Sensing and Shaping Emerging Conflicts Report of a Workshop by the National Academy of Engineering and United States Institute of Peace Roundtable on Technology, Science, and Peacebuilding (2013) / Chapter Skim
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3 Uses of Technology in the Field
3 Uses of Technology in the Field
Pages 23-32
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From page 23... ...
It involves many groups -- citizens, political parties, parliaments or legislatures, and international organizations. Election monitoring typically involves training hundreds or thousands of citizens to go to polling stations from the time they open until they close, including the counting process, and to look for particular things.
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From page 24... ...
"You can get much better quality data through these data tools and dashboards." One problem with election monitoring is that analysts still typically work with the software tools they used in the days of manual reporting rather than the Web-based tools now available. "There's an opportunity that we've been trying to solve, and we welcome help." Command centers have begun to use cloud computing, which makes it possible to not only store data remotely but also synchronize and compare data.
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From page 25... ...
Many organizations believe that once a press release is carefully written detailing the results of an election monitoring effort, their work is done. But technology offers many other means to disseminate and elaborate on that message, from social media to new forms of visual representations.
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From page 26... ...
In a previous position at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, where Meier codirected a program in crisis mapping, he was involved in a project to compare georeferenced and time-stamped Ushahidi data with coverage from the national and local print and broadcast media.1 The events reported in the mainstream media were manually geolocated and time stamped and compared with the digital traces of about ten of the most active citizen journalists in Kenya. The data were put into a mapping program and animated to understand the information flows and potential information consumption patterns in crisis-affected communities.
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From page 27... ...
Meier is currently involved in a project in Kenya called PeaceTXT, which uses text messaging as a way to change behavior, based on observations that public health text messaging can significantly change people's behavior.2 (A prominent model for PeaceTXT was a Chicago-based project called CeaseFire, which used early warning and quick responses by former gang leaders to prevent and reduce street violence.) Based on work in areas prone to conflict, including focus groups with former perpetrators of violence, PeaceTXT has developed 40 to 50 specific text messages geared toward different triggers and phases of conflict.
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From page 28... ...
During and since the war he has produced information "in almost every imaginable form" to help people understand what they experienced. For example, he has sought to visualize human rights violations using maps, as part of a broader effort to explain concentrations of power and their implications for future conflict.
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From page 29... ...
So, in that sense, it's larger than us." Authoritarian governments believe they can intimidate people and control information, "but today information is free," said Hattotuwa. "You can… physically replace people in a country, but the information will always find a way out." Hattotuwa urged using the full range of technologies to keep public debate alive and "help people ask the questions that need to be asked." Technology needs to be democratized, he said -- made available at the lowest possible grassroots level and not used just by elites.
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From page 30... ...
And the many other interpretations of that future can only occur because of the technologies that we are talking about today." DISCUSSION An interesting discussion arose about the use of satellite imagery as both a deterrent and early warning system to prevent violence. Ivan Sigal, executive director of Global Voices, spoke about the power of the "long zoom," where a figurative camera in outer space moves from one location of the planet to another.
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From page 31... ...
"We can start acting like angel investors, where instead of deciding, funding, and implementing the project ourselves, we're trying to engage really innovative teams." Dickover's group has applied this approach around the world and is putting the results online so that others can learn from them. Christina Goodness, chief of the UN Peacekeeping Information Management Unit, cited a number of factors to consider in data gathering.
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From page 32... ...
The long-term storage of data, whether by government or the private sector, has not been resolved for many applications. Local peacebuilders and local peacekeeping communities are enthusiastic about using technologies to collect, store, disseminate, aggregate, and distribute information from alternate sources, Goodness observed, but there are no hard and consistent data to gauge the benefits and costs of using these data.
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