On Page 5 of USIP’s new report, Blogs and Bullets II: New Media and Conflict after the Arab Spring, it is noted that, In February 2011, a workshop at Stanford Uni- versity cosponsored by USIP, George Washington University’s Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communication, and Stanford’s Liberation Technology Program discussed the state of the art in empirical research ...
I woke up to news of Steve Job’s death. His ’05 commencement speech at Stanford University is one that I’ve watched and read many times. Seems fitting to republish today. ### This is a prepared text of the Commencement address delivered by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, on June 12, 2005. I am honored ...
This blog post should have come up much earlier than this, but Digana got in the way and in a way, resonating with what was discussed, esp. through a weaponisation of Twitter hitherto unseen in the kind of violence that gripped Sri Lanka in general, and Kandy in particular, that week. After Namal Rajapaksa, bots and trolls: New contours of ...
I delivered a presentation on open data, civil society and data driven journalism at the Sri Lanka Press Institute (SLPI), as part of a half-day introductory seminar on ‘open data’ organised by Internews Network. The seminar looked at ‘open data’ and discussed the role civil society, the media and technologists can play in advocating to government to open up ...
Young Asia Television recently asked me the following questions about the Not In our Name initiative for their weekly Connections TV digest. Not in Our Name: Is it focusing just only on the incident in Dambulla or is it looking broadly at religious extremism in Sri Lanka ? Judging from the responses so far , what do you feel is ...
Wrote the following for my newspaper column on Sunday, which has around a 700 word limit. KONY 2012′s generated a lot of attention. For me, Ethan Zuckerman’s excellent analysis and subsequent commentary raises the most pertinent questions. The following are some other articles I’ve found interesting to read. African Critics of Kony Campaign See a ‘White Man’s Burden’ for the Facebook ...
Given the vituperative pushback of the BBS online against those who participated in the vigil in Colombo a few weeks ago, immediate measures to secure content posted on to web based social media platforms are essential to protect one’s own privacy, and those of family, friends and colleagues. Engaging in liking content on Facebook, featuring articles on it, uploading ...
Presented the work I had done with Groundviews to a group of activists from South Asia recently, noting that using social media platforms on the web, combined with mobiles, it is increasingly possible to bear witness to and report on inconvenient truths, no matter what the timbre of government. I also flagged that in contexts where mainstream media, for whatever ...
The ICT4Peace Foundation recently published The potential and challenges of open data for crisis information management and aid efficiency: A preliminary assessment, a short monograph in large part based on a longer report I wrote on Big and Open data about a month ago. It’s a work in progress. Our understanding and support of Big and Open Data is evolving ...
Photo of the Academy, taken by me. Just back from a stint of teaching at the Folke Bernadotte Academy. I’ve done a short write up about it at the ICT4Peace Foundation’s site. The participants were a tough, mixed bunch. All very experienced in either intelligence analysis or field work, they came from military, police, government, intelligence services, counter-terrorism, security, NGO, ...
Read this post for a full description of this event and book, which also contains a video interview with me in English. This video of the launch was produced by Young Asia Television, and was part of a longer episode in the Connections series. The original video can be viewed on Vimeo here. Filed under: ICTs in general
Cross-posted from my blog featuring my regular newspaper column. ### There is in Sri Lanka an Information and Communications Technology Agency. There are also Ministries of Science and Technology, Mass Media and Information, Telecommunication and Information Technology and incredibly, Technology and Research. In addition, we have the Department of Government Information. Finally, there is a National Science and Technology Commission. ...
In an article published in NYT’s The Lede blog by Robert Mackey on the desecration of the Koran by US soldiers, the author ended on an interesting note when it first went online, After the transcript of NATO Commander Gen. John R. Allen’s apology to the Afghan people, Mackey noted, While it might seem surprising that the American-led mission continues ...
Two recent stories reported first on Twitter in Sri Lanka demonstrate the power of the medium to reveal bias, and influence a global media agenda. The first was related to the BBC’s rebroadcast on State controlled terrestrial radio, a few days after outrageous threats made by Mervyn Silva, a brutish government MP. I follow the feed of Charles Haviland, the ...
Google recently invited me to write up 500 words for their Policy by the Numbers blog on big data and peacebuilding, taking points and examples from a much longer paper I wrote recently (A brief exploration of Open and Big Data: From investigative journalism to humanitarian aid and peacebuilding). My submission is now live on Google’s blog. As I ...
Innovation and paywalls were the buzzwords at the 20th World Editors Forum (WEF) and the 65th World Newspaper Congress, held recently in Bangkok, Thailand. There was hardly any panel which didn’t address the ostensible merits of establishing a paywall, or how innovation – proposed and perceived mostly as mobile app development, responsive web design or changes in the newsroom culture ...
I was invited by the International Center for Journalists to give two lectures to a group of South Asian journalists on digital media strategies and online safety. The first I gave a couple of days ago, and today I gave a presentation on how they could navigate online security issues. As expected, the questions ranged from how secure Skype was ...
This article is cross-posted from Groundviews, where it was first published under the title Who really supports reconciliation in post-war Sri Lanka?. ### The official media page of the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) tells its own story. It’s blank. There’s literally nothing on the official website of the LLRC that provides information on public statements by the LLRC ...
Was asked in the morning by a friend and journalist to pen a quick response to the following questions, anchored to the events around Sri Lanka’s tsunami watch a couple of days ago: What did you think of speed and quality of official GOSL response? How, in your view, did mainstream media react? Both websites of newspapers and radio/TV ...
Cross-posted from my personal blog, and published as my regular column in the print edition of The Nation, on 9 September 2012. ### Recent events in Tamil Nadu demonstrate the risk inherent in what most suggest is the Rajapaksa regime’s LLRC gambit – to drag on a process of enfeebled accountability and reductive reconciliation until the sections of the international ...
