Discussing open source tecnology in Damascus on Arduino Day 2015. Flickr/Wikilogia. Some rights reserved.Conflict zones were once considered ‘information-scarce environments’. Wars effectively cut off large slices of territory and populations from the rest of the world. No longer. As vicious conflicts from Darfur and South Sudan to Syria amply show, new technologies have changed all that. Data is collected from satellites to smartphones, offering real-time channels to view events on the ground. Technology has dramatically transformed the ways in which wars are fought, but also how they are reported and how they are communicated between citizens.
The revolution in information communications technologies is forcing through a new form of conversation. What are the pros and cons of these digital platforms? How will the next generation of tools transform the construction of peace? Before I turn to solutions, I should confess that I'm not steeped in the peacebuilding world. That said, I do come from Brazil, a country experiencing conflict in all but name — we had more than 58,000 murders last year, surpassing Syria.
My personal interest in these issues kicked off two years ago when I started working for the Igarapé Institute. As a software developer working in the private sector, I suddenly found myself building technologies to make people safer. After developing a relationship with Jigsaw — the think tank associated with Google — my team and I became involved in building new data visualisation platforms to understand insecurity around the world.
