The Lankadeepa, the leading Sinhala newspaper in Sri Lanka, has reported a speech by Dr Ranga Kalansooriya at a recent event on media ethics organized by the Sri Lanka Press Institute, where he claims that a survey covering 14 out of the 25 districts showed very high levels of reliance on the Internet for political news. Of those who had changed their views on who to vote for President, 59 per cent had done so based on TV; while 31 percent did so because of Internet content. Only one percent of those changing their stance had done so because of print media Somewhat ironically, the SLPI has not posted any information related to the event on its website. Hopefully, more information about this survey will be forthcoming.
We have been requested via social media to shed light on MNP, I gather in light of various dissatisfactions about what all ISPs did in terms of blocking websites in the past few years. Attachment to the number, the costs involved in printing up new business cards, etc were seen by many in the West as a barrier to customers changing from one operator to another. There are instances when we have unequivocally recommended MNP. But as a general rule, one has to weigh the pros and cons. This slideset is the most comprehensive I could find, though it was worked up for small economies where the economic case for MNP is much harder.
Five years ago, our Lead Consultant Economist, Dr Harsha de Silva, entered Parliament as an opposition national-list MP. For those unfamiliar with idiosyncrasies of Sri Lankan politics, that is an MP without constituency responsibilities who is appointed by a political party based on the contribution he/she may make to legislative or executive functions. Without doubt, Harsha was one of the best national-list MPs in the 14th Parliament. In the early years, he continued to engage in research-related activities sometimes on behalf of LIRNEasia and sometimes on his own. Few years back, his party made him a constituency organizer which left him little time for research.
Parvez Iftikhar will be amused that I am proposing a fund, after objecting to his favorite Universal Service Fund. But that is how the policy game gets played. We look at something that does not work at all or produces more bad outcomes than good (government-owned telcos with universal service obligations in the old days; government-owned media organizations now) and propose a solution that will reduce the harm (universal service fund for telecom; public media content fund for media). Then we see how the solution works and propose sunsetting it or shutting it down if it has been hijacked by nefarious interests. Deng Xiao Ping called this crossing the river by feeling the stones.
It was not all sunshine and fare weather that greeted us on the December 26th this year in Sri Lanka. Instead a country in a crisis dealing with the continuous week long rains washing away sides of hills and flooding (copy of Dec 26th landslide and flood warnings issued by DMC). While we were at the Hambantota exhibition, there was uncertainty in being cut-off from Colombo with flash floods crossing roads in various E/A/B network. Had the rains continued on the 26th we may have been stranded or had great difficulty returning to Colombo. An incident or situational map, like Google’s Alerthub, would have been informative in comforting the uncertainties.
The full report suggests that the number show massive potential for low-cost smartphones in this market. Sri Lanka’s mobile phone sales reached one million units in the third quarter of 2014 while smart phone shipment up by 100 percent which accounts for 20 percent of the total sales, a market report said. “Sri Lanka mobile handset shipments continue to show consistent growth in both the Feature phones as well as Smartphone segments, making it among very few South East Asian markets where growth was seen in both segments,” said CyberMedia Research, a Market Intelligence and Advisory firm in its report.
All the plans for advancing the lives of people in South Asian countries, including Internet access, are not likely to achieve fruition unless the electricity problems are solved. For this, one essential action is the the tapping of the abundant potential of the southern slopes of the Himalayas. Another is interconnection of the national grids of the South Asian countries. The Economist wrote about this, focusing on sub-continent, and leaving out Sri Lanka. A second reason, says Raghuveer Sharma of the International Finance Corporation (part of the World Bank), was radical change that opened India’s domestic power market a decade ago.
Based on writing and interviews done in June 2015 in the context of LIRNEasia’s events organized to mark the 10th anniversary of the Indian Ocean tsunami on December 2004 http://www.thestar.com.my/News/Regional/2014/12/22/Contributing-to-global-knowledge/. The first multilingual trials of the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) – a data format for exchanging public warnings and emergencies between alerting technologies – were carried out in Sri Lanka as part of the Hazard Information Project funded by Canada’s International Development Research Centre.
Except for the hearing and speech disabled, voice telephony is a relatively simply technology to use. The Internet is different. We’ve been thinking for some time about how we can improve our understanding of persons with the skills needed to make good use of the potential of the Internet. It’s in this context that I read the summary results of the 2011-12 Sri Lanka Census: Literate population : Final census data indicates that out of the population aged 10 years or more at the time of Census, 16,142,267 (95.7%) of Sri Lankans are literate.
The 2014 Measuring the Information Society report is out. No surprises at the top: Denmark is now at 1 and Korea is now 2; just changed places from 2012 ranking. Significant movement from the Gulf countries: UAE goes from 46 to 23 and Qatar from 42 to 34. UAE is almost too difficult to believe. No good news from South Asia, sadly.
I’ve never had a conversation with a government before. But today they had assembled (almost) all the secretaries, all heads of government organizations including the heads of the armed forces and the police into one location. The government was launching its On(egov)ernment strategy, that has a whole of government approach that requires collaboration among government units. I had no part in the best part of the program: putting all these senior people in groups and getting them to come up with ideas of new services that required cross-agency collaboration. My role was that of moderating the closing panel that was to pull together all the themes that had been discussed.
Dr. Gordon Gow is Associate Professor in Communication and Technology, University of Alberta delivered a speech “Stewarding Technology for Inclusive Innovation,” at the SSHRC Success Stories 2014 event
LIRNEasia’s image is tied up with ICTs, thought from the beginning we wanted to be an infrastructure shop. Ports are infrastructure, and for the city I live in, perhaps the most vital infrastructure. So this piece fits. But the fit is even more from the mindset side. Everything we do as a think tank is intended to get people to think about problems (and solutions) differently.
Despite the massive goof-up with the situation reports which over-reported the number of casualties from the Koslanda landslide by a factor of eight (300 as against the actual 38), the country has been shaken by the disaster. The Sinhala language weekly, Ravaya, was dominated by it. The article that I contributed, building on the thinking we had done after the tsunami, and what our colleague science journalist Nalaka Gunawardene had contributed stood out in terms of constructive proposals that would help avoid such calamities in the future. The relevant sections in English are given below: The foundation is the development of good hazard assessments. Consultants working for the Disaster Management Center have developed these for the coastal areas though they are not public.
The development of knowledge workers is obviously important for the emergence of inclusive knowledge economies. We have been working on this, but it has not been front and center of our public communication. This will change in the next little while. The 2015 Budget Speech of the Government of Sri Lanka placed its central emphasis on the development of human resources, as befits a country moving into middle-income status. But the policy proposals require some focus.
Except for our work on agriculture, most of our activities contribute to the development of the service sector. This is partly because it is the sector that is most dependent on ICT services and because that’s where the investment and growth is, in the countries that we work in. But every so often, industrial policy, or the notion that governments should promote specific industries, including by spending taxpayer money on them, raises its head. I wrote http://www.lankabusinessonline.