CMEV’s election monitoring featured on Technology for Transparency Network

I was recently interviewed by the Technology for Transparency Network, an initiative of GlobalVoices, on the work I do with the Centre for Monitoring Election Violence (CMEV). They were particularly interested in the pioneering manner in which CMEV uses the web and the Internet to aid its work, which I had written about in detail […]

Social media: An introduction to practical uses during elections

I delivered a lecture at the Sri Lanka College of Journalism today on the use of social media in election reporting. The presentation I based my interactive lecture on is below. Aspect of the up-coming Presidential Elections are unprecedented in any number of ways. A point about it is that both leading candidates use social […]

Mapping violence during elections and voter education

This is not the first time I’ve helped plot violence related to elections in Sri Lanka. In my first post I noted that the map helped journalists better understand the degree of violence on the ground. Things are no better in the lead-up to the Western Provincial Council elections. Just like previous maps, this map […]

Western Provincial Council candidates go online: So what?

Duminda SIlva was the first that I know of to launch a website to support his campaign. The bloke looks like Queen Elizabeth on a bad hair day. He has an interesting track record and his (erstwhile) website claims his “foundation” has “donated 9,850 families”, which makes about as much sense as why anyone who […]

Micro-blogging election violence and malpractices in Sri Lanka

Set up a quick and dirty way to get updates from Vikalpa’s islandwide network of citizen journalists on election violence and malpractices in the Eastern Province. See Vikalpa for details and our Twitter site for updates from the field. As I note in the Vikalpa post: “While we cannot check the veracity of each SMS […]