Open Minds!

Tsunami Stories: How a film saved lives in Kosgoda, southern Sri Lanka

With the third anniversary of the Asian Tsunami drawing close, we are reliving memories of the mega-disaster that hit many parts of coastal Asia on 26 December 2004.

On 10 October 2007, I wrote the story of Tilly Smith, the 11-year-old English school girl whose geography knowledge helped save hundreds of lives on the Maikhao Beach in Thailand that day.

Here’s another story, which was related by Thyagee de Zoysa, a young Sri Lankan woman who until recently was working as Project Officer of CEE Sri Lanka, a non-profit educational charity that I am associated with.

In January 2007, Thyagee spoke at the European launch of TVE Asia Pacific’s latest environmental television series, The Greenbelt Reports</em>, held in Athens, Greece. There she made a passionate appeal for education and awareness to be put into action.

She drew from her personal experience, having survived the Indian Ocean Tsunami in her native village of Kosgoda in southern Sri Lanka. These are her exact words:

“I, myself, am particularly willing to participate in this project, as I was at my home on the 26th of December 2004, with my parents, until we heard a young man crying ‘Run to the temple, run to the hill, the sea is coming’. We ran — and it saved our lives.

“The young man told me later that he knew that the sea was going to come with full power because of a film that he had seen. A film, which was about a meteorite impact with earth and how a tsunami happens after that. He knew that, if there comes a day when the sea goes back towards the horizon, it then comes back again to take your life.

“It does not matter in what way you create awareness on the environment, be it books, films or the Internet. What matters is that you do it and make somebody understand the possible actions to take up. Believe me, I am grateful to this young man for saving my life and that of my family…”

Neither Thyagee nor the young life-saver could recall the name of the film, but it doesn’t matter. The film left a bit of knowledge in the young man’s mind which surfaced instantly just when it was needed. That helped save lives.

Alas, there were very few Sri Lankans – young or old – who had any idea about tsunamis prior to that fateful Boxing Day 2004.

Writing a foreword to Communicating Disasters: An Asia Pacific Resource Book (co-edited by Nalaka Gunawardene and Frederick Noronha), Sir Arthur C Clarke refers to another rare exception: a retired sailor living in the coastal village of Galbokka recognised the tell-tale signs of the on-coming tsunami and rushed the entire community to safety.

The challenge we still face is to build everybody’s awareness on multiple hazards and what to do when hazards turn into disasters.

From KL to Bali: Why were ICT and climate change debates worlds apart?

The timing of the Third Global Knowledge Conference or GK3 last week just couldn’t have been worse in terms of international media attention and coverage.

Some 1,700 people from all over the world – representing academia, civil society, governments and industry – gathered in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur from 9 to 13 December 2007 for this platform of events meant for everyone interested in using information and communications technologies (ICTs) for the greater good – to solve real world problems of poverty, under-development, illiteracy and various other disparities that afflict our world.

The organisers, a network called the Global Knowledge Partnership, called it ‘Event on the Future’. They had worked for almost two years on planning the event, and spent a huge amount of development funding to drum up global interest in the event.

As things turned out, GK3 was a complete non-event for the world’s media, whose attention was much more engaged by another event that was crucial for the future of all life on this planet – the UN Climate Change conference taking place in neighbouring Indonesia’s Bali island.

That coincidence of events was very unfortunate, especially since GK3 also discussed and debated important issues that shape our common future. Yes, the substance at GK3 was immersed in — and sometimes buried under — massive volumes of hype and spin, but for the discerning participants there were occasional gem stones amidst the numerous gravel.

I have written up my impressions of GK3 as a series of missed opportunities. In my view, the biggest missed opportunity was GK3’s failure to position itself as part of the smart response to global climate change that scientists now confirm is happening and is largely human-induced.

After 20 years working in the media, I can understand why the news media ignored GK3. Yes, bad timing was one factor. But the bigger lapse was that the GK3 organisers and participants failed to find and articulate their common ground with the bigger global process that was unfolding in Nusa Dua, Bali island.

In the real world, Bali is not all that far from KL. But sadly, the two were worlds apart as parallel processes took place with little confluence.

It need not have been that way. There is much that ICTs can do in reducing carbon emissions that are warming up the planet.

The biggest ‘digital dividend’ from ICTs is how they can help reduce needless travel. Dependent as we still are on fossil fuels of oil and coal for most of our transport, even a few percentage points of travel that we can realistically cut down can yield major savings in emissions of carbon dioxide.

In a blog post written in August 2007, I cited Sir Arthur C Clarke’s slogan that sums this up very well: Don’t commute; communicate!

I quoted from an essay Sir Arthur had written for the UK’s Climate Group in 2005, included as part of a global exhibit on climate issues, where he noted: “….Meanwhile, other technologies enable us to adjust our work and lifestyles. For example, mobile phones and the Internet have already cut down a lot of unnecessary travel – and this is only the beginning. We should revive a slogan I coined in the 1960s: ‘Don’t commute – communicate!’”

My friend and academic colleague Dr Rohan Samarajiva, who heads the regional ICT research organisation LIRNEasia, has given this some further thought.

More and easier use of telecom should theoretically lead to less need to travel. But nothing is ever that simple, he says. “It is not realistic to think that improved telecom-based connectivity will immediately lead to a reduction in demand for transport and a reduction in greenhouse gases. But it is clearly a necessary action that will yield good results over time.”

For telecom to make a real contribution to reducing demand for transport, Rohan says several things need to happen:
• Most people need to have easy and convenient access to telecom, for sending as well as receiving messages and for retrieving as well as publishing information;
• All offices and business establishments must be reachable through telecom;
• They must change their business processes to reduce the need for people to physically come to their locations; and
• The ancillary infrastructures such as energy, payment and delivery systems must change accordingly.

These, then, are important goals that are worth pursuing not only for the achieving information societies but also for saving the planet from the current slow baking. That’s the message that GK3ers failed to grasp or convey to Bali.

Instead, we heard from the movers and shakers of the IT and ICT companies how they are working to achieve greater energy efficiency in the manufacture and use of their products. Their sincerity and commitment were not in question. But I didn’t hear anyone emphatically make the point that helping people to avoid needless transport use is the biggest climate benefit ICTs can deliver. (I was yearning to stand up and say ‘It’s avoided transport, stupid!’ in one plenary but we ran out of time.)

The industry mandarins were not alone. Even the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), which sets standards and keeps an eye on ICT trends and conditions, missed this point. In a statement delivered to the Bali climate conference, ITU talked about lots of small contributions that ICTs can make to find solutions to the climate crisis.

To quote from their 12 December 2007 press release:
“ITU pointed out that the proliferation of ICT products in homes and offices, and their deployment throughout the world, places an increasingly heavy burden on energy consumption. The late night glow in homes and offices emanating from computers, DVD players, TVs and battery chargers is all too familiar. And the move to “always-on” services, like broadband or mobile phones on standby, has greatly increased energy consumption compared with fixed-line telephones, which do not require an independent power source. Energy demands caused by high-tech lifestyles in some countries are now being replicated in others.”

It’s always good to improve energy efficiency, if only to keep the bills in check. But can ICT industry and ITU please stop apologising for the relatively minor contribution their sector makes to global warming — and instead become a much bigger part of the solution? In other words, stop rearranging chairs on the Titanic’s deck, and instead get in the engine room to help steer the planetary Titanic from heading straight into that iceberg looming large.

We don’t need further studies, expert groups or conferences to deliver this category of carbon-saving, climate-friendly benefits: just keep rolling out telecom coverage worldwide and also make the services affordable and dependable. The markets will do the rest.

This point was also lost in Bali. Obsessed as they were with a mechanism to succeed the imperfect Kyoto Protocol, the delegates failed to fully appreciate tried and tested solutions that can begin to roll out now and here. Let the diplomats and lobbysts bicker for years to come, but don’t ignore what markets can do in the meantime.

Even some champions of climate change have yet to realise the ICT potential for their planet-saving crusade. Al Gore, being both ICT-savvy and green, is an exception. Sir Nicholas Stern is not.

In October 2006, the UK government published a 579-page report on the economics of climate change by Sir Nicholas Stern, a former chief economist at the World Bank. Despite the massive size, scope and authority of the report, the Stern Report had no reference to the role that the ICT sector could play in helping to reduce energy demand, mitigate CO2 emissions and help to save the planet.

Fortunately, as I wrote in August 2007, telecom operators are begining to taking note. Among them is the European Telecommunications Network Operators’ Association (ETNO), which issued a report — incidentally, in the same month as the Stern Report — titled Saving the climate @ the speed of light: ICT for CO2 reductions.

It was a joint publication with the World Wide Fund for Nature, WWF. Its introduction read: “A wider usage of ICT-based solutions can play an important role in reducing CO2 emissions. This joint WWF-ETNO road map proposes a concrete way forward for a better consideration and inclusion of ICT’s in EU and national strategies to combat climate change.”

Read the full report here.

So it seems that part of the climate response answer is literally in the air – or the airwaves. The emergence of information societies — where more electrons (carrying information) are moved than atoms (people, goods) — can help the pursuit of climate-neutral or, even better, climate friendly lifestyles. To use a currently fashionable UN term, that’s a co-benefit!

For these co-benefits to be appreciated and seized, it’s essential that we look at the bigger picture and not just work in individual sectors such as ICT and sustainable development. The ITUs and UNEPs of this world have to meet and talk more often — and also listen to each other more seriously.

I chose to attend the ICT event of GK3 in KL in spite of receiving three separate (and sponsored) invitations to join various activities in Bali. After last week, I have mixed feelings about that choice, but there’s no doubt at all in my mind about the massive potential that ICTs hold for mitigating the worsening of climate change.

But the ICT sector has to put its money where its mouth is, and practise what it advocates. It’s not good enough to endlessly meet and talk about all things ‘e’. Just as the world has to kick its serious addiction to oil and coal, we in the development sector have to wean ourselves away from our obsession with paper. Lots and lots of it.

In the last hour of the final day, I walked around GK3’s exhibition area, with the ridiculous name MoO. I was stunned by the massive volumes of paper lying around everywhere. The week’s events were drawing to an end, and it was unlikely there would be too many more takers for all that paper. In that week, I saw very little digital media being used to peddle institutional messages or deliver their logos. It was 95% paper-based.

My colleague Manori captured on her mobile phone this image of an exasperated me surrounded by mountains of paper.

Clearly both ICT and climate camps have some urgent rethinking to do. Together, we can find win-win, now-and-here solutions for slowing down processes of disruptive climate change already underway.

Or we can keep pushing bits of paper all around, all year round. The choice is ours – and the planet is at stake.

– Nalaka Gunawardene

Read my overall impressions of GK3: All geek but very little meek…and at what high cost?

Impressions of GK3: All geek but very little meek…and at what high cost?

I spent a good part of my last week (9 – 13 December 2007, both days inclusive) in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur participating in the Third Global Knowledge Conference or GK3.

GK3 was organised by a network called the Global Knowledge Partnership, as a platform for those interested in using information and communications technologies (ICTs) for the greater good – to solve real world problems of poverty, under-development, illiteracy and various other disparities that afflict our world.

Those within the GKP call it ICT for Development, abbreviated as ICT4D. I prefer the more catchy phrase ‘Geek2Meek’ (or using geeks’ tools/toys to serve the needs of the meek).

In the spirit of spawning endless acronyms and abbreviations that contribute to the Alphabet Soup, I will compress this as G2M.

GK3 was meant to showcase the best of G2M products, practices and processes in every area of human endeavour — education, health, natural resource management, poverty reduction, empowering youth and women, promoting enterprise, etc.

After spending a good deal of my time and energy sampling many of GK3’s offerings, my cumulative impression was: there was a lot of geek for sure, but very little of the meek.

And the nexus between geek (tools) and meek (needs) was hopelessly lost in the incredible volume of hype, PR and spin generated by the platform organisers. What a missed opportunity it was for everyone!

To be fair, GK3 was not a single conference, but a whole platform of events sharing the large physical space of the KL Convention Centre and spread through the week of 9 to 13 December 2007. During that time and using that space, various groups organised diverse events and activities — ranging from the usual talk sessions and workshops to training, exhibitions, quiz shows, a TV debate and a documentary film festival. There were also several social events that provided many hours networking among individuals and organisations.

Event platforms like GK3 mean very different things to different people. Some turn up mainly to show and tell (or share) what they are doing. Some attend simply to find out what’s going on. Others look for markets, partners or opportunities. With some planning and work, most participants get to take away something in the end.

All this certainly happened during GK3 to one extent or another. It brought together hundreds of people from all over the world who share an interest in G2M — according to official figures, a total of 1,766 registered participants from 135 countries, comprising 19% from public sector, 21% from private sector, 29% from civil society, 20% from international organisations, 5% from media and 6% from academia. Among them, 82% of participants were from developing countries. And half of all participants were from Asia, which was not surprising given their easier access to KL.

These participants — most of them eager, energetic and creative individuals — talked and mixed in a myriad combinations around the overall platform theme: how the threads of emerging people, markets and technologies will intertwine to deliver the future. There was discussion, debate, sharing and networking.

I myself did all of this. I attended part of the 3rd World Electronic Media Forum, joined the GKP’s 10th birthday celebration, sat through some plenary and parallel sessions and moderated two sessions myself. Some TVE Asia Pacific documentary films that I had scripted or directed were screened at the i4d film festival, a key side event. The week also saw the release of two Asian regional books that I was involved in creating (one I co-edited, and the other I wrote a chapter for).

But being the professional skeptic that I am, I don’t buy the GK3 secretariat’s post-event claim that “An overwhelming number of participants indicated that GK3 is the only event of its kind, is absolutely critical and worthwhile.” I have no doubt that a statistically higher number of people made nice and kind remarks about the week’s offerings, as many such people are wont to, especially if their participation was supported by travel scholarships. (I would be interested to know how many of the 1,700 people came on their own steam, as I did.)

In fact, style (and hype) over substance characterised the entire GK3 platform — the hype had actually started months before the event, with all registered participants being bombarded by endless promotional emails that I found simply intolerable. (And no, the organisers didn’t offer us the option of unsubscribing.) So much time, energy and donor funds were spent – nay, squandered – on dressing it up and inflating everything to the point of losing all credibility. If anyone was laughing all the way to their banks after GK3, it must be the assorted spin doctors!

As I have written and spoken (for example in an op ed article in i4d magazine, June 2006), the gulf between the (expensive) hype and reality in ICT circles can be wide and shocking. What is worth investigating is the development effectiveness of this whole platform, and the value for money it delivered.

Take, for example, an email circular sent out by the GK3 organisers days after the platform ended. Under ‘key initial findings’, they list the following for emerging technologies, the area that interests me the most (verbatim reproduction here):

Four future-oriented outlook involving technologies were highlighted – media, cybersecurity, low cost devices, and green technologies.
* Increased convergence of different media allows single broadcasting (one to many) to be complemented by social broadcasting (many to many), and in turn increases interactivity in the exchange of information.
* Cybersecurity, cybercrimes and cyberwaste are becoming real dangers which deserve special attention.
* More new low cost devices are needed to facilitate affordable access to information, knowledge, communication and new forms of learning.
* Demand for innovative green technologies is welcomed and growing.

I don’t see how any of this can be labelled as ‘findings’ — these are not even articulate expressions of already known trends, conditions or challenges. Is this how the ‘Event of the Future’ going to be recorded for posterity? Surely, GK3 achieved more than this – probably below the radar of its spin doctors?

GK3 to me was more evidence of the disturbing and very unhealthy rise of spin in international development circles, where both development organisations and development donors are increasingly investing in propagandistic, narcissistic communications products and processes. While publicity in small doses does little harm, it is definitely toxic in the large volume doses that are being peddled whether in relation to MDGs or humanitarian assistance or, as with GK3, in relation to Geek2Meek. Full-page, full-colour paid advertisements in the International Herald Tribune don’t come cheap — but they come at the expense of the poor and marginalised.

I was also struck by how web 1.0 the GK3 organising effort was — all official statements, images and communication products (and even social events) were so carefully crafted, orchestrated, controlled. Whatever spontaneous action came not from the Big Brotherly organisers but from some free-spirited participants who seized the opportunity to express or experiment. The defining characteristics of web 2.0 – of being somewhat anarchic, highly participatory and interactive – were not the hallmarks of GK3. Again, a missed opportunity.

Then there was the ridiculously named Moooooooooooooo – sorry, it was actually MoO, an abbreviation for ‘Marketplace of Opportunities’, which GK3 was supposed to create or inspire for all those engaged in Geek2Meek work.

The MoO turned out to be just another exhibition where two or three dozen organisations put up their ware to show and tell (and a few did brag and sing, but that’s allowed at places like this). Strangely for an ICT gathering, there was so much paper floating around — posters, leaflets, booklets, books, postcards, you name it! And very few CDs, DVDs and electronic formats being distributed.

Oct 2007 Blog post: Say Moooooooooo – Mixing grassroots and iCT in KL

In the last hour of the final day, I walked around the MoO (I must admit I was half curious to see if the cows have come home!). I was stunned by the massive volumes of mixed up paper lying around everywhere. The week’s events were drawing to an end, and it was unlikely there would be too many more takers for all this paper. My colleague Manori captured on her mobile phone this image of an exasperated me surrounded by mountains of paper.

The MoO exhibitors were not alone in their profligacy and wastefulness – the GK3 secretariat easily wins the prize for producing the greatest volume of glossy, expensive paper-based promotional material for at least a year preceding the event. These were often sent in multiple copies to heaven knows how many thousands of people all over the planet.

All this happened in a year (2007) when scientific confirmation of global climate change prompted governments, industry and civil society to realise that business as usual cannot continue, and more thrifty ways to consume energy and resources must be adopted. Ironically, GK3 was largely ignored by the world’s news media who focused much more attention on the UN Climate Change conference underway in neighbouring Indonesia’s Bali island.

I have commented separately on the missing link between KL and Bali. It is highly questionable what value-for-money benefit an ICT event like GK3 could derive from the abundance of paper-based materials produced to promote it. It’s revealing that the GKP’s oft-repeated claims of attracting 2,000 participants to GK3 were under-achieved despite excessive promotion.

Writing in October 2007, I said: “An informed little bird saysGK3 has milked development donors well and truly for this 3-day extravaganza. I hope someone will calculate the cost of development aid dollars per ‘Mooo’…”

Well, now is the time to ask those difficult questions. The donor agencies of several developed countries — and from Canada and Switzerland in particular — invested heavily in the GK3 extravaganza. These are public funds collected through taxes, given in trust to these agencies for rational and prudent spending. And it’s fair to say that most of this official development assistance (ODA) money is given with the noble aim of reducing poverty, suffering and socio-economic disparities in the majority world.

The GK3 organisers — that is, the GKP Secretariat — often talk in lofty terms about good governance, extolling the virtues of accountability and transparency. Here’s your chance to practise what you preach to the governments and corporations of the world: disclose publicly how much in total was collected for GK3 (from development donors, corporate sponsors, hefty registration fees), and how this money was spent. In sufficient detail, please!

We will then decide for ourselves whether GK3 provided value for money in the truest sense of that concept, and assess if GK3 was ‘absolutely critical and worthwhile’ as the organisers so eagerly claim.

It’s easy for like-minded people to become buddies and get cosy in international development networks. It’s also common to engage in self congratulatory talk and mutual back-slapping at and after gatherings like GK3. But too much manufactured (spun?) consensus and applause can blind our collective vision and lead us astray.

If we genuinely want to engage in Geek2Meek (or, ICT4D), we have to keep repeating the vital questions: what is the value addition that ICTs bring to the development process, and what is the value addition that mega-events like GK3 provide for turning geek tools to serve the meek? Answers must be honest, evidence-based and open to discussion (and dissension, if need be).

In not sharing the euphoria of GK3 organisers, I probably sound like that little boy who dared to point out that the mighty emperor had no clothes. If nobody talks these inconvenient truths and asks some uncomfortable questions, we would be going round and round in our cosy little grooves till the cows come home.

Did someone say Mooooooooooooo?

Read my November 2005 op ed essay written just after WSIS II: Waiting for pilots to land in Tunis

From KL to Bali: Why were ICT and climate change debates worlds apart?

Communicating Disasters in digitally empowered Asia: A tale of two books

I have just spent a hectic week in Kuala Lumpur, and am just coming up for fresh air. That explains why this blog was silent for a few days.

I was at the Third Global Knowledge Conference (GK3) held in the Malaysian capital from 11 to 13 December 2007. With several related events preceding the main conference, my week was completely full.

GK3 was a global platform for all those engaged in using ICTs (information and communication technologies) for meeting the real world’s needs and solving its problems — to reduce poverty, increase incomes, create safer communities, create sustainable societies and support youth enterprise, etc. (Read my impressions of GK3 in this blog post.)

The week’s assorted events saw two separate video films produced by TVE Asia Pacific being screened as integral components of two sessions. These were The Long Last Mile (on community-based warning of rapid onset disasters) and Teleuse@BOP (on telephone use patterns among low income groups in five emerging Asian economies).

That wasn’t surprising because we produce and distribute films that capture Asia’s quest for improving lives through sustainable development. But unusually for myself, I also had two books coming out during the week — one that I had edited, and another that carried a chapter I had written.

The first was Communicating Disasters: An Asia Pacific Resource Book, which I co-edited with Indian journalist Frederick Noronha. It was the culmination of a year-long process that began with an Asian brainstorming meeting on Communicating Disasters that TVEAP convened in December 2006 in Bangkok. That meeting, attended by three dozen participants drawn from media and disaster management sectors, identified the need for a handbook that can strengthen cooperation of these two communities before, during and after disasters.

The book, comprising 19 chapters contributed by 21 authors, has a foreword written by Sir Arthur C Clarke, inventor of the communication satellite. Pulling together these contributions from the specialist authored scattered across the globe was no easy task for co-editor Fred and myself.

The book’s blurb reads as follows:

“Where there is no camera, there is no humanitarian intervention,” said Bernard Kouchner, co-founder of Medecins Sans Frontieres who later became the Foreign Minister of France. Disaster managers and relief agencies acknowledge the mass media’s key role at times of distress. Yet, the relationship between media practitioners and those managing disasters can often be stressful, difficult and fraught with misunderstandings. Communicating about disasters sometimes ends up as communication disasters.

How can these mishaps be minimised, so that the power of conventional and new media can be harnessed to create more disaster resilient communities? What value addition can the new information and communication technologies (ICTs) bring in? In this book, media and development professionals from across the Asia Pacific share their views based on decades of experience in covering or managing a variety of disasters – cyclones, droughts, earthquakes, floods, landslides and tsunamis.

This book is aimed at journalists, disaster managers and civil society groups who want to use information and communication to create safer societies and communities.

The other book that came out in KL was Digital Review of Asia Pacific, 2007-2008 edition. It was launched during a workshop on Emerging Knowledge Opportunities (The Progress of ICT in Asia-Pacific and Other Parts of the World) on 12 December 2007.

The completely updated edition of the Digital Review of Asia Pacific contains authoritative reports on how 31 economies are using ICT in business, government and civil society written by senior authors who live and work in the region.

I have written the Sri Lanka chapter for the book, continuing a tradition I started back in 2003 with the first edition of the book. I was only sorry that I missed the session during GK3 where the book was launched — because I was moderating another session exactly at the same time in another room. But I was glad to join at least part of the post-launch reception and to meet with some fellow authors who were attending GK3.

Both books are multi-author books, and both have been in the making for a year or longer. It was quite a challenge to get 20 other contributors to come up with their chapters for Communicating Disasters. They were genuinely interested and supportive, but everyone being so busy, it took time and effort to pull together all the strands.

I was not the only common author in these books. My colleague and one-time co-author Chanuka Wattegama (now with LIRNEasia) has written two distinctive chapters on ICTs and disaster communication for the two books.

Many years ago, my friend (now international expert on terrorism and widely published academic author) Rohan Gunaratna told me that writing a book was like waging a small war. I don’t normally use military metaphors, because I deplore all things military, but I can’t resist extending Rohan’s analogy to say that compiling a multi-author book is a bit like waging a mini-war with a coalition of the willing!

Arthur C Clarke 90th Birthday reflections released on YouTube!

We have just uploaded on to TVEAP Films channel on YouTube a new short video, capturing the 90th birthday reflections of Sir Arthur C Clarke.

The world’s best known writer of science fiction, Sir Arthur C Clarke turns 90 on 16 December 2007. Scientific, literary and media communities around the world plan to mark this event.

In this 9 minute video, the visionary writer, explorer and science populariser looks back at his illustrious career spanning nearly 70 years and notes: “Growing up in the 1920s and 1930s, I never expected to see so much happen in the span of a few decades.”

He offers a quick assessment of two sectors where he has left his mark: space travel and communications technology. Ever the optimist, he believes that the best is yet to come in both areas.

“I still can’t quite believe that we’ve just marked the 50th anniversary of the Space Age,” Sir Arthur says. “We’ve accomplished a great deal in that time, but the ‘Golden Age of Space’ is only just beginning.”

Noting that good communications are necessary, but not sufficient, for human progress, he makes a strong plea for tolerance and compassion to achieve greater understanding between peoples and nations. To him, true globalization would require overcoming “our tribal divisions and begin to think and act as if we were one family”.

In the video, which we recorded in Colombo in the first week of December, Sir Arthur mentions three personal wishes – proof of life outside the Earth, clean energy to overcome global warming, and peace in Sri Lanka, his adopted country.

He ends the message indicating his preferred legacy: “I want to be remembered most as a writer – one who entertained readers, and, hopefully, stretched their imagination as well.”

In a technical paper written in 1945, Clarke was the first to propose the idea of communications satellites, which have today become a global industry supporting broadcast and telecommunications needs. One of his short stories inspired the World Wide Web, while another was later expanded to make the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, which he co-wrote with director Stanley Kubrick. He has lived in Sri Lanka since 1956.

The video was filmed by Video Image (Private) Limited, in collaboration with the non-profit educational media foundation TVE Asia Pacific (TVEAP) — both of which donated their services to this effort.

Read the full text of Sir Arthur’s birthday reflections on TVEAP website

Good communications necessary, but not sufficient, says Arthur C Clarke

Arthur C Clarke’s 90th birthday reflections on TVEAP’s YouTube channel

GlobalVision at 20: Insiders turned outsiders keep kicking

GlobalVision, the path-breaking media company anchored in New York with a truly global outlook and a strong commitment to social justice, completed 20 years this week.

It was launched in November 1987 out of one room in Soho (New York) as a mission-driven company with little money but a big idea: to improve news coverage of the world through an “inside-out” approach that would offer voices not usually heard on the air in the US.

The founders were Danny Schechter, who became, in his words, a “network refugee” from ABC News 20/20 and Rory O’Connor, then with CBS News 48 Hours.

As the company introduction says:

“The whole world is watching… From Baghdad to Beijing, from Madrid to Manhattan, information is moving at the speed of light. Media and communications technology are transforming our lives — and those of our six billion neighbors. But in the emerging global village, whose stories get told — and who gets to tell them?

“At Globalvision, we believe in telling stories from the inside out. That means working with other cultures — not at them –and helping people to tell their own stories in their own way, to a world that’s getting smaller every day.”

In an industry saturated with media companies known more for their style than substance, Global Vision has not only blazed new trails, but used moving images in ways that moved people towards social change, political reform and – just as importantly – constantly question and challenge conventional wisdom and traditional authority.

They have also never hesitated to challenge the fellow journalists and corporate media on their servility, acquiescence and willing suspension of journalistic norms in the United States, especially under the current Bush administration.

They have won numerous awards and professional recognition for its pioneering international newsmagazine South Africa Now, which first broke through censorship to smuggle footage out of what was once the land of apartheid — and later chronicled Nelson Mandela’s transition from prisoner to President.

The company followed up with another award winning series, Rights & Wrongs: Human Rights Television with Charlayne Hundter-Gault, which aired for four years in sixty-two countries around the world.

Danny and Rory have also directed and produced more than thirty hard-hitting documentaries, many involving controversial issues and investigations — some for the PBS “Frontline” series” and others for television systems worldwide. Current films deal with subjects such as America’s child farm workers, bridging the global digital divide, flawed media coverage of the War in Iraq, and the ongoing debt crisis that threatens the global economic system.

I met Danny in person only once – in the Fall of 1995, when I spent a few weeks in New York on a fellowship to study the United Nations. Danny was one of the more colourful people we met (besides lots of men in suits from the UN, only a few of whom I can now recall by name). Danny introduced himself as a (TV) ‘network refugee’ — and gave a workshop on television journalism in defence of the public interest and human rights that had a lasting influence on myself.

Ever since, I have followed his books, incisive NewsDissector blog and Global Vision output with much interest.

So here’s wishing Danny, Rory and team at GlobalVision many more years of kicking ass!

MediaChannel.org: Global Vision marks 20th anniversary

Read Danny Schechter on: The Days of Our Dominion: Global Vision celebrations 20 years in the trenches

Rory O’Connor’s tribute to the late Anita Roddick, a long-standing supporter of Global Vision

Portraits of Commitment: New face of HIV/AIDS in Asia

Today, 1 December, is World AIDS Day — and this is the new face of HIV/AIDS in Asia.

Well, at least one of 50 faces that my friend Shahidul Alam captured during this year for a UNAIDS-published book titled ‘Portraits of Commitment: Why people become leaders in the AIDS response’.

It profiles men and women who are confronting HIV/AIDS in their lives, professions, work places and families in a variety of ways, each of them remarkable and courageous.

In August 2007, Shahidul held an exhibition in Colombo that featured the South Asians who were photographed for the book. Adorning the cover of the exhibition brochure was this 17-year-old Bangladeshi girl, Sabina Yeasmin Putul.

And this is what Karen Yap Lih Huey of Inter Press Service/TerraViva wrote about her and the exhibition:

Sabina Yeasmin Putul has a silent, determined look with her left fist clenched tight in front of her face – a vision of strength, grace, and resilience all in one.

The 17-year-old Bangladeshi has a lot going for her. Mature beyond her age, she had a good understanding of what she has been through, as a daughter of a sex worker, and of how society sees and judges her. And she probably doesn’t know this – that her struggles inspired respected Bangladeshi photographer, writer and activist Shahidul Alam.

“The way she tackles issues regarding her mother and the people around her is powerful. Of course, among other things, she did martial arts and I thought rather than showing child of a sex worker, I photographed her as this powerful woman who came across with powerful ideas,” said Alam, managing director and founder of the Dhaka-based Drik Photo Library.

Posters of her in a martial arts pose was the face for Shahidul’s photography exhibition, a project produced by a team from Pathshala, the South Asian Institute of Photography which is the education wing of the award-winning agency Drik.

Read the article in full on IPS/TerraViva

Read my Aug 2007 blog post on another Portrait of Courage: Rajiv Kafle of Nepal

Photograph by Shahidul Alam/Drik/Majorityworld

“Hands up who is poor, speaks English – and looks good on TV!”

“Hands up who is poor, speaks English – and looks good on TV!”

With that title, I opened my panel remarks to the 8th Annual Symposium on Poverty Research in Sri Lanka on the morning of 30 November 2007.

Sri Lanka’s Centre for Poverty Analysis (CEPA) had invited me to speak during a session on ‘Taking it off the page: Alternative mediums of communication to influence change’. The theme of the overall symposium was ‘Communicating research and influencing change’.

Part of my talk was on challenges in using moving images to communicate development related research. The other part was on how most sections of the mainstream media covers stories of the poor — or those living at the bottom of the income pyramid.

I noted that as Asia’s billions strive for a better today and better tomorrow, there are millions of stories at the bottom of the pyramid. But most mainstream media manage to miss these stories due to their ignorance, or arrogance, or both.

But reporting from the bottom of the pyramid need not be all about doom, gloom and alarm. In fact, so much is happening there that a well informed story-teller won’t have much time to spend on negativity (while acknowledging a great deal of suffering that remains).

In my remarks, I emphasised that to discover these stories and tell them with empathy and accuracy, we as story-tellers need to recognise a few basic realities:
• The poor are not another species to be treated as if they were endangered! They are living and loving human beings as complex and nuanced as anyone in this room.
• Nor are the poor a ‘sub-human species’ with a simpler set of needs and aspirations. They have as many primary, secondary and tertiary needs – just like anyone else!
• When it comes to information, they have not only survival and practical information needs (which many development projects try to provide), but also what I call ‘information wants’ – cultural and social information – which many development projects completely ignore.
• The poor have opinions too — and are often more articulate and expressive when someone cares to listen and capture these.

So telling media stories from the Bottom of Pyramid needs the knowledge base, socio-cultural understanding and ethical framework in which to gather and process these stories. We at TVE Asia Pacific don’t claim to have got everything right, here are our basic rules of engagement:
• We treat the rich, middle class and poor alike – extending the same courtesy and respect (including obtaining personal clearances for interviews).
• We caption everyone on-screen by name and location, irrespective of their social and economic status.
• We film people – for interviews or generic footage – only with informed consent.
• Wherever possible, we take our the finished TV products back to where they were filmed and share with those who told us their stories. (We are not alone in this: I have written blog posts about Earthcare Films of India and the Brock Initiative of the UK who are also doing this.)

Our industry of broadcast TV is not always known for its class-less treatment of every human being with respect and dignity. In fact, the poor often become ‘Canon-fodder’ for camera crews looking for dramatic images of human suffering.

The globalised media continue to use stereotyped images of the global South – captured mostly by northern photographers and camera crews. As my friend Shahidul Alam, founder of Drik Picture Library in Bangladesh, says: “Invariably, films about the plight of people in developing countries show how desperate and helpless they are…. Wide angle black and white shots, grainy, high contrast images characterise the typical third world helpless victim.”

This explained my title: “Hands up who is poor, speaks English and looks good on TV!” It’s a caricature of how some camera crews go looking for that convenient sound-bite with some doom-and-gloom visuals to match.

But it’s not just the northern media who sensationalise and oversimplify life at the bottom of the pyramid in the South. Many of our own media outlets, rooted in the cities and obsessed with middle class life styles, are also good (or bad) in this game!

And the media are not alone. When development agencies and ‘pro-poor’ activists presume – in their middle class arrogance – that the poor only need survival or sustenance related information, the latter is immediately reduced to sub-human status.

Nov 2005 op ed: Communication rights and communication wrongs

Nov 2006 op ed: Ethical news gathering: Al Jazeera’s biggest challenge

Aug 2007 blog post: Wanted: Ethical sourcing of international TV News

Moving images moving research…beyond academic circles!

Although I’ve dabbled in some media research at times, I don’t think of myself as a researcher. So when Sri Lanka’s Centre for Poverty Analysis (CEPA) invited me to speak at their 8th Annual Symposium on Poverty Research in Sri Lanka, I spoke on what I know a little bit about — communicating research using the audio-visual media.

My panel remarks, delivered on the morning of 30 November 2007, were on ‘alternative mediums of communication to influence change’. I opened with the provocative title “Hands up who is poor, speaks English – and looks good on TV!” (see separate blog post on media related aspects of my talk).

These days, so much of research in physical, biological and social sciences is justified in the name of poverty reduction. Yes, studying and understanding development problems is the essential first step of solving them. But without properly communicating this research, the results won’t help the poor — or anyone else.

We at TVE Asia Pacific are committed to covering Asia’s development issues using TV, video and web. Our small challenge is to capture the many and varied facets of how Asians are working for a better today and better tomorrow. Reducing and eventually eliminating poverty is a significant part of that process.

As Asia’s billions strive for better lives, there are millions of stories at the bottom of the income pyramid. But most mainstream media manage to miss these stories due to their ignorance, or arrogance, or both.

For us, one key source of information and analysis is researchers – people who study trends and conditions, and keep reflecting on how and why. Their knowledge and insights are invaluable for us to tell stories from and about the bottom of the pyramid.

As I told the researchers in my audience: “Part of our challenge is to know what you are studying — and then figure out the public interest and human interest angles of your work. As communicating research to those outside the scientific or research communities is more an art than a science.”

I cited three recent examples where we had produced engaging TV/video content to communicate research directly relevant or related to the poor.

Digits4Change was our attempt to understand and document how information and communication technologies (ICTs) are changing the way Asians live, work and play. We covered technologies such as Internet, computers, mobile phones and satellite communications applied in education, healthcare and rural business development. The knowledge base for this 2006 series came from IDRC’s Pan Asia programme which supports action research that addresses specific problems.

Also in 2006, we produced The Greenbelt Reports to take a close look at the environmental lessons of the Indian Ocean tsunami. We visited a dozen locations in India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Thailand to find out how community and conservation interests can be balanced in relation to coral reefs, mangroves and sand dunes. In telling these stories, we worked with researchers from global agencies like IUCN the World Conservation Union and UNEP as well as national organisations like the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation in India.

The Greenbelt Reports

Living Labs is our most recent series, released in March 2007. Filmed in 9 countries in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America, it looked at how researchers are addressing different aspects of a major challenge in agriculture: how to grow more food with less water. We worked with a global action research project called the CGIAR Challenge Programme on Water and Food, which gave us exclusive access to their on-going field work and emerging findings in nine major river basins of the developing world.

In telling these and other stories, we work within a certain framework we have defined for ourselves. Among its salient points:
• We don’t set out trying to communicate messages; we just want to tell good stories and development communication is a by-product.
• We look for under-reported/ignored development issues, or a less covered angle in a widely reported story.
• We don’t just talk to technical experts but to many other individuals involved or affected – women, men and children from all walks of life.
• We seek and accommodate different points of view, not allowing single-issue activists or one source to dominate/monopolise a story.
• Our finished products are informed by science but never immersed in science – we always keep in mind that our audience is non-specialsits.

All our stories cover real people dealing with real world issues and challenges. And since Asia has more people living in poverty than anywhere else in the world, most of the time our stories concern what’s happening at the bottom of the pyramid – or what can directly impact people living there.

And without exception, all these TV series and individuals films are available free of any license fees for broadcast, civil society and educational use. They are also available for online viewing at TVE Asia Pacific’s channel on YouTube.

Communicating research through moving images is not easy. Packing years of hard work into a few mins of engaging visuals and narration involves ruthless condensation which sometimes leaves some researcher egos bruised. When covering the work of large research organisations, we’ve also had deal with internal politics and hierarchies: for example, what to do when a junior researcher is more authentic and articulate than her supervisor?

Producing Living Labs based on filming in 9 countries on 3 continents in just 5 months during 2006 was a challenge in both logistics and political negotiations. As editor-in-chief, I had to balance the public accessibility of our end product with researchers’ keenness to pack their stories with facts and figures.

We didn’t please everyone. One senior researcher told us that his multi-faceted, multi-year nad multi-million dollar was like an elephant — and we’d only glimpsed just one part of that big creature!

That’s just the point: we can never cover the whole elephant in a media product intended for non-specialists. So we choose which part of the elephant is most interesting and present it in a way that will make viewers realise — and hopefully, appreciate — that there’s a lot more that’s worth finding out.

Moving image products often act only as ‘teasers’ — communicating highlights of research, and directing those interested to online or offline sources that offer more information.

Because they act as a/v versions of executive summaries, these ‘teasers’ by themselves are a powerful way of reaching out those who are unlikely to look up the details: that includes many policy makers, government officials and business people.

Winston Churchill used to ask his staff to give him everything ‘on one page’. These days, he might have asked for everything to be summed up in a five minute video — as we often do.

Road to Bali: Beware of ‘Bad weather friends’!

All the environmental roads — well, actually flights — seem to lead to Bali in the coming days.

The Indonesian ‘Island of the Gods’, famed as a tourist resort, will play host to the 13th United Nations Climate Change Conference from 3 to 14 December 2007.

The Conference, hosted by the Government of Indonesia, brings together representatives of over 180 countries together with observers from inter-governmental and non-governmental organizations, and the media. The two week period includes the sessions of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), its subsidiary bodies as well as the Meeting of the Parties of the Kyoto Protocol.

The Bali meeting will be a turning point in the global response to climate change, an issue which has moved above and beyond being a simple ‘green’ concern to one with economic, security and social implications. The annual meeting returns to Asia after five years, since New Delhi, India, hosted the 8th meeting in November 2002.

In the build up to Bali, a new report released on 19 November 2007 says that without immediate action, global warming is set to reverse decades of social and economic progress across Asia, home to over 60 per cent of the world’s population.

Up in Smoke? Asia and the Pacific – with a foreword by Dr Rajendra K Pachauri, Chairman of the Nobel prize-winning Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – is the most extensive and concluding chapter of a unique, four-year long exercise by the Up in Smoke coalition, an alliance of the UK’s major environment and development groups.

The report shows “how the human drama of climate change will largely be played out in Asia, where almost two thirds of the world’s population live, effectively on the front line of climate change.”

When our friends at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) in London sent me the press release about the report last week, something caught my eye. Among the several accompanying quotes was this one concerning the media:

“In many Asian countries climate change stories don’t make it into the media, so the public are left out of the debate. The challenge for decision-makers and the media is to stimulate interest in their work and translate the complex issues into stories that capture the public’s imagination. Climate change above all requires the engagement of everyone in creating the changes required.”

This sweeping statement is attributed to Rod Harbinson, Head of Environment, Panos London.

I know Panos London well, and am surprised to read an official remark of this nature emerging from that organisation which, until recently, has tried to relate to the majority world media as a friend and supporter. In fact, the first time I had one of my own pieces internationally syndicated was by Panos Features, back in 1989.

Come to think of it, the second article I wrote for Panos Features concerned how the low-lying, Indian Ocean island nation of Maldives was preparing for adverse impacts of climate change. That was years before the web, so there’s no link I can provide.

As a development writer and journalist who has covered global climate change among other issues for two decades, I have problems with Mr Harbinson’s remark.

Drik/Majorityworld
Photo: A family looks for shelter using a raft made of banana trees during the last Monsoon: 31 July 2007: Gaibandha, Bangladesh © Quddus Alam/DrikNews Linked from Shahidul News

I’m in full agreement on the need to ‘translate the complex issues into stories that capture the public’s imagination’. There is also no argument that climate change requires the engagement of everyone.

But I would be very interested to know on what statistical or analytical basis he says “in many Asian countries climate change stories don’t make it into the media, so the public are left out of the debate’.

Asia, as Mr Harbinson should surely know, is not just China, India and Indonesia. It is large and highly diverse region, containing five sub-regions as defined by the UN. It is home to nearly two thirds of humanity, who live in over three dozen independent states or dependent territories.

Living in Asia and trying to work at regional level, I know how difficult it is to make any generalisations about this rich and constantly changing assortment of economies, cultures and societies branded as Asia (which, taken together with the small island nations of the South Pacific, is known as the Asia Pacific). In fact, it’s wise not to speak about Asia as a whole, for there is little in common, say, between Japan and Laos, or between China and Maldives.

The Asian media are as diverse as the region, and have been undergoing rapid change in recent years. Unshackled from the state’s crushing grip in most countries, the broadcast media (radio, TV) have proliferated and emerged as the primary source of information for a majority of Asians. New media – web, mobile devices and multimedia combinations – are now changing the way many Asia’s communicate and access information.

I have always been curious how Panos London, perched at its cosy home in London’s White Lion Street, assesses what goes on in the majority world. In this case, how much of Asia does Mr Harbinson know and is really familiar with? How many Asian media outlets has he or Panos monitored, assessed and sampled before coming to this sweeping and damning conclusion about the lack of climate change stories in the Asian media?

And how many of these outlets are radio and TV, and in languages other than English? I would really like to know.

If Panos London believes in evidence-based analysis, then it owes us in Asia an explanation as to on what basis its head of environment makes such statements about an entire continent, whose media output is predominantly in Asian languages, not English. And whose principal media are broadcast, not print.

And what constitutes a climate story? Tracking the endless array of inter-governmental babble in the name of working out some compromised partial solution to the major problem? Or reporting on campaigns to clean up polluting industries or sectors (such as transport) that generate most of the greenhouse gases? Or focusing on how humble communities in remote corners of the world are finding how their lifestyles and livelihoods are suddenly threatened by something they hardly understand?

To me, it’s all of the above — and a lot more. Climate change is akin to a prism through which many, many development issues and topics can be analysed. Just as HIV/AIDs long ago ceased to be a simple medical or health story, climate change has moved well beyond being an environmental story.

The more angles, perspectives and topics that are covered in the media, the better. And all of it need not be in that staid, cautiously balanced style of The Guardian or BBC that Panos London must be more familiar with.

Panos London, in its statement of beliefs, says ‘Freedom of information and media pluralism are essential attributes of sustainable development’. Surely, then, they realise that media pluralism includes speaking in a multitude of tongues, and analysing from many different perspectives — as happens in the Asian media 24/7, if Mr Harbinson and his colleagues care to spend more time in the region and keep their eyes and ears open.

But instead, they seem more like a group of well-meaning people with a solution in search of a problem. For the past many months, Panos London has been crying wolf about the allegedly poor coverage of climate issues in the majority world media.

That was the main thrust of a report they published in late 2005, titled Whatever the weather – media attitudes to reporting climate change.

According to Panos London website that I have accessed today, “…the survey found that there is little knowledge among journalists about these important choices and they are rarely discussed. The dramatic impacts of extreme weather events, for example, rarely feature in relation to climate change and the topic remains low on editors’ story sheets.”

The survey was based on ‘interviews conducted with journalists and media professionals in Honduras, Jamaica, Sri Lanka and Zambia’ and claimed to ‘give insights into the attitudes of journalists and the status of the media in these countries.’

Well, I was one of those majority world journalists covered by the survey — and I had major reservations about how they used my responses. Being cautious, I had used email (and not the phone) to respond to their survey questions – I therefore have a complete record of everything I said. When the draft report was shared on my request, I found some of my responses being distorted or taken out of context. I had to protest very strongly before some accuracy was restored. I later regretted having agreed to be part of this dubious survey.

It was flawed in many ways. The questionnaire was very poorly conceived and structured. I actually declined to answer some questions which were worded in such a way as to elicit just the kind of response that Panos London wanted — to make a case that journalists in the majority world are so incompetent that they need help.

A glaring omission in the final report was that it carried no list of journalists interviewed. I had to ask several times before I could even find out how many others participated in the survey (apparently some three dozen). But my requests for a list of other survey respondents were repeatedly declined by Panos London, who said it was privileged information. They later took the position that European data protection laws did not allow them to disclose this information!

In an email sent to Rod Harbinson on 22 Feb 2006, I said: “I would argue that Panos London had pre-conceived notions that it wanted to present in this report, and used superficial and largely unprofessional interview surveys with a few scattered journalists as a rubber-stamping exercise to publish what it wanted to say anyway. This is further borne out by the fact that some of my more outspoken responses have been completely ignored.”

I have seen or heard nothing since to change the above view. And the contents of Whatever the weather – media attitudes to reporting climate change are consistent with what Rod Harbinson says in the IIED press release that prompted me to make this comment.

Yes, climate change is the Big Issue of our times that needs everyone to rally around and search for ‘common but differentiated’ solutions and responses. But no issue or global threat is too big to warrant the willing suspension of time-honoured journalistic or academic values of honesty, integrity and balance. Issuing lop-sided ‘survey reports’ and making sweeping negative statements do not help the cause of improving public discussion and debate on climate change.

The road to Bali and beyond is going to be an arduous journey. On that treacherous road, we in the majority world need to beware of ‘bad weather friends’ who come bearing bad surveys and self-serving offers of ‘help’.

— Nalaka Gunawardene

Note: In the spirit of communication for development and media pluralism, I invite Panos London to respond to the above critique, and offer to publish their response in full.

I remain a critical cheer-leader of the global Panos family, and serve on the Board of Panos South Asia, an entirely independent entity that has excellent relations with Panos London. Like all families, we don’t always agree – and that’s part of media pluralism!