SMS for election monitoring, peacebuilding and strengthening democracy – A conversation with Ken Banks

ICT for Peacebuilding 1 Minute

This podcast, from Cyberweek 2007, is a conversation between Colin Rule (Director of ODR at eBay/PayPal) and Ken Banks, founder of kiwanja.net and creator of FrontlineSMS.

To download the mp3 file or listen to it online, visit VOR Radio here. For more information on the podcast, visit here. (File size 30.46Mb, running time approx. 30 mins)

Colin and Ken touch upon much of what I’ve articulated on this blog as sustainable and appropriate technologies to support grassroots empowerment. There is skepticism, rightfully, expressed on the XO laptop (alias $100 laptop) and Negroponte’s promises, with Ken making the point that many in the developing world still use mobile phones only capable of basic SMS. This is also a point I have raised on this blog in detail earlier. Ken’s vast experience in countries in Africa, India and other parts of the world is useful in this regard, since he speaks from the perspective of an innovator acutely aware of ground realities.

I’ve written about FrontlineSMS and the power of mobile phones to augment democracy earlier, and look forward to its development to support a number of activities I am facilitating in Sri Lanka, ranging from Human Rights monitoring to citizens journalism (Groundviews and Vikalpa).

This is a must listen podcast for anyone interested in using mobile phones for social activism.

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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One thought on “SMS for election monitoring, peacebuilding and strengthening democracy – A conversation with Ken Banks”

  1. You might want to contact Partners for Democratic Change. I recently wrote for them a summary of election time governance project in Albania that included use of SMS for national observers

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