What are tangible ways to promote peace in local communities? How can peacebuilding practices effectively spread beyond borders? What are the best ways to encourage tolerance and responsible citizenship to avoid wars?

These issues are the focus of Generations For Peace, a leading global non-profit peacebuilding organization working to solve challenges and resolve conflicts around the world. Founded by HRH Prince Feisal Al Hussein and Sarah Kabbani of Jordan in 2007, Generations For Peace focuses on empowering youth by training young volunteers in sustainable conflict transformation so they can introduce peaceful practices and spread them throughout their communities. The youth volunteers then train others in conflict resolution practices with advocacy and empowerment training in the form of activities such as sports, arts, and dialogues.

The five ways Generations For Peace empowers their youth volunteers around the world as portrayed in the animation

The five ways Generations For Peace empowers their youth volunteers around the world as portrayed in the animation

Storytelling via Animation
If a picture is worth a thousand words, an animation can tell a story that can propel people to action. After coming across TechChange’s animation for DME For Peace last summer, Generations For Peace approached the TechChange Creative Team to help tell their story of promoting peace through an animation.

Julia Kent, Director of Donor and Partner Communications at Generations For Peace, stressed that an animation was the perfect medium for telling their story. She emphasized that, “peacebuilding, and particularly sustainable peacebuilding via the Generations For Peace model, is a complex story to communicate. We felt an animated video would be an excellent medium to use in simplifying our story, and to show powerful and tangible visual examples of the work our volunteers do around the world.” The goal of the animation was to communicate this story of the powerful impact of youth volunteers sharing conflict resolution practices with others, carrying out their mission to “Pass It On” – ultimately urging viewers to take action by contributing their time, donation, or voice to GFP’s efforts.

We’re proud to announce the launch of our latest animation with Generations For Peace.

The Process of Visualizing Peacebuilding Practices
The Generations For Peace story is one of personal and community transformation, so the youth characters in the animation were vital in its storytelling. It was also important to have many diverse characters as well, to show the potential for peaceful conflict transformation to restore relationships between people of different backgrounds. The animation also needed to reflect Generations For Peace’s work in a variety of rural and urban contexts in 50 countries in the Middle East, Europe, Asia, and Africa. By understanding Generations For Peace’s vision for an animation, we used simple, papercut-style characters in the animation to be able to have a longer animation of 3:05 minutes with many different characters and activities to fully communicate their various vehicles for peacebuilding.

We used mixed teams of blue and yellow uniforms on each team (instead of one team of blue and another of yellow) to emphasize how GFP volunteers facilitate sports-based games that require cooperation between different groups as a medium for peacebuilding.

We used mixed teams of blue and yellow uniforms on each team (instead of one team of blue and another of yellow) to emphasize how GFP volunteers facilitate sports-based games that require cooperation between different groups as a medium for peacebuilding.

GFP’s guidance in reflecting their brand and communicating culturally relevant messages in the animation was crucial in coming up with a great final product. Julia also added that as this young organization is poised for another strong year of growth, they are excited to use this animation to reach more supporters and partners to support their mission. Organizations like Generations For Peace are doing very important work, and at TechChange, we help tell their stories in an engaging way, helping them communicate their story to a wider audience. We are excited to see Generations For Peace’s growth in the upcoming year!

Make sure to check out the ‘Pass It On’ video here, and let us know if you’re interested in sharing your organization’s story or a campaign by contacting the TechChange Creative Team at info@techchange.org.

The Global Database of Events, Language and Tone (GDELT) has been gathering and databasing all the news events related to conflict and political protest dating back to 1979. GDELT continues to be fed new data through the various global news services, automatically updating every day. At the end of July GDELT released their Global Dashboard which visualizes all of their data collected from February 2014 to present on a map of the world. It’s a fantastic tool for conflict management and resolution professionals who are interested in big data, since it takes their information and puts it in a visually attractive, easily navigable format. This is an exciting development, so how does it work and what can peacebuilding practitioners get out of using GDELT’s event data?

The first thing to keep in mind is that the Dashboard is new. As it stands there are only two filters for event data (‘conflict’ or ‘protest’), but there are plans to expand these filters so that users can easily focus on the events that are of most interest. For now they’ve done a pretty good job of helping filter out conflict events, which are basically events involving kinetic violence, from protest events, which could end up being violent but are generally more along the lines of protests and social action. While basic, these are good starting points for an initial filter. The nice thing about the dashboard though is that if I have some expertise about the region or event I’m interested in gathering data on, I don’t need the filters because I can use geography and date to narrow my search. The Dashboard allows the user to take advantage of their contextual knowledge to filter the data, so while the built-in filters that come later will be helpful researchers can still use the database efficiently now.

Let’s say we’re interested in recent protest events in South Africa, but we want to know if there have been any in smaller cities, since we know that there’s likely to be a lot of political action in places like Cape Town and Johannesburg. I started with the Dashboard zoomed out to the maximum, so I could see the whole world, then went to the bottom left and set the date that I was interested in seeing news from. For this test I picked August 3, 2014. Below is what the screen looked like at this point:

GDELT Global Dashboard

We can see the whole world, and in South Africa there are big dots indicating aggregated data. Since I want to see what’s happened outside the main cities, I zoomed in until the dots started to disaggregate, then I selected the ‘protest’ filter to remove the ‘conflict’ events. Once I was zoomed in the filter was set, I found that there was a protest event in Port Elizabeth so I clicked on the dot and a box with the web addresses for news articles about a protest against money being spent on a museum appeared: GDELT Global Dashboard: South Africa

I clicked on the Google News link, which took me to the related articles that Google had collected about that protest and read one that had been reposted by a local news service from the Agence France-Presse:

"South African shantytowns residents force anti-apartheid museum to close," Agence France-Presse

I managed to do this in a few minutes using the Dashboard, work that would have taken longer if I was just doing searches for protest news out of South Africa. What makes the tool really useful is that I can search in a few different dimensions. If want to know if this is the first time there has been social action around the museum in Port Elizabeth, I can leave the map zoomed in to that location and scan through the dates going back to February. What we can do, relatively easily, is see events and narratives spatially and analyze how they change over time.

This is a big dataset, so I thought hard about what its value added is from a methodology perspective. As I dug through the data, I realized something important. I’m not sure this is a database that will be particularly useful for forecasting or predictive analysis. You might be able to identify some trends (and that’s certainly a valid task!), but since the data itself is news reports there’s going to be a lot of variation across tone and word choice, lag between event and publication, and a whole host of other things that will make predictive analysis difficult.

As a qualitative dataset though, the GDELT data has incredible value. A colleague of mine pointed out that the Dashboard can help us understand how the media conceptualizes and broadcasts violence at the local level. Understanding how news media, especially local media, report things like risk or political issues is valuable for conflict analysts and peacebuilding professionals. I would argue that this is actually more valuable than forecasting or predictive modeling; if we understand at a deeper level why people would turn to violence, and how the local media narrative distills or diffuses their perception of risk or grievance, then interventions such as negotiation, mediation and political settlements can be better tailored to the local context.

Big Data is a space that is both alluring and enigmatic for conflict resolution professionals. One of the key challenges has always been making the data available in a way that is intuitive for non-technical experts to use. GDELT’s Dashboard is a great start to this, and the possibilities for improving our understanding of conflict through the narratives we can observe in the media are going to grow rapidly in the next few years.

This post originally appeared in Insight for Conflict on September 19, 2014. 

 

The release of the South Sudan Ushahidi map has spurred an online dialogue on the possibilities and challenges of how we understand crowdsourcing, big data, and technology for conflict management and peacebuilding. A series of blog posts from Chris Neu of TechChange, Daniel Solomon, and myself highlighted these issues, which I wanted to combine with brief descriptions because I think they’re an interesting series for those grappling with how we make use of emerging data and technology tools in pursuit of peace and stability. It’s worth giving all four a read, since they represent a nice arc of thinking about big data for conflict prevention and peacebuilding.

  1. Can a Crisis Map End the Crisis in South Sudan? by Chris Neu. This was the first post about the South Sudan Ushahidi map that got the chain of posts started. Greg Maly had advocated getting a map up as the situation in South Sudan began deteriorating, so with the help of Rob Baker, a deployment was launched. After the map was live, comments came back in – a number were constructively critical and thought provoking. The key points were focused on the utility of the data that could realistically be provided.
  2. Two Tweets Reveal Central Problem for South Sudan Crisis Map by Chris Neu. Chris’ following post brought up the important issue of ethics when using data submitted by individuals in such a chaotic environment. “Is it ethical to restrict information to the public? Is it ethical to reveal information about the vulnerable?” Both questions are valid, but the one that gained some traction focused on the data we expect to get from conflict zones.
  3. The Murky Swamp of Mass Atrocity Data by Daniel Solomon. Up to this point this online discussion had focused on the map and software, so Daniel Solomon took the conversation and framed it in the context of conflict itself. He outlined a set of important issues about how conflict affects data, and thus how our efforts to crowdsource and use big data could actually lead to greater confusion instead of clarity.
  4. Finding Big Data’s Place in Conflict Analysis by Charles Martin-Shields. Daniel Solomon’s post inspired me to think through the methodological challenges of using Big Data for conflict analysis. The two posts got some good traction and discussion going, which is always exciting.

I wanted to pull all four posts together in one place since I found them to be useful individually, and interesting as a whole. They also provide an arc of event, critique, and potential solutions that are useful when practitioners are trying to decide how and when to use crowdsourcing or Big Data in their conflict analysis and resolution work.

Interested in this topic? Want to join the conversation and learn more? Enroll today in our Technology for Conflict Management and Peacebuilding online course to learn more about digital mapping, social media, mobile platforms, and other technologies for promoting peace.

Spreading violence in South Sudan threatens thousands of civilian lives, political stability in the region, and even outbreaks of transmissible disease (NYT). As the fog of the initial outbreak of war begins to clear, the question becomes how the international community should begin to address this hot conflict, and prepare for what is likely to be a global humanitarian response effort. Student networks such as STAND are writing open memorandums to policymakers, while volunteer technical communities such as contributors to The Enough Project and the Satellite Sentinel Project (SSP) are sending their pleas straight to the media. But as we move from advocacy to response, a number of core questions come to mind:

  • Who are the key actors?
  • What are their motivations?
  • What are our windows of opportunity to see a reduction in violence?

And as these questions get answered – how do organizations ensure that their work is complementary?

Coordinating the Information Flow

With information flows from the region taking the form of emails, phone calls, text messages, and videos from people’s mobile phones, connecting the dots is the entire point of organizations such as the Digital Humanitarian Network (DHNet), whose activation TechChange was proud to be part of last year, and reliefweb.int – a well known asset for first responders. But because South Sudan is still in the midst of a hot conflict, actors coordinating with one another must take into consideration the lives of individuals who are still in the region to ensure that no additional harm is done through the sharing of this information.

The good news is that there are guidelines for such a response effort, not least from what has been provided by the lessons from the Libya Crisis Map by OCHA, who are also keeping tabs on the current crisis (see image below). Andrej Verity, an Information Management Officer at UN-OCHA identified three specific ethical issues in Libya:

1. Identify. We did not want any information provided in the LCM that could be used to identify the individual who reported.

2. Location. To avoid anyone from being able to pinpoint anyone reporting, the data was generally anonymized to the centroid of the city it was reported from.

3. Do No Harm. Given the situation in Libya was conflict-based, we needed to ensure that whatever we did minimized the chance of causing anyone harm.

Sudan: Humanitarian Snapshot (30 September 2013) [UN-OCHA]

Connecting Grassroots to Government: South Sudan Watch

Connecting grassroots volunteer networks to government response is not an easy task, as our partners at the Wilson Center have explored these challenges in depth. Moreover, their recent workshop report lists “[f]actors obstructing the adoption of crowdsourcing, social media, and digital volunteerism approaches often include uncertainty about accuracy, fear of liability, inability to translate research into operational decision-making, and policy limitations on gathering and managing data.”

These are not small challenges, but one recent effort deserves recognition: A recent Ushahidi deployment for South Sudan Watch. According to the About page, it is designed to be just such a centralized reporting mechanism for watchers of the current conflict in South Sudan. Also worth noting, is that the entry forms have been modified to aid in conflict analysis, and the public information restricted to protect those on the ground and report contributors.

Will it make a difference? Maybe. Rob Baker of Ushahidi (and until recently a Presidential Innovation Fellow) shared with us:

“It won’t be easy, but we believe it is necessary to try. We can learn from past examples to help on the ground — nobody is here to just make a map, but hopefully to improve the situation on the ground through a better understanding of what is happening through technology and crowdsourcing.”

If you are interested in learning more, please do check out the live Ushahidi deployment and see how you can contribute. We’ll continue to add more information as it becomes available.

South Sudan Watch: http://southsudanwatch.ushahidi.com/

Want to learn more about how digital mapping and other technology like social media and and mobile phones are addressing conflicts around the world? Enroll now in TC109: Technology for Conflict Management and Peacebuilding, which starts January 13, 2014.

Earlier this month I sat down with Dr. Craig Zelizer, Associate Director of the Conflict Resolution MA Program at Georgetown University and TechChange Advisor, to talk about the online professional network that he created in 2008 called the Peace and Collaborative Development Network (PCDN). PCDN has grown to over 16,000 members, 250,000 hits a month and is one of the most well respected and utilized sites in the field of peace and conflict studies. The aim of the site is “to foster dialogue and sharing of resources in international development, conflict resolution, gender mainstreaming, human rights, social entrepreneurship and related fields.” I was eager to learn about the network’s origins, successes, challenges and future plans. Highlights from our conversation are featured below.

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