Future of Sri Lanka relies on responsible use of social media
Social media has today become a top notch platform for people to get connected with their long-lost friends and families while many businesses and corporates use it as a powerful tool to make money out of it. While on the one hand there are people who use these social media platforms with positive intentions, on the other hand there are others who use it with the wrong intentions.
In that sense if people are educated enough to use social media platforms with good intentions, not only urban society but rural communities too would benefit from this.
With this in mind, the Information and Communication Technology Agency of Sri Lanka (ICTA) has formulated an initiative called ‘Smart Social Circle (SSC)’. The objective is to empower citizens and communities to foster ethical and responsible use of social media and other emerging communication technologies in citizen journalism, good governance and disaster-risk management and so on. This citizen-centric initiative is aimed at providing strategic, technological and a commercial foundation needed to encourage and promote use of all social media and emerging ICT and develop an environment conducive to the achievement of the nation’s intellectual, cultural and social aspirations through ICT.
ICTA’s SSC project officer Aminda James said that there is a massive boom in social media around the world and people are using this as a powerful tool for many reasons. With Internet penetration in Sri Lanka at about 28 per cent and mostly in urban areas, use of smart phones and people getting used to new technology is tremendously increasing, he added.
He said, “Our goal is to create digitally enabled and socially responsible citizens in the country. The target audience for the project are those between the ages 5 and 75 who have tech savvy minds and the ability to grasp things quickly. We want to educate the people from the grassroot level, so we are reaching out to the Grama Niladari of every small community island-wide in order to accelerate the project.”
He also mentioned that a pilot project was conducted at the beginning of this year in five districts – Kurunegala, Polonnaruwa, Badulla, Jaffna and Matara. Twelve Grama Niladari divisions were formed in each district and knowledge agents were deployed, five from the community and five from the government services sector. Altogether 600 knowledge agents from five districts were formed and a half-day training programme was conducted to them on how effectively to use social media. During the training programme, 60 SSC Facebook pages were created by the agents themselves to boost existing unknown businesses within their small communities and the feedback they received were tremendous. People learnt that social media is a very good tool to do e-commerce and the benefits are numerous, noted Mr. James.
The project is now conducted island-wide in collaboration with key government institutions and other stakeholders as well as partnering with government banks and private business entities who have joined to uplift the rural communities in educating the society. Members of community organisations, school children, youth, house wives, small and medium scale enterprises, social activities are encouraged to join as volunteers for this national initiative. Also professionals in the ICT industry, university students and academia in the field joining the initiative would be to their advantage to be part of this innovative model which promotes the use of ICT in day-to-day life of all citizens. The reference documents are available on the ICTA website, added Mr. James.