Two recent stories reported first on Twitter in Sri Lanka demonstrate the power of the medium to reveal bias, and influence a global media agenda. The first was related to the BBC’s rebroadcast on State controlled terrestrial radio, a few days after outrageous threats made by Mervyn Silva, a brutish government MP. I follow the [...]
A brief exploration of Open and Big Data: From investigative journalism to humanitarian aid and peacebuilding
The ICT4Peace Foundation recently published The potential and challenges of open data for crisis information management and aid efficiency: A preliminary assessment, a short monograph in large part based on a longer report I wrote on Big and Open data about a month ago. It’s a work in progress. Our understanding and support of Big [...]
ICTs in Sri Lanka’s post-war reconciliation: Untapped and ignored by government
This article is cross-posted from Groundviews, where it was first published under the title Who really supports reconciliation in post-war Sri Lanka?. ### The official media page of the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) tells its own story. It’s blank. There’s literally nothing on the official website of the LLRC that provides information on [...]
KONY 2012 and Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields
Wrote the following for my newspaper column on Sunday, which has around a 700 word limit. KONY 2012′s generated a lot of attention. For me, Ethan Zuckerman’s excellent analysis and subsequent commentary raises the most pertinent questions. The following are some other articles I’ve found interesting to read. African Critics of Kony Campaign See a ‘White [...]
Remarks by Navi Pillay at Panel Discussion on the Right to Freedom of Expression on the Internet
United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay’s succinct, clearly reasoned opening remarks at a panel discussion held on 29 February 2012 at the the 19th session of the UN Human Rights Council is worth reproducing in full. I’ve been part of two studies, Sri Lanka’s first and only in fact, that looks at [...]
Massively distributed intelligence: Two social gaming exercises and ICT4Peace
“10 folks in a small apartment in Egypt used social media and cell phones to start a revolution, and 17 days later the president of many decades is out of power.” That’s clearly not what happened, but some people will believe what they will especially if simplifying complexity is an opportunity for personal profit or [...]
Teaching at the Folke Bernadotte Academy
Photo of the Academy, taken by me. Just back from a stint of teaching at the Folke Bernadotte Academy. I’ve done a short write up about it at the ICT4Peace Foundation’s site. The participants were a tough, mixed bunch. All very experienced in either intelligence analysis or field work, they came from military, police, government, intelligence [...]
The Guardian’s Open Journalism today and Sri Lanka’s Ravaya: A note from 2005
In 2012, when leading Sri Lankan Editors are still plagiarising content from web and social media, don’t even know about correct attribution of web sources and demonstrate an outrageous ignorance about social and web based media, the Guardian’s new ad shows how it’s done, and just how much potential there is in embracing readers as [...]
The Lede and the Koran
In an article published in NYT’s The Lede blog by Robert Mackey on the desecration of the Koran by US soldiers, the author ended on an interesting note when it first went online, After the transcript of NATO Commander Gen. John R. Allen’s apology to the Afghan people, Mackey noted, While it might seem surprising [...]
Parliament 2.0
Earlier this week, Transparency International Sri Lanka (TISL) organised a workshop on improving the access to and accountability of Parliament, based on a South Asian study of legislatures. Systemic flaws in our own Parliament were anchored to two broad areas – access to internal workings and proceedings, and inadequate, often untimely, Parliamentary output. I was [...]
