Looking a lot like an updated version of Gapminder, the newly launched US Federal IT dashboard reminds us that the visualisation of information in the public domain can be a powerful mechanism to animate voters to hold government accountable and transparent.

For the record, this is not something our own ICT Agency or Central Bank will even remotely consider doing. Though the outrageous corruption in government flagged in the two COPE reports would make for some interesting visualisations, both ICTA and the CB, far from being thought-leaders in ICTs are sadly factories for irrelevant policies and practices underpinned by sycophancy and dishonesty.

Visualisations like this are like a storyboard for citizens and voters. For example, the animation on IT spending for example since 2001 demonstrates, during the two successive Bush regimes, how IT expenditure on defense sectors overwhelmed many others, including education. By 2010, even under Obama, total IT investments in the defense sector are greater than many other sectors combined.

What’s significant though is the year on year change in IT investment on education, that shows a marked increased under the Obama administration.

I’m sure progressive journalists and vigilant civil society will use websites such as this to ask questions of government’s on how and why they prioritise public spending on certain sectors, and certain projects, as opposed to others. Underpinned by enabling Right to Information legislation, websites such as the Federal IT dashboard provide a framework for citizens to be continually engaged in governance, a media to be constantly vigilant in the public interest and public officials to be always aware that their decisions are a matter of public record.

Even after war, Sri Lanka’s corruption, nepotism and miasmic governance shows no real signs of change. Obama’s administration shows how the political will to make government accountable finds expression in the use of technology to empower citizens. The most progressive our government gets is to talk about getting rid of pornography on the web getting rid of pornography on the web and getting women to record themselves getting raped.

C’est la vie.

Arianna Huffington, Co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Huffington Post, takes a look at the recent success of citizen journalism and the role it can play in the years to come.

Arianna is better read than viewed (she is overwhelmingly soporific), but the examples she presents in this video, though largely from a US centric perspective, point to the potential of new media to add value to stories reported in traditional media, and bear witness to issues that journalists are barred from or fearful of covering.

The BBC’s Nik Gowing writes an excellent piece in the Guardian on how new media is subverting traditional media’s vice grip on news and information. As Nik notes in Real-time media is changing our world,

Institutional assumptions of commanding the information high ground in a crisis are from a different era. The instant scrutiny created by the new digital media landscape subverts their effectiveness and leaves reputations more vulnerable than ever in a crisis. It usually does so with breathtaking speed.

A good example of this in Sri Lanka was the atrocious use of wikipedia by the Sunday Times recently, and the Editor’s inane responses to my article that flagged it.

Noting that the primary difference between new and traditional media is the ability to add value to news, I note in a recent column that,

A bastion of ageing, and worse, pompous journalists commanding what Nik Gowing calls news regimes from a different era pose a challenge to media freedom equal to the government’s censorship and repression. Conversely, voters unable or unwilling to realise and leverage the potential of mobiles, PCs, the web and Internet to strengthen democracy will get the media and government they deserve.

Image from Agile Thoughts

I post this in response to an interesting essay published recently on the More Intelligent Life website by the Economist group. In We are all writers now, Anne Trubek avers,

Yes, we need to darken the line between what is verifiable and what is hearsay. The financial downturn and its disastrous impact on print publishing has led some to think we can do without trained reporters and editors–professionals who know how to check facts and strip the gloss off hasty pronouncements. We need this work, perhaps now more than ever. But not at the expense of silencing the new voices–an exciting new crop of self-possessed scribes–ringing all over our screens. There may be too much, but that does not mean it is unworthy.

Many would agree with me that content aggregated on Kottu today, while more varied than two to three years ago, is qualitatively poorer. Some of it is rank drivel, suggesting that the democratisation of publishing is also, too often, the production of content of very limited value at best. Well written esoteria have their niche audiences, but the proliferation of bad writing questions Trubeck’s assertion that “it is easier to cultivate a wide audience for tossed off thoughts has meant a superfluity of mundane musings, to be sure. But it has also generated a democracy of ideas and quite a few rising stars, whose work we might never have been exposed to were we limited to conventional publishing channels.”

The “few rising stars” are unlikely to become writers solely because of their new media production or blogging. They are more likely to be better educated and better writers, who bring these skills to bear on what they produce online. Trubeck’s assumption is based on this mythic Shakespeare in the boondocks, whose genius is first found and fame spread online. Writers are generally good bloggers. Bloggers are often bad writers.

And while Trubeck correctly points to self-possessed scribes adding to the perspectives of traditional media and other traditional producers of partisan media such as governments and NGOs, it’s also made media literacy much more important than in the analog age. Today’s misinformation and disinformation is hard to discern, easy to believe and a cinch to pass around. While I’ve written about media literacy in a digital age (see Media Literacy and Web 2.0 and Tolerance and the Internet: Scenarios by 2020), my column in the Sunday Leader recently flagged the urgent need for professional journalists as well to learn about what’s possible and desirable with new media.

Trubeck says we need to define more clearly what’s hearsay and fact. True. But how? Digg and its spinoffs, Facebook’s walled garden approach to news generation and dissemination, and my hugely experienced fellow Ashoka News & Knowledge Entrepreneurs for 2008 Fabrice Florin (with News Trust) and Sasa Vucinic (with the Media Development Loan Fund) all offer different models on how to go about this vexed problem.

What’s your take?

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?

Hurrah! Who can argue with such a noble cause?

Google’s new Speed site points to tools and techniques designers and coders can use to make web services and websites more efficient and effective, especially over limited bandwidth and high latency connections.

But as many agree, it’s not just the code that needs tweaking. It’s the pipes that need widening. Many agree that broadband provisioning for all citizens is what makes most sense when talking about a more pervasive web and making the world a better place.

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.

Take over the world? Yes We Can!

Reuters reported this week that the US Pentagon had approved the creation of a cyber command for defending U.S. military IT systems.

The rise of Skynet?!

But seriously, just wish that there was equal emphasis on R&D into how ICTs could be used for peacebuilding.

On the 16th of June, the UN discussed the growth of hate speech online.

This is an issue I have looked at repeatedly from international and local perspectives. I was also part of a group that attempted to draw up some basic guidelines for respectful online communications, echoing those I drew up to frame the discussion on Groundviews.

I was sad to miss it by a day, but both the participation and speech of the UN Secretary General suggest that this is now getting the serious attention it deserves. The discussions seems to have been american centric, but the issue is global and multi-lingual.

Calling it digital demonisation, the UN SG went on to note that,

“… we have seen it time and again targeting innocents because of their faith, their race, their ethnicity, their sexual orientation. Here at the United Nations, we understand the power of words. Words can hurt or they can heal. They can rupture or they can repair. For young people, electronic harassment and cyberhate can have a searing impact. We must be aware. We must remain vigilant. Protecting children is a top priority for the United Nations. And we have taken a number of steps to make cyberspace safer for young people.”

The UN SG’s full speech can be read here. UN Radio has a related podcast here.

My first mobile phone in 2002 was a Nokia 3310. It was a hardy beast and hands down, the most reliable mobile phone I have ever owned. I don’t remember playing the in-built games that much, but its screen was easy to read and the phone was dead simple to use.

I recently bought two Samsung i780’s for friends and upgraded them, after purchase, to Windows Mobile 6.1. I use a Blackberry Bold and have a Apple iPod Touch at home, which is the same UI as the Apple iPhone, which I’ve toyed around with a lot but never had the inclination to buy. I’ve also used the Nokia N series and the Symbian operating system in addition to Nokia’s own OS for its other phones. And for a short time, I also had a Sony Ericsson phone – that I hated enough to forget the model – and a Samsung X820, at one time the world’s thinnest phone.

Each of these phones came with a different operating system and UI, some with more bells and whistles than others. Not a single one of them were as stable as my Nokia 3310. In my experience, the greater the complexity of the OS and features on the phone, the more unreliable and unstable the OS was.

This is one reason I support device agnostic SMS as the best way to send and receive mission critical information – like election monitoring reports from the field. With the exception of apps for the Apple iPod Touch, which ran well, I have not encountered a single J2ME app or app for Symbian that has not at some critical moment just crashed and buggered the phone’s OS to boot.

If only because I know I will not be able to resist buying it, I really hope the recently announced HTC Sense UI in their new Hero phone works as well as it looks.

On another note though, with my Blackberry Bold, I hardly ever use my laptop when I travel long-haul or when I am in the field in Sri Lanka. Even basic phones today are capable of photo and video recording, some even voice. Phones like this new HTC model blur further the distinction between a mobile phone and features traditionally associated with the PC.