VOR Radio – The story so far on podcasting for peace in Sri Lanka

ICTs in general, Interesting content on ICT4Peace, Links 1 Minute

VOR Radio, officially launched in December 2006, has some fascinating download statistics that’s surprised me on how much of demand there is for podcasts, mostly in Sinhala & Tamil but in English as well, dealing with peace and reconciliation in Sri Lanka.

The server gives out the following stats:

Figures in parentheses refer to the 7-day period ending Jan 10 2007 at 4:35 AM.

Successful requests: 368,164 (22,515)
Average successful requests per day: 1,899 (3,216)
Successful requests for pages: 311,049 (18,857)
Average successful requests for pages per day: 1,604 (2,693)
Data transferred: 19.38 gigabytes (587.10 megabytes)
Average data transferred per day: 102.36 megabytes (83.87 megabytes)

With even more content coming soon, I’m heartened by the very strong demand for podcasts to scale up VOR Radio this year. VOR Radio is to date, Sri Lanka’s first and only civil society internet radio, with content in all three languages on issues dealing with peace, democracy and reconciliation.

Setup under the Voices of Reconciliation project, VOR Radio partners with Groundviews in providing engaging content that you simply won’t read, hear or see in mainstream media.

Spread the word !

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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2 thoughts on “VOR Radio – The story so far on podcasting for peace in Sri Lanka”

  1. Actually, Transparency International Sri Lanka has been doing podcasts on and off since July 2006.

    Granted their focus is mainly on anti-corruption though.

  2. this is wonderful, i was curious as to how effective web4Advocacy is in SL. What might be the geographical breakdown? are mos of the hits foreign or local?

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