I made this presentation at the American Centre in Colombo yesterday, at the invitation of Nooranie Muthaliph, Project Lead of the interesting Rotaract Shutterbug competition organised by the Rotaract Club of Panadura. I was asked to Create awareness of these powerful mediums used by different communities and people in bring about change and, Generate interest of people in Colombo/ […]
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Civic media, citizen journalism and role of information in democracy
A brief interview with the Ashoka Foundation, conducted during the 2011 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference in Boston.
My TED Talk
Recorded at TED 2011, Long Beach, California.
The Internet as a fundamental human right?
Many around the world believe that the Internet access should be a fundamental right, as brought out by a recent BBC global survey. The case was earlier made for mobile phones as a basic human right, which I found rather unconvincing. On the other hand, I see the Internet and web, and the access to […]
The size and nature of the mobile web market
From Gizmodo comes a pointer to this interesting visualisation of the size and nature of the mobile web. Click image for higher resolution version. Amongst other interesting points, Google dominates mobile search. Nokia and Symbian (which I detest) dominate smartphone sales and mobile OS platforms respectively. Unsurprisingly, the iPhone dominates the mobile web in the […]
A damned democracy and a violent peace: Groundviews
Read over 2,600 times and generating nearly 150 comments to date (well over 30,000 words), The ‘Sinhala-Nationalist’s Burden’ by Kalana Senaratne critiques Gomin Dayasiri’s idea of and primacy given to Sinhala nationalism. Kalana avers that, “Approaching the Tamil people with a self-made list of grievances is the wrong place and the wrong way to start […]
A response to Diane Coyle’s defence of New Technologies in Emergencies and Conflicts: The Role of Information and Social Networks
Diane Coyle finds the tone of my critique of New Technologies in Emergencies and Conflicts: The Role of Information and Social Networks, published by the UN Foundation and Vodafone Foundation “surprising and disappointing”. That’s actually a succinct encapsulation of what I feel about her report itself. I have already responded in detail to co / second […]
Al Jazeera questions media freedom in post-war Sri Lanka
Al Jazeera’s path-breaking The Listening Post programme looks at enduring challenges facing media freedom in Sri Lanka. The Sri Lankan media war continues critically looks at the video broadcast by Channel 4, the sentencing of journalist J.S. Tissainayagam and the continued violence against independent media. This programme features at the end very short submissions made […]
The pros and cons of crowdsourcing election monitoring
MobileActive.org’s Katrin Verclas has a great article looking at the pros and cons of crowdsourcing election monitoring, based on the experience of Lebanon recently. I agree that crowdsourcing anything leaves much to be desired in terms of accuracy and information fit to feed into critical decision support processes. This is why the ICT4Peace Foundation is […]
The end of foreign correspondence?
Taken from Fi & Bryn’s Big Trip Is the role and relevance of the foreign correspondent now defunct or is it evolving? Foreign correspondence, I explained, is not as foreign as it used to be. “There, not here,” is over. It is a momentous, overlooked shift in the world: Foreign correspondents no longer cover one […]
