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) 
Sri Lanka’s recently discarded tourist promo line said it so well: A Land Like No Other!
Where else do you get an utterly schizophrenic administration that, at once, claims to modernise the society through ICTs and satellites of our own, and in practice, places hurdle after hurdle on the diffusion of specific digital technologies through market forces and social acceptance?
Where is the ICT Agency of Sri Lanka in these debates? It claims to be the apex agency, with a lofty vision “To harness ICT as a lever for economic and social advancement by taking the dividends of ICT to every village, to every citizen, to every business & to re-engineer the way government thinks & works”? http://www.icta.lk/index.php. Yet in practise, it is reduced to being the government’s webmaster and an operator of way-wide cyber cafes, with no discernible policy influence. Certainly the Telecom regulator has consistently ignored the ICTA in many respects in recent months.
If the ICT Agency does not speak out in the interests of ICTs, why do we even need this potty little agency that spends much of its budget on ad agencies, media relations and event sponsorships?
Or, are mobile phones not part of the definition of ICTs that the ICTA follows?
Does the I in their name stand for information or ignorance?