fairooz said,

December 6, 2007 @ 12:36 pm

wish u all the best.

Shauna Sylvester said,

December 7, 2007 @ 2:52 am

Congratulations to the past and present contributors to Groundviews for winning the 2007 Award for Excellence in New Communications . I fondly remember the early days of the Voices of Reconciliation project when Groundviews first emerged as an important source of information, debate and analysis of the situation in Sri Lanka. A toast to the Editor Sanjana Hattotuwa and to the dozens of people who have offered their views, technical know how and journalistic experience to the site. Well done!.

Shauna Sylvester
Vancouver, Canada

sham said,

December 10, 2007 @ 12:12 am

although the site is well set up, knowledge about the ste is lacking.
i think mostly NGO people are the one who have updated about the existence of such a site. id there are funds available, it may be of best interest to put a add in a sunday news papers to create more awareness about the stite.

Virtual Diplomacy Workshop at GKP GK III: A missed opportunity « ICT for Peacebuilding (ICT4Peace) said,

December 23, 2007 @ 7:54 am

[...] December 22, 2007 I attended Diplomacy Goes Virtual: Opportunities and Limitation of Virtual Diplomacy, a worshop at the recently held Global Knowledge Partnership GK III conference in the hope that I would learn more than I knew and had already done using tools, mechanisms and platforms such as blogs, Skype, mobile communications, the XO laptop and Second Life, to further inter-cultural understanding, reconciliation and peacebuilding.I was very, very wrong. The panel was, by far, not just the worst I attended at GK III, it was one of the worst and most ill-informed I have ever attended in my life.Perhaps it was on account of the gross mismatch between what the audience expected from reading the description of the workshop in the official GK III brochure (as reflected here) and what the panel turned out to be, which as noted here concentrated exclusively on Second Life.I could have even endured a discussion on Second Life if it was anchored in the socio-political and cultural dynamics of countries and regions outside of North America and Western Europe – for example, those with repressive regimes that clamp down on fundamental freedoms, or those that were embroiled in Complex Political Emergencies (CPEs) and protracted ethno-political conflict.It was not to be.The panel, that did not have a single Asian on it or anyone with experience in using MMORPG’s / virtual worlds / Second Life for real world complex political negotiations, focussed entirely on the simplistic uses of Second Life to bring people together for genetic research and other mundane and relatively uncomplicated tasks. The unique and extremely challenging demands of virtual diplomacy shaped by and responding to violent conflict or where not at all covered.The panel repeatedly pointed to the existence of Embassies of countries such as the Maldives in Second Life as proof of the coming of age of virtual diplomacy. My challenge to the panel was to map out how long the Maldivian Embassy on Second Life would last if there was a concerted effort to demonstrate against the essential dictatorship of the Gayoom regime in its virtual space.It was a question they could not answer.Even with Second Life, they did not cover at all the potential of conflict within sims, real world conflict spilling over into virtual interactions (or vice versa), alternative dispute resolution mechanisms within Second Life (such as the E-Justice Centre in Second Life), evolving notions of justice and peace within Second Life, how media reporting within and on Second Life influence the manner in which avatars interact or how sims in Second Life could be used for future scenario model based simulations in support of conflict transformation processes. Further, the panel did not address the challenges posed by new media, such as blogs, to diplomacy and diplomats, as brought out in my post Diplomacy and blogs (on Jan Pronk’s behaviour in Sudan) or critical discussions on how the United States State Department is now using blogs to further international relations.The panel also scoffed at the environmental impact of using Second Life, even though there’s no agreement that using Second Life is as environmentally friendly as it is often made out to be.In fact, the panel did not address even a single point on the potential and challenges of using Second Life for dispute resolution, collaboration and civic participation I had made earlier at the 5th International Forum on Online Dispute Resolution in Liverpool, England.On the positive side, the panel did discuss the urgent need for and developments towards interoperability of virtual worlds and the need for open standards and open source based access to and development of various sims and MMORPG’s. A representative of Linden Labs who connected virtually made the exciting announcement that Second Life would be connected to (and perhaps even accessible from) mobile devices.Regrettably, the constitution of and terrain covered by this workshop was the anti-thesis of what was expected from a global knowledge exchange as envisioned by GK III. Not only was the knowledge imparted through this workshop US and Western Europe centric, dated, passe and extremely blinkered, it was also at at times, dangerously naive.To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy said Will Durant, the American writer and historian. In light of the overwhelming insignificance of this workshop’s presentations, one can compliment them all on mastering half the art of diplomacy.I sincerely wish however that GKP invites, the next time around, non-diplomats who would invariably make for more meaningful and interesting discussions! Posted by Sanjana Hattotuwa Filed in ICT4Peace Tags: Avatars, Blogs, Conflict Transformation, Diplomatic relations, GK III, GKP, ICT4Peace, Linden Labs, MMORPGs, New media, ODR, Online Dispute Resolution, Peacebuilding, Public diplomacy, Second Life, Sims, Virtual Diplomacy [...]