View this document on Scribd See presentation in full screen here. On the invitation of the resident new media champion and researcher at the Institute for Policy Studies, Anushka Wijesinghe, I delivered a presentation today to their research and communications staff on the use of new media for their work. IPS describes itself as “the apex economic policy research institute ...
Just over a month since I last gave a public presentation at the American Centre, I spoke today (along with Anush and Iromi from The Picture Press) around the evolution of smartphone photography – calling it ‘Pocket and palm photography’ (download high quality PDF here). I quickly went through a history of photographic technology from film to digital, and ...
On 11th April 2012, at the height of public panic and anxiety over a tsunami watch, YES FM tweeted about tickets for a Shaggy concert in Colombo. I’ve covered this in detail in YES FM’s tweet during a tsunami watch: An epic fail. YES FM, in a number of public tweets, apologised and put it down to a “scheduled update” and ...
I made this presentation at the American Centre in Colombo yesterday, at the invitation of Nooranie Muthaliph, Project Lead of the interesting Rotaract Shutterbug competition organised by the Rotaract Club of Panadura. I was asked to Create awareness of these powerful mediums used by different communities and people in bring about change and, Generate interest of people in Colombo/ Sri ...
Guy Gunaratne and I have known each other for a few years, and were first acquainted in the lead up to a film he went on to produce and show around the world, The Truth That Wasn’t There. Having subsequently set up his own production company CODOC with a few others, Guy’s most recent venture is into interactive web ...
“10 folks in a small apartment in Egypt used social media and cell phones to start a revolution, and 17 days later the president of many decades is out of power.” That’s clearly not what happened, but some people will believe what they will especially if simplifying complexity is an opportunity for personal profit or gain. Teaching at the Folke ...
As part of the Guardian’s ongoing Battle for the Internet series, looking “challenges facing the dream of an open internet”, it published an interactive map purporting to rank the level of government interference over Internet access around the world, with data sourced from the OpenNet Initiative (ONI). Bizarrely, on Sri Lanka it notes that “The ONI has given Sri ...
I was invited today by the American Centre in Colombo today to deliver a lecture on digital archives in general, from the perspective of a citizen archivist. The presentation looked at the ways information around contemporary events, issues and processes, in Sri Lanka and elsewhere, are being generated digitally and largely lost for posterity, raising the challenge of archiving ...
A recent post on Mashable reminded me why I started a personal project to archive websites in Sri Lanka during and after the ceasefire agreement (2002 – 2006). To even begin to understand the amount of information we are creating is impossible &
I don’t want to go back to war. I don’t want Sri Lanka to go back to war. My fear is that most of what we are doing today, and who we are, will drive us back to one. One thousand days after the last war ended, what gave rise to it is still largely unaddressed. Tamils remain, for most ...
Paper prepared at the invitation of Dr. Asanga Welikala for a preparatory advisory roundtable on a new constitution for Sri Lanka, hosted by the Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA), the Constitution Building Programme of the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA), and the Edinburgh Centre for Constitutional Law (ECCL) inn collaboration with the Government of Sri Lanka. ...
I was privileged to deliver a keynote address at the 2011 International Network of Crisis Mappers, held in Geneva from 14-15 November, 2011. The ICCM network has now kindly put a video of my keynote on YouTube.
Paper prepared at the invitation of Dr. Asanga Welikala for a preparatory advisory roundtable on a new constitution for Sri Lanka, hosted by the Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA), the Constitution Building Programme of the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA), and the Edinburgh Centre for Constitutional Law (ECCL) inn collaboration with the Government of Sri Lanka. ...
On Groundviews this morning, I covered in detail conversations on Twitter with Sri Lankans and Indians on the publication of an utterly tasteless cartoon, depicting the Prime Minister of India and the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, in the Sunday edition of Lakbima, a newspaper with good circulation and owned by a businessman very close to the Sri Lankan government. ...
The proverbial glass ceiling has long been in the way of women’s upward movement within the public sphere, including in media institutions. How have women overcome the limitations of access and opportunity of the conventional media structures by increasingly and innovatively engaging with online media platforms and spaces? The Sri Lankan chapter of South Asian Women in Media Network (SAWM ...
It would have taken a singularly ignorant individual yesterday to not know about the tsunami watch Sri Lanka was under, for a couple of very tense and chaotic hours, after an earthquake and strong aftershocks occurred off Indonesia. Rohan Samarajiva has a good article noting the role social media (Twitter in particular) played in information exchange during and around ...
In 2012, when leading Sri Lankan Editors are still plagiarising content from web and social media, don’t even know about correct attribution of web sources and demonstrate an outrageous ignorance about social and web based media, the Guardian’s new ad shows how it’s done, and just how much potential there is in embracing readers as contributors, and shifting the ...
Getting ready for the session on Youth & ICT by @sanjanah of @groundviews at the @stitchmovement TEP. http://t.co/s3JtGPcXv0— Pd. (@prabudeepan) May 03, 2014 I delivered today, in Sinhala, a lecture on how to use social media for social justice campaigns for a group of volunteers from the STITCH Movement, aged between 16 – 30, from across Sri Lanka. The weekend ...
Illustration courtesy Asvajit Boyle Saskia Fernando Gallery in Colombo, Sri Lanka running till the 15th of September an art exhibition I was invited to curate. Titled Mediated, it’s a project that essentially seeks to create greater awareness around and engagement with aspects of post-war Sri Lanka’s ideational, constitutional, economic, social and religious challenges. If around in the city, please ...
I was invited to present a keynote address at the International Conference on “Communication, Conflicts and Peace Processes: Landscape of Knowledge from Asia and the Deep South of Thailand”, from 21 – 22 August in Pattani, Thailand. The organisers have just uploaded a video of the full keynote. A write up, based on the notes I spoke from, can be read here. Filed under: ICT for Peacebuilding
