Groundviews and ICT4Peace profiled in Fast Company

Fast Company profiles Groundviews and my work on ICT4Peace in an article by Jenara Nerenberg published today on their website. Hattotuwa now serves as Special Adviser to the Geneva-based ICT4Peace Foundation affiliated with the United Nations to leverage his real-world experience in new media and citizen journalism to help with crisis response, early warning and …

Launch of Groundviews 2.0: Compelling citizen journalism from Sri Lanka

Regular readers of Groundviews would have noticed the site upgrade that went live last week. The new website sports a complete overhaul of underlying site technologies and presentation. Content is now presented in an easier to read font and format. More white space enhances readability and the rolling features tabs on the homepage allow readers …

Unique perspectives on the end of war in Sri Lanka

"I am an Indian pediatrician who served with the Indian Medical Team at Menik Farm IDP center. The point I am trying to raise is this – we were managing scores of infants with bullet / shell blast injuries (some festering, mostly healed). It gives an idea of the extent of collateral damage suffered by …

Relaunch of Vikalpa: Engaging opinion and analysis in Sinhala from Sri Lanka

Vikalpa (www.vikalpa.org) relaunched its website yesterday, with a renewed focus on compelling and original opinion and analysis in Sinhala from Sri Lanka. First launched in 2007, the old website had become unwieldy, inelegant and hard to navigate. The new website introduces a number of new sections, and makes it easier to follow content updates on …

Groundviews hits 1,000 fans on Facebook and registers highest ever number of readers in a month

Perhaps it is the buzz about the Sri Lankan Presidential Elections, and the plethora of content the site features on it, that is driving these numbers. Groundviews hit a milestone today by registering 1,000 members on its Facebook fan page. We also have 413 followers to date on Twitter. The most web savvy newspaper group …

Arianna Huffington on Citizen Journalism

Arianna Huffington, Co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Huffington Post, takes a look at the recent success of citizen journalism and the role it can play in the years to come. Arianna is better read than viewed (she is overwhelmingly soporific), but the examples she presents in this video, though largely from a US centric perspective, …

Quick take: BBC’s Nik Gowing on new media

The BBC's Nik Gowing writes an excellent piece in the Guardian on how new media is subverting traditional media's vice grip on news and information. As Nik notes in Real-time media is changing our world, Institutional assumptions of commanding the information high ground in a crisis are from a different era. The instant scrutiny created …

Are we all writers now?

I post this in response to an interesting essay published recently on the More Intelligent Life website by the Economist group. In We are all writers now, Anne Trubek avers, Yes, we need to darken the line between what is verifiable and what is hearsay. The financial downturn and its disastrous impact on print publishing …

Posts on Iran, new media and citizen journalism

I've been inundated with links on how new media is helping us understand what's going on in Iran after its recently held Presidential elections. In order to understand the broader context of who uses new media in Iran, why and how, the Berkman Centre's Mapping Iran's Online Public is essential reading. A few articles on new …

Negotiating ethnic hatred in Sri Lanka

Can we End this Cycle of Hatred? an article published on Groundviews, a citizen journalism site I edit in Sri Lanka, elicited this comment from someone called Ramanan: Nice article. I see a lot of parents infesting the young minds in western world. I am a Tamil, living in the US for a long time. …