Sanjana Hattotuwa, Special Advisor at the ICT4Peace Foundation, was invited to take part in Tech Camp 2016, held at Phandeeyar, where he talked about and trained on mobile advocacy and activism strategies. Calling on the work engineered in Sri Lanka around election monitoring, civil society mobilisation, voter education and civic media, Sanjana talked about how mobiles were used to bear witness to violence, promote democratic debate, dissent and also foster interest in voting.
Sanjana also travelled to and conducted an in-depth workshop in Mandalay, the heart of Myanmar’s deeply troubling Ma Ba Tha movement. The workshop was around the use of social media in general, and mobile messaging in particular, and focussed on countering violence extremism (CVE) and civil society mobilisation campaigns. Focussing on key campaigns in Sri Lanka as well as some of the leading peacebuilding related social media campaigns globally, Sanjana explored how vitality could be engineered, the importance of designing for mobile first and also how simple, effective messaging helped promote a campaign. He also touched briefly on digital security for activists especially when going head to head with online trolls as well as others with powerful online networks.
Finally, Sanjana touched on the importance of data driven campaigns, using the wealth of data provided for example by Facebook itself in the planning, design and implementation of online campaigns against violent extremism.