Published by Sanjana
An Ashoka, Rotary World Peace and TED Fellow, I have since 2002 used, studied and advocated Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) to strengthen peace, human rights & democratic governance.
I founded in 2006 and till June 2020 edited the award-winning Groundviews, Sri Lanka's first civic media website. From 2002-2020 I was a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Policy Alternatives. I pioneered both the use of social media for activism and online citizen journalism/civic media in Sri Lanka, including setting up South Asia's first Twitter and Facebook accounts for civic media, in 2007. Having started digital security training for human rights activists in 2010, I continue to advise civil society on digital hygiene, mass and personal surveillance, privacy and secure communications to date. I also curate a comprehensive digital archive of material linked to peace and conflict in Sri Lanka, since 2002.
I specialise in, advise and train on social media communications strategy, countering-violence extremism online, web-based activism, online advocacy and grounded, context-based, platform-specific social media research. My work experience over two-decades spans five continents.
Through the ICT4Peace Foundation and since 2006, I help strengthen information management during crises and work on countering violent extremism online. For over a decade, this included leading the Foundation's work on these lines with the United Nations and other multi-lateral organisations involved in peacebuilding, peacekeeping, and humanitarian affairs.
Since 2008, I have worked in South Asia, South East Asia, North Africa, Europe and the Balkans to capture, disseminate and archive inconvenient truths in austere, violent contexts.
I completed doctoral studies at the University of Otago, New Zealand, looking at the symbiotic relationship between offline unrest and online instigation of hate and harm in Sri Lanka and, in the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre in 2019, facilitated by leading research based on New Zealand's first ever Data for Good grant by Twitter.
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ICT for Peacebuilding (#ICT4Peace) 
Until the ceasefire agreement of January 2002, mobiles were not allowed in the North and East. Within six weeks of the CFA, Dialog started offering services. It is estimated that over 150,000 connections were given in the North and East in 2003 alone. The question is not whether mobiles will be available in the North, but whether the hotting up of Eeelam War IV will result in the shutting down of the already heavily used services. For details see: http://www.lirneasia.net/2006/02/news-release-jaffnaites-spend-up-to-12-of-their-monthly-regular-income-on-telecommunications/
One could argue that in our information age, an intelligent government would keep mobile phone services alive (albeit with a degree surveillance) if only to reach the populations that have access to them. If the mobilisation of popular opinion is necessary in a non-military war to win the hearts and minds of those in the North and the East, SMS / MMS and innovative voice mail services can bring government closer to those who already feel alienated from governance mechanisms. The denial or withdrawal of such services, I fear, will only serve to strengthen the animosity towards the central government.
Another example of ICT and conflict in east timor