Kasun Erandi, now a graduate of Kelaniya University and currently employed at the Central Environmental Authority (CEA), is someone who came and met me around one and a half years ago as she was writing her thesis on new media and citizen journalism in Sri Lanka. I was happy to note that she had gone on to expand her thesis ...
Reblogged from appvocacy: Appvocacy meets Sanjana Hattotuwa, 2010 TED fellow and founder-curator of award-winning citizen journalism blog Groundviews Among other things, what makes Groundviews remarkable is the climate in which it emerged and thrived. In 2009, three years after its launch, the civil war which had ravaged Sri Lanka for two decades came to a very bloody end, as ...
A week ago, a violent a mob of about 2,000 Sinhalese, including a group of Buddhist monks led by the Mahanayaka of the Rangiri Dambulu chapter Inamaluwe Sumangala thero, stormed and vandalised a mosque in Dambulla. The mosque was declared an illegal structure, but it is unclear how this far this is accurate. The shameful behaviour and expression employed ...
Sri Lanka’s Department of Government Printing website is a trilingual resource for Gazettes, Extra Gazettes, Bills, Acts and other information, including official Tenders, since 2004. A major site redesign in 2016 made the site easier on the eye, but seriously impacted discoverability of information on the site. There is also no search functionality of any sort on the website. ...
Created a new Google custom search engine (after the reception to the first made yesterday) covering key government websites. Access it here. The search engine indexes everything on: President’s Media Division – http://www.pmdnews.lk Official Website of the President – http://www.president.gov.lk Presidential Secretariat – http://www.presidentsoffice.gov.lk President’s Fund – http://www.presidentsfund.gov.lk President’s Wikipedia entry – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maithripa
Anchored to my 2014 public lecture on digital archiving and archives, was invited by the English Department at the University of Colombo to deliver a presentation on the same topic, as part of a new research project anchored to digital humanities. Harking back to points from my 2014 lecture, I spoke on the transition in digital domains from history ...
Over August and September this year, I conducted Sri Lanka’s first workshops on the ethical, legal use of drones or UAVs in journalism. The workshop was heavily anchored to the ethics around the use of drones, the detailed regulations by the Civil Aviation Authority of Sri Lanka (CAASL) around UAVs flights, a practical, hands-on segment where all participants got to fly ...
The following note was penned to the co-ordinator of the Centre for Monitoring Election Violence (CMEV), who asked me to go into some detail around the information security, gathering, archival and dissemination strategies I conceptualised and deployed around the historic Presidential Eleection in Sri Lanka, held on 8th January 2015. CMEV’s information operations are a template for the monitoring of ...
Delivered this speech in Sinhala at the Awards Ceremony of Agenda 14’s Short Film Festival 2011, held at the National Film Corporation Cinema. A PDF of the Sinhala version can be downloaded from here. ### Good evening. In the time I have for this speech, which is around 10 minutes, over 6,000 new videos would have been uploaded to ...
An article I wrote for Alliance for Peacebuilding’s Building Peace magazine is now up on the web. In it, I look at both the significant progress around technologies to share vital information before and during a conflict or disaster, and also how much more needs to be done in this regard. I end by asking, The progress, potential, and ...
In early April this year, I was invited to deliver a keynote address at the inaugural Build Peace conference, held at MIT Media Lab. My presentation was given, almost to the day, twenty years after the Rwandan genocide. Just before I went on stage, we all observed a minute’s silence to remember the victims. The genocide wasn’t on my mind ...
I was recently asked to put together a presentation on the fake news phenomenon for discussions with leading journalists and media institutions in a developing country, with extremely poor media literacy but strong growth around social media use, on how to both identify misleading content and also stem its flow, reach and influence. Fake news and how to combat it ...
An article I wrote for Alliance for Peacebuilding’s Building Peace magazine is now up on the web. In it, I look at both the significant progress around technologies to share vital information before and during a conflict or disaster, and also how much more needs to be done in this regard. I end by asking, The progress, potential, and ...
The Zentrum für Internationale Friedenseinsätze gGmbH (Centre for International Peace Operations) based in Berlin, Germany, invited me to talk on social media and peace as part of an event to celebrate 15 years since its inception. I’ve worked with ZIF for a number of years, starting with pioneering training programs on leveraging open source intelligence and social media to strengthen ...
Code4Good, Sri Lanka’s first social good hackathon kicked off today, an initiative of Internews Network implemented in partnership with International Alert, and with the support of SLASSCOM, Facebook internet.org, Google Business Groups and the Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd. The event today attracted a wide range of civil society organisations from as far North as Jaffna. Nalaka Gunawardene and I ...
Till I received a PDF of the chapter I wrote for Online Dispute Resolution: Theory and Practice: A Treatise on Technology and Dispute Resolution as it appears in the tome, I had entirely forgotten about it. Ethan, Daniel and Mohamed are three of the finest minds in ODR today, and writing this chapter for them was how I wish it ...
I was invited to give a presentation of around 20 – 25 minutes to Amnesty International’s 2017 Chairs Assembly & Directors Forum (CADF) meeting, held for the first time in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Focussed on the work done through Groundviews at the Centre for Policy Alternatives to use information and communications technologies (ICTs), for over ten years, to bear witness ...
Cross posted from Groundviews. ### I was asked to contribute an article to an up-coming issue of The Architect, the journal of the Sri Lanka Institute of Architects. The issue will be anchored to the idea of ‘democratic space’. After the guest editor accepted my article without any reservations or edits, he was informed by the Editor in Chief a ...
‘Upon a Sleepless Isle’, the astonishingly good new book by Andrew Fidel Fernando has a vital lesson for new and generally excitable students of misinformation in Sri Lanka. Countering the spread of rumour, from the risible to the inflammable, is all the rage. The focus and framing are largely on Facebook as well as WhatsApp, but the general debate is ...
Invited by ZIF – Center for International Peace Operations and representing the ICT4Peace Foundation, I spoke today at re:publica15 in Berlin, Germany on the future of peacekeeping and technology. The session this morning had a very compelling title: NERDS WITH BLUE HELMETS? DIGITAL INNOVATION AND PEACEKEEPING. My submission was anchored to the following points: Following from the ‘Performance Peacekeeping’ report, what ...
