Sanjana Hattotuwa

Activist, Change Agent, Concerned citizen, Consultant, Parent, Producer, Single, Social entrepreneur, Technologist, Writer/Editor

An Ashoka, Rotary World Peace and TED Fellow, I have since 2002 explored and advocated the use of Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) to strengthen peace, reconciliation, human rights & democratic governance. I founded in 2006 and for eleven years curated the award-winning Groundviews, Sri Lanka's first citizen journalism website. Having joined in 2002, I am a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Policy Alternatives, based in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where I focus on civic media production, social media strategy, digital activism and digital security for civil society activists. I specialise in, advise and train on new media literacy, web-based activism and advocacy. With the UN and other actors, through the ICT4Peace Foundation, I also work extensively on the advancement of information management during crises, both sudden-onset as well as protracted. Since 2008, I have conducted workshops and training programmes in Sri Lanka, South Asia, South East Asia, Europe and the Balkans, focussing on using a wide spectrum technology to capture, disseminate and archive inconvenient truths in austere, violent contexts. I am currently pursuing doctoral studies at the University of Otago, New Zealand on social media and politics. Contact me at sanjanah {at} gmail {dot} com. FastCompany profile of my work at http://www.fastcompany.com/1711352/2011-ted-fellow-cuts-through-wartime-censorship-in-sri-lanka

Using Information and Communications Technologies, new media and mobiles for peacebuilding and human rights. Travelling and reading compete for attention.

What if through the study of murmuration, applied to group dynamics on large-scale social media networks, we can unravel the mysteries of group-think that lead to physical responses and reactions from content or commentary that's digitally produced?

Citizen Journalism, Civic media, CVE online, Journalism, New Media, peacebuilding, Political communications, Social media

Nominated at a time when Sri Lanka was facing, post-war, systemic, violent repression and authoritarianism, the TED Fellowship was both an opportunity to be part of a global community of peers and, at the time, a safety net of sorts. In 2011, the community of Fellows was much smaller and as a consequence, TED was more a family than social network. The TED conference itself was strange. No one was interested in peacebuilding, or civic media's role, reach and relevance in bearing witness to human rights abuses. Disinformation, misinformation, fake news - all present in Sri Lanka at the time - hadn't captured the imagination of the audience. Attendees were interested in hard science, tech, robotics, genomics and other STEM related subjects. What I brought to TED, at the time, was perhaps ahead of its time. The TED main stage presentations, on the other hand, where amazing. Saw Eli Pariser's presentation on filter bubbles and the magic of Josh Roman's cello performances. Impossible to frame or capture in words the experience of witnessing this, or the fortune and privilege to be there in person. For that alone, grateful for TED, even as over the years, the wide-eyed adoration & adulation of TED's brand has been replaced by a more critical, nuanced appreciation for what it does, and can be more of.

Singing karaoke very badly. Typing out letters on a 1974 typewriter.