes alive through new media.

There’s a clear list of issues the site covers on the right - clicking on any one of them brings up associated events. Else, you can browse through the timeline - clicking on a year brings up information related to that year. The site makes very good use of AJAX - everything is fluid and very responsive, even on a slow internet connection, aided by the absence of bandwidth hogging graphics. 

Well thought out submission guidelines will hopefully ensure that that the fringe lunatics, racists, trolls and nut jobs that usually latch on to sites like these are kept at bay. This is important since as PACT evolves, it will have to judge what to publish in terms of comments, keeping the overall tone of conversations on the site civil, progressive, interesting and light. This is my first worry - from what I know, PACT has little real institutional support in terms of human resources. Though it will largely be a site for reading / research more than discussion, the fact that it encourages feedback means that serious consideration has to be given to site moderation and what it will entail. I know from experience that many organisations haven’t the foggiest as to how much of work this really is. Do it badly or haphazardly and the entire site goes down. 

What’s also interesting is that the site allows you to subscribe to new events and new comments. New events don’t necessarily mean contemporary events since PACT will add events in the past as and when necessary. The ability to subscribe to comments and posts via RSS and email is great and avoids the common mistake of assuming that readers actually like to come to a website to access new content.

The first site ran on some half-baked home made content management system that was an unmitigated disaster. To this day I find it shocking that anyone at CEPA thought it was fit to go up the way it did. Mistakes have been learnt from and the new runs on the extremely robust WordPress (2.5.1) platform, which means that it is scaleable, can be accessed through a variety of devices, can be easily referenced and embedded in other blogs and just makes the content in it more easily accessible. Something for all Mac users using Safari to watch out for though. If you intend to register and write something to PACT using the WordPress, some plug in that’s active on it make it extremely unstable. Safari (3.1.1 on Leopard) crashed twice as I was trying to type in something, which is very unusual yet something to keep in mind. 

There’s another small problem. An incorrectly configured submission URL on the Suggest an event page actually prevents anyone from suggesting an event. In the absence of anyone from the general public suggesting an event, all that’s on the site are suggestions by the PACT team. What’s not entirely clear to me is why they remain as suggestions, with the only explanation being that the research needed to enter these into the PACT database is hostage to the limited time available for the administration of the site by the one person I know is behind it almost single handedly.

Three features I would really like to see on the site I’ve already communicated to those in charge. The first would be to plot on a map of Sri Lanka the locations of incidents in PACT. The geo-visualisation of incidents and events would give a user a perspective much wider and deeper than reading the same information in a textual format, just like the Mideast Conflict Timeline. 

Another is in the visualisation of information proper. I remember using Microsoft Encarta’s timeline and discovering a range of events and processes that I would not have pieced together as easily by reading just text. There’s actually a very powerful example of what I would like to see for PACT in the form of the Xtimeline website. For example, see this history of the microprocessor - beautifully done and extremely intuitive. 

Finally, a way to make PACT more social. The suggestion here is to include ways through which each post can be more easily integrated into a range of social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace. This can be very easily done by integrating Addthis to their site. 

PACT is a must for any researcher on our conflict and is one of those sites that really should be put as a shortcut on the desktops of PCs in libraries and cyber-cafes, so that people actually get to know of it and use it. Traffic to the site will never be comparable to a other sites on conflict including those such asGroundviews or Vikalpa, but what is offers is content that complements, strengthens and gives more insight into that which is published elsewhere. 

It is truly sui generis in this regard. Visit it today. 

The problem with cloud computing is two fold.

One, the assumption based on the marketing spiel and hype that surrounds it that nothing will ever go wrong with data stored on and accessed via the Internet and web. Two, when something awry does occur, the almost complete inability for cloud services and products to continue functioning with even reduced functionality. Google Gears and Adobe’s AIR may offer some relief, but the WordPress outage for over 2 hours this morning (SL time) was a sobering reminder than reliance on hosted / cloud solution comes at a price - when things go wrong, one is at the complete mercy of the service providers.

CMEV’s blog went down with the WordPress outage. We’ve been getting a fair number of page views on it after yesterday’s interesting elections in the Eastern Province. It was annoying to see that WordPress was down this morning and even more so when the time given for downtime turned out to be a gross misrepresentation of the time it actually took to get WordPress.com up and running again (messages on my account kept saying 21 minutes more, went down to 1 minute and then kept going up to 18 or 19 minutes for around 2 hours!). 

With everyone talking about cloud computing usurping our desktop centric storage / access / dissemination paradigm I really wonder if we’ll hit a stage in which downtime is guaranteed to not occur, or whether it is possible with science to give such a guarantee?

While we wait, some short common sense strategies for redundancy and the preservation of sanity during downtime esp. for ICT4Peace applications:

Diversify media. CMEV also has a Twitter channel that I was able to post updates on the outages to. CMEV also hosted it’s maps with election violence updates on Google Maps. Combined with Twitter, I could have run the updates even without WordPress. I also used Twitterfeed to update the Twitter channel with content from the CMEV blog automatically. I also hosted the podcasts outside WordPress on Internet Archive, giving access to them even when the site was down.

Diversify access. To the extent possible, make sure critical applications aren’t reliant on a single ISP or connection. I used SLT ADSL and SLT 3G HSPA interchangeably over election day to update the CMEV sites with content. 

Backup and mirror. All CMEV sitreps and incident updates were mirrored on the old CPA site.

Email. Plain old email updates work just fine when you want to alert a few key people on new content, who then spread the word in a viral fashion. 

Expect the block and outage. Plan at the outset for the worst case scenario. 

Use RSS. It helps gets the message out. Don’t expect people to come to your website to get the news. 

Don’t be old school and stingy. Full RSS feeds may reduce the number of those who visit your site, but they get the content out in a manner that’s accessible even if the site goes down for a bit. Combined with a service like RSSFwd, can be a powerful way to disseminate content that makes it virtually impossible for Governments to clamp down on (unless they go the route of Myanmar, but that’s it own defense). 

Go mobile. Make your site accessible to mobiles. It pays off. There are a couple of plugins for WordPress that do this if you host the site on your own. Mofuse is a great (free) service is you use a hosted WordPress (or any other blogging) service / site. 

Need to write a book about these strategies in more detail sometime…

I’m excited to be conducting a workshop for peacebuilders from across the world on how Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) can help strengthen their work next week, as part of the GlobalPeaceBuilders Peacebuilders Summit from 6 - 7 May 2008 in Belfast. 

My presentation Technology for Peace: IDeas from the Trenches is online and can be downloaded. It won’t make too much of sense without what I have to say on each slide, but at least gives an idea of the technologies I will talk about. 

I’m looking forward to Belfast and to what I hope will be a stimulating workshop!

The Daily Mirror carries an advertisement today to elicit photos shot by citizen journalists called “Informant”. Despite the growing challenges to media in general and citizen journalism in particular, it’s heartening to see traditional media (finally) in Sri Lanka waking up the potential of mobile phone totting citizens as first witnesses of certain events. 

As an aside, Daily Mirror’s website is the most technically evolved of all print media in Sri Lanka, offering things like RSS feeds which no one else does. A banner ad at the time of writing claims that the site gets 2 million hits a day, which is not really a useful metric to determine how many people read the content on the site, but I don’t doubt for a moment that thousands visit their site a day. Nothing much in the way of citizen generated content yet, but this should change in the future if “Informants” is successful.

Their blogging centre however is an unmitigated disaster - it looks a complete mess and the content is a jarring combination of Daily Mirror Editorials and individuals pitching in with their thoughts. The website itself has other flaws - the fonts and font sizes are terrible, the layout is atrocious, you cannot print anything easily and just try visiting the archives and then going to any other page (after a few visits to the archive it gets really fun).

Doesn’t anyone visit the NY Times website and learn about how it’s really done? More importantly, doesn’t anyone in the Daily Mirror actually visit their site?