Photo courtesy The Sunday Leader
A Twitter Q&A with the JHU’s Champika Ranawaka was conducted at 7pm yesterday, generating hundreds of tweets with questions for the Minister ranging from his hate speech, endorsement of astrology, open calls to violence, politics and religious extremism to the up-coming presidential elections, corruption and governance in general. A cursory study of the session suggests the response rate to the questions posed seems higher than previous attempts at Twitter Q&A’s with leading figures in Sri Lanka like Mahinda Rajapaksa, Lalith Weeratunge and Nivard Cabraal.
Aside from the Minister himself, Muditha Senarath Yapa, Head of John Keells Research (@muditha), CPA’s Sinhala civic media initiative Vikalpa, led by Sampath Samarakoon (@vikalpavoices), Nalaka Gunawardene (@nalakag), Swarnavahini journalist Vajira Sumeda (@vajirasumeda) amongst others were the most active during and leading up to the Twitter Q&A.
- An archive of all the tweets generated during the #AskChampika session can now be accessed here.
- An archive of all the tweets can be downloaded as an Excel spreadsheet (XLS) here or in the OpenDocument Format (ODF) here.
- Note that in our experience, the archives don’t behave well using the currently available version of Excel for Apple OS X and open fine on Excel running Windows. Opening the Excel file on Apple’s Numbers for the Mac works fine too.