HCI & Conflict SIG at CHI 2016

If you are coming to CHI 2016, we invite you to join us for the HCI & Conflict SIG, on May 12, at 11:30am, room 112. We will discuss the role interactive technologies can play to prevent, deescalate, and recover from armed conflict, while focusing on developing ideas for specific projects. To get these ideas going, you may want to check this blog post on violent groups, social psychology, and computing.

Papers and articles on HCI for Peace

Hourcade, J.P. and Nathan, L. (2013). Human Computation and Conflict. In Michelucci (Ed.) Handbook of Human Computation (pp. 993-1009). New York: Springer.

Hourcade, J.P., Bullock-Rest, N.E., Jayatilaka, L. and Nathan, L. (2012). HCI for Peace: Beyond Tie Dye. interactions, 19(5), 40-47.

Hourcade, J.P. and Bullock-Rest, N.E. (2011). HCI for Peace: A Call for Constructive Action. Proceedings of CHI 2011. ACM Press: pp. 443-452. 

You can contact Juan Pablo Hourcade at juanpablo-hourcade@uiowa.edu 

HCI for Peace at the Build Peace: Peace Through Technology conference

The MIT Media Lab is hosting a conference titled Build Peace: Peace Through Technology. This is an exciting development that we hope will enable human-computer interaction researchers to connect with peace practitioners, activists, and researchers from other fields. Batya Friedman and Juan Pablo Hourcade are presenting ignite talks at the conference.

Human computation and conflict

Juan Pablo Hourcade and Lisa Nathan wrote a chapter for the Handbook of Human Computation titled Human computation and conflict. It provides an overview of ways in which human computation may be used to promote peace, but also how it could be counter-productive. There is a draft version of the chapter available online.

Read about the HCI for Peace Ideathon's outcomes

The outcomes of the HCI for Peace Ideathon are now posted in an interactions magazine blog post by Juan Pablo Hourcade.

HCI for Peace Ideathon at CHI 2013

HCI for Peace is hosting a SIG meeting at CHI 2013 in Paris. This SIG will be the first opportunity for CHI attendees to meet during the main part of the conference, share their ideas, and provide concrete ways to move forward with this line of research. We are calling it an "Ideathon" because we want to get lots of ideas on the role HCI researchers can play in preventing, de-escalating, and recovering from armed conflict.

The meeting will be on Wednesday, May 1st, and 9am in room 362/363.

Other organizations working on interactive technologies for peace

Looking for other perspectives on technologies for peace? Two successful organizations include the Peace Innovation Team at Stanford University, and the ICT for peace foundation.

HCI for Peace on the cover of interactions magazine

HCI for Peace is the cover story for the September-October 2012 edition of interactions magazine. Let us know what you think about the story, and share your own ideas about how to promote peace through interactive technologies.

HCI for Peace Workshop at CHI 2012

We had a wonderful workshop on Saturday at the CHI conference. The papers presented at the workshop included a wide range of work, from calming technologies aiming at self-awareness and self-regulation, to  the visualization of data (from detecting land mines to see patterns behind human behavior), to the gathering of data and media from individuals, with the challenges of curation, and finding common narratives that can lead to peace. We also discussed how patterns in the way people experience and share information on conflict can lead to more conflict or to peace. Themes that emerged for further discussion included the high complexity of the challenges, the importance of context and different viewpoints, and the role of design.

We also had a chance to explore issues of professional ethics, making (non-violent) conflict constructive, and tensions with the use of the word "peace". In particular, we agreed that the efforts we discussed were directed at preventing, de-escalating, recovering, and minimizing the damage from armed conflicts.

Interview with Lisa Nathan

Lisa Nathan is a faculty member at SLAIS, the iSchool at the University of British Columbia. Through a range of projects she investigates: 1) the design of information systems that address societal challenges, specifically those that are ethically charged and impact multiple generations (e.g., environmental degradation, war, colonialism) and 2) creative information practices that influence how these systems are appropriated over time. She is a founding member of the Voices from the Rwanda Tribunal project hosted by the University of Washington. The project's website provides citizens around the world with various means to access and use video interviews with personnel from the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (e.g., judges, defense lawyers, translators, prosecutors). The research team is building design theory and method to inform the development of the multi-lifespan information system design research initiative.

HCI for Peace interviewed Lisa about her work with the Voices from the Rwanda Tribunal project.

Lisa Nathan: A brief caveat before I dive into answering the questions - although the responses are mine, my experience with this project is strongly shaped by the numerous individuals I have had the honor of working with over the past few years. In particular, discussions with Batya Friedman (project PI), Nell Grey, Milli Lake, Bob Utter and Betty Utter continue to shape how I think about the project.

HCI for Peace: Can you briefly explain the concept of multi-lifespan information systems and how it may apply to post-conflict reconciliation?

Lisa Nathan: For me, the question motivating multi-lifespan information system design is simple - how can we design information systems to help us address complex societal challenges that influence many generations? For example, how might we design an information system to help recover from genocide or environmental degradation or colonization? Rather than thinking in the short term - designing an information system to meet the needs of today - the multi-lifespan information system approach is focused on longer-term goals. In terms of post-conflict reconciliation, the multi-lifespan design approach recognizes that reconciliation after horrific conflict will likely take many generations to achieve. The approach positions designers to investigate how an information system might scaffold this multi-year process. Although the concept is simple, implementation is complex and quite frankly, daunting.

HCI for Peace: How did you get involved in the project with the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda?

Lisa Nathan: At the time I was a doctoral student working with Professor Batya Friedman at the University of Washington. We attended a talk by Angeline Djampou, the Director of LIbraries for the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). After the talk we met with Ms. Djampou to discuss with her the multi-lifespan information system design approach, which at the time was a nascent concept. There was a great deal of synergy throughout the conversation. She invited us to visit the ICTR in Tanzania to speak with administrative officials about developing a multi-lifespan information system associated with the work of the ICTR. We made the trip a few months later and officials were very receptive to the idea. We were invited to return a few months later to start a project. Once we were back in Seattle we invited a range of people involved in information system design, international justice, international criminal law, and film to work with us on crafting the project. Over many long discussions and challenging debates, the Voices from the Rwanda Tribunal project began to take shape. We were given permission from the ICTR to recruit tribunal personnel for video interviews. During the interviews judges, defense lawyers, interpreters, prosecutors shared compelling reflections concerning the role of justice in the process of reconciliation. There were no restrictions in terms of interview questions and ICTR administration did not ask to review the material we collected. Interviewees were provided the opportunity to review his or her video interview, but only one person asked to have an interview sealed until the ICTR closes. That was the beginning of the project. Although an incredible amount of work has gone into the project over the past few years, it is still just getting underway.

HCI for Peace: What is one of the greatest challenges in the project?

Lisa Nathan: The multi-lifespan information system design approach is incredibly ambitious. It is much easier to critique than it is to feel that you have made progress because we are building a system to address a complex, shifting issue. Clearly this challenge is tied to what you use for metrics of success. Most projects in our field are in the 2-5 year range and it is a bit easier to figure out whether they were successful or not. Similarly, funding opportunities and other standard research components are based on projects with a much shorter time frame.

HCI for Peace: What are your hopes for the system you built?

Lisa Nathan: It is critical to realize that although there are strong technical components, at its heart this is a deeply human endeavor, it depends a lot on things like interpersonal relationships, goodwill, trust, and respect. I see those involved as stewards of the system, constantly evaluating and trying to improve the system (technical aspects, policies, protocols, etc.).One of my deepest wishes is that more Rwandans become actively involved in the project. I am not referring just to Rwandans using the material within the system to support local initiatives -- which is happening and is fantastic --but Rwandans becoming active stewards, helping to envision future adaptations of the Voices from the Rwandan Tribunal information system.

HCI for Peace hosting a workshop at CHI 2012

It will be on May 5 or 6, 2012 in Austin, Texas. Please checkout the workshop's website for more information.

HCI for Peace on SustainableLens

Samuel Mann interviewed Juan Pablo Hourcade for SustainableLens, a radio program out of Otago Access Radio in New Zealand. You can listen to the interview about HCI for Peace, which covers most of the material in the paper Prof. Hourcade presented on HCI for Peace at the CHI 2011 conference. The interview starts about 5 minutes and 40 seconds into the program.

Humanitarian demining: An interview with Lahiru Jayatilaka

Lahiru Jayatilaka is a researcher at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He leads the project called PETALS, which aims to create visual support devices for use by humanitarian deminers. We recently had the opportunity to interview him.

HCI for Peace: What has inspired you to conduct research on computer-based solutions to clear landmines?

LJ: Thrishantha Nanayakkara introduced me to the severity of the landmine problem during my Sophomore year at Harvard. After a couple of conversations with him, I was moved by the humanitarian urgency of the problem, and simultaneously shocked at the state-of-the-art in the domain. I, like most others, could not wrap my mind around the fact that most landmine clearance occurred with humans using metal detectors and hand-held probing tools. In these times of ‘high-tech’, it seemed unjust to have a fellow human being manually finding and removing buried explosives--a missed audio signal seemed to be the difference between life and death. Furthermore, I found it hard to accept the reality that countries such as Vietnam and Cambodia had remained contaminated with landmines since around the 1970s. Why was landmine clearance so slow? Why did we have to risk human life to get rid of these post-conflict threats? These ponderings, along with a keenness to apply my skills as a Computer Scientist to interesting, challenging and socially relevant problems, were some of the driving factors behind my decision to enter this space.

HCI for Peace: Can you give us a brief overview of the PETALS project?

LJ: The PETALS (Pattern Enhancement Tool for Assisting Landmine Sensing) project is a recent research initiative at Harvard University that aims to develop assistive visual devices to improve the safety and efficiency of metal detector-based humanitarian demining. PETALS is motivated by two fundamental characteristics of humanitarian landmine clearance. First, metal detectors are, and will for a very long time remain, the primary detection tool for finding landmines. Second, metal detectors are of limited effectiveness, as modern landmines contain only minimal amounts of metal, making them difficult to distinguish from the ubiquitous but harmless metallic clutter littering post-combat areas. In response to these challenges related to detection, the PETALS system enables deminers to visualize ‘metallic signatures’. A metallic signature is simply the outline of an electromagnetic field belonging to a buried metallic object. Given that a metallic signature is roughly proportional in size and shape to the buried metallic object, visualizing metallic signatures provides more information to the deminer about the nature of the object buried in the ground, thereby, enabling better detection decisions.

HCI for Peace: What are your plans for the future of PETALS?

LJ: We are currently prototyping the PETALS system with both novice and expert humanitarian deminers at a demining training center. These preliminary field studies have helped us gather ecological support for our experimental findings, and also ascertain feedback about eventual system design. We hope to continue with these field studies during the coming months, while simultaneously transitioning PETALS to a field-ready system. If our plans proceed as expected, we hope to deploy PETALS commercially in the not-so-distant future.

HCI for Peace: A Call for Constructive Action

A preview of our CHI 2011 paper is now available here: http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~hourcade/hciforpeace.pdf. Here is the abstract for the paper:
Peace is an important value for the human-computer interaction research community, yet it has not resulted in the development of a research sub-community or even a research agenda. In this paper we seek to address this void by first motivating the need for computing research on promoting peace and preventing war. We then review evidence on the factors that affect the likelihood that armed conflict will occur, as well as the aspects involved when individuals make moral decisions on whether or not to support a war. Based on this review, we propose a research agenda, citing research examples from the human-computer interaction literature and discussing new ideas.

The Future of Simulation

by Ronald "Skip" Cole

I want to ask you a favor. I ask that you spend sometime in the next week or so, maybe while in the shower, or stuck in traffic, pondering a question. This is a question that I and others have thought about for several years, and I think we are just scratching the surface as to where the answers will lead us. So I sincerely hope you can give it some thought, and share back here any insights that you may have.

The question is this, "How can simulation improve human decision making?"

The ability for people to easily and inexpensively create synthetic or ‘virtual’ environments is relatively new. We can project that this ability is going to get even more inexpensive and powerful. Imagine that, just as any educated adult is expected to be able to write a document with a word processor, in the future, any educated adult will be expected to be able to use software to create virtual worlds, worlds that can be used for educational or even experimental purposes. How will that change the real world?

There is nothing, by the way, theoretically holding us back from this future. It is just a matter of good interface design and refining our educational processes. What are now graduate level courses in simulation design will soon become quite common fare - there are not a lot of profound secrets there. Indeed, as simulations have to work with us common humans in the loop, most of the lessons seem intuitive when stated out loud.

As the printing press ushered in a new age of creativity and improved communication, the ability to create interactive worlds will do so also. Just as Gutenberg probably could not have foreseen a talented 18 year old writing "Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus" for mass distribution using his 'movable type,’ it is hard for us to see all there is to come. So the time spent pondering this question may be time very well spent.

How could simulations affect your personal life? Are you having a hard time convincing someone of something? Don't you just wish you could let them step into a world in which they have already made the decision you want them to make, so they could see how better off they would be? We try to do this with each other all of the time. Painting a shared vision of a common future is a very powerful technique in persuasion. Technology will help us do this with even greater saliency.

How will simulations affect commerce? Imagine if anyone doing a business proposal, for a restaurant say, had to submit a simulation of how the restaurant would function; when the customers would come in, how they would be treated, etc. Currently banks don't demand such an item because it would be too expensive to create, but the price is coming down on such software. Modern software techniques and the open source movement are driving the costs down, and will continue to do so. Software, once written, is written, and if it is well written, other software can be built on top of it.

How will international affairs be different when all nations could see, maybe just a little bit, further down the line, when making their plans? What if any nation planning aggressive action could see how things are likely to pan out? This ability might not be enough to stop all wars, but it may at least prevent some of the more foolish ones.

What happens to the human race as its members grow in experience and improved communication? How will our 'collective intelligence' be changed? The ability to predict and communicate second and third order effects has been traditionally been poor, and it will never be perfect. Look closely behind any modern catastrophe, and you will find tortured Cassandras: People who tried to give warning, but were not heard. These voices have been drowned out by the charlatans, noise and expediency. Creating platforms to allow ideas to play themselves out in more objective settings seems like something we must do. It is hard to put a value on not making bad decisions.

I have been working on an Open Simulation Platform (OSP) at the United States Institute of Peace. This is a tool that could allow anyone to create, conduct, refine and share online training simulations. I have been exploring its use in helping prepare peacebuilders, by providing another possible tool for them to use relying on cheap, ubiquitous simulation technology. Innovations have traditionally been fueled by great conflicts. The 'space race' gave us microelectronics and microwave ovens. The cold war produced the Internet - a distributed network that could survive a nuclear attack. If the 'fuel' that drives the innovation toward inexpensive, ubiquitous simulation technology is the pursuit of peace, I think that matters. And I’m proud that we are playing our part in this next stage of the mankind’s progression.

So please, share back with us any thoughts you may have. And if you are interested in helping us on this journey, drop an email to OSP at usip.org.


The views expressed here are purely the author’s are not necessarily those of the United States Institute of Peace, which does not advocate specific policies.

Design for Change Finland

by Anna Keune and Pavan Ramkumar

Design for Change (DfC) is a worldwide school contest that originated from Kiran Bir Sethi's Design for Giving project, in Ahmedabad, India in 2007. Here you can find out more about the global movement: http://www.designforchangecontest.com

DfC is calling children to work for one week on solutions for a local problem they are most drawn towards. The contest aims to give children the opportunity to think critically about their everyday life, form working groups, come up with a plan of action, and act upon it. The global movement has great potential to awaken the talents and awareness of children to participate in shaping their world, by offering a simplified four-step design process toolkit of "feel, imagine, do and share" to children. DfC sends the message that learning can happen through hands-on design practices, and interconnectedness of knowledge domains. During the DFC contest, the teacher's role changes. The teacher becomes a facilitator and learns together with the students.

The DfC contest is specifically targeted to the school environment. With this it is expanding the possibilities that school offers to children by stretching the boundaries from within.

Currently, 22 countries are participating in the global movement including Finland. We set up DfC Finland with 4 volunteers, in the spring of 2010. We performed the four step process with children in Helsinki. The children chose their own content and worked on a campaign to stop Finland from supporting cluster-bombs in war territories, and a pro-cycling blog. You can view a video summarizing the workshop in Helsinki here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fW7NlTFkVr8

We also conducted an interview with the teacher, who offered us the opportunity to work with the children. You can listen to the experiences of the teacher from Finland here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7etEWqSmbY

Recently, DfC Finland launched an open call for volunteers to help take Design for Change Finland to more schools or youth groups around Finland. School teachers from Oulu and Lapeenranta have expressed interest to participate with their classes.

Last Saturday, we conducted a workshop with Unicef, in which the teachers and students of the Unicef school in Helsinki got to try out part of the DfC process and get inspired. The topic was to develop the Unicef school network in Finland.

On November 20th, the global child rights day, the TEDxYouth will be organized at the Aalto Design Factory in Helsinki. Design for Change Finland will be offering a workshop for children there.

Design for Change, as it originated from India is representative of a trend in how and where innovative ideas originate and spread, sometimes called reverse innovation. It picks up on universal challenges and offers an example of a solution from India to all other parts of the world. Anyone in the world can gain from learning how to become more socially engaged, and collaborate with others based on their own interests.

If you are curious and moved to contribute, do reach the DfC Finland volunteers at dfc.finland@gmail.com.

HCI Hero award for HCI for Peace

Juan Pablo Hourcade received the 2010 HCI Hero Award at the University of Maryland's Human-Computer Interaction Lab's Symposium for his work with Natasha Bullock-Rest in organizing HCI for Peace. We hope the award will help raise awareness of HCI for Peace's goals and will encourage others to pursue research in this area.

HCI for Peace at CHI 2010

Bringing HCI for Peace to CHI 2010 was a great success! We recruited 500 peace ambassadors through the distribution of as many postcards and peace ribbons, held an informal brainstorm for peace gathering, and collected many ideas for peace on sticky notes.

At the peace gathering, partners discussed their ideas for peace and wrote them down on sticky notes. From these ideas, several main themes emerged: promoting education, increasing social awareness of everyday actions, creating a culture of peace, engaging other organizations, exposing the ugly side of war, promoting cross-cultural understanding, and building infrastructure and tools.

Promote education
Education plays an important role in creating peace. Participants suggested working on raising literacy rates for women, educating children, giving opportunities to adults and elderly people, and building education ICTs. Another participant captured a popular sentiment – “peace starts from the kids.”

Social awareness of everyday actions
Some participants noted the importance of informed social awareness. One stated, simply, “think about who you’re working for and what their goals are.” Another mentioned that giving consumers tools to ascertain product origin and the conditions in which different products are created can help people making more ecologically and humanitarianly sound choices. Social networking sites can allow the sharing of social pressure to maximize individuals’ social impact. Another participant stressed the need for moving beyond quick fixes by figuring out how to promote long-lasting changes in attitudes and behaviors relating to informed consumer knowledge

Highlight peace
Creating a culture that values peace includes creating activities that highlight peace: geocaching of “peace sites” in the model that war sites and battlefields are commended, including places like the ones where Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. spoke.

Engage other organizations
Ben Bederson and Allison Druin mentioned creating an HCI Peace Corps in their acceptance talk for the SIGCHI social impact award, a group that could carry out service projects around the world, in the form of Master’s projects, PhD work, and sabbatical work, similar to the University of Maryland’s Human-Computer Interaction Lab’s service day. Other ideas included connecting with existing peace groups to combine forces. A participant suggested hosting a TED talk that focused on peace and conflict in Africa or other developing regions.

Expose the ugly side of war
One idea to promote peace is to educate people about the negative facts of war through pictures, stories, and anecdotes, as a way to encourage people to think about the importance of peace. One participant noted, “conflict should not produce profit,” highlighting the frequent interplay between the two, dovetailing with another participant’s suggestion to create visualizations that illuminate the public cost of war and who profits to help people understand the true forces that create conflict.

Promote cross-cultural understanding
By far the most discussed topic was reducing conflict through emphasizing a common humanity, encouraging people to step out of their comfort zones to make cross-cultural connections and seek out information from new sources of ideas, help them learn about each other, and think from another perspective. Ideas to this effect included setting up video-conferencing classrooms across the world, creating a site for “speed friending” across the globe – particularly for countries in conflict, encouraging diverse groups of young children to communicate through playing and collaborating together across time and space, setting up partnerships for the privileged to collobrate and help people in need, and a computer-mediated pen pal system to match children in conflict prone tension areas. To seek out different perspectives, one participant suggested a findyouropposite.net, a space in which one could discuss ideas with people from different persuasions and backgrounds. A participant mentioned that it is important for everyone’s voices to be heard, even if it requires extra work on our part. Microblogging could be used as a helpful tool, both for sharing experiences and for making higher numbers of contacts from other countries.

Infrastructure tools
In the realm of infrastructure, one participant expressed a desire to create guidelines/heuristics to evaluate the use of oppressive language and sexist applications or online tools as a way to cut down these harmful forces. Another suggested that the HCI community could use its technical skills to build tools for organizing and communicating for peace. Another suggested improving worldwide computing technology overall.

If any of these ideas speak to you, think about the ways in which you can contribute to make peace a reality. If you have ideas or projects you’d like us to hear, feel free to leave a comment, tweet with the #hciforpeace hashtag, or leave us a note on our Facebook group.

What are we going to do now?
For CHI 2011, we are planning an HCI for Peace Special Interest Group, as well as a panel discussion.

Massive brainstorm at CHI 2010

How can computing be used to promote peace and prevent conflict? Join us in a massive brainstorm to coincide with CHI 2010 by following these steps:

Become a Peace Ambassador. Find a peace ribbon attached to postcards near the CHI 2010 registration desk or in the Exhibits Hall and add it to your nametag.
Talk to your friends about computing for peace.
Share your ideas on Twitter (#hciforpeace), our Facebook page (HCI for Peace), and this blog by commenting on this story.





Need some food for thought? Browse this blog for articles on computing initiatives related to peace and interviews with Allison Druin and Ben Bederson (winners of the 2010 ACM SIGCHI Social Impact Award), Ben Shneiderman and others.

Not going to CHI? We would still like to hear your ideas. Share them through one of our online homes.

We are hoping to spark a massive online brainstorm, tapping into the expertise, knowledge, and wisdom of the HCI community. Our grassroots movement seeks to create the conditions for peace by promoting the precursors of peace – democracy, education, economic opportunity – and decreasing the known causes of conflict -war profiteering, inequality, environmental stress, and the failure of the social contract, to name a few. The HCI community is uniquely positioned in the computing world to affect change in this arena, its focus not only on individual users, but on the effect of technology at a societal and global scale.

Through wearing the peace ribbon, you not only express your desire for a more peaceful world, but also are instantly linked with the like-minded Peace Ambassadors around you, visibly united in a common goal; we hope this call to action starts community-wide discussions from which positive action can spring. CHI brings together individuals from different backgrounds and areas of expertise, from many countries, with different opinions. It is our wish that this diversity will cross-pollinate, resulting in a wide variety of ideas on how computing can help achieve peace. Our world can be no brighter than the worlds we dream of.

It is our dream that the conversations started at this conference will encourage research, create a community of impassioned individuals, forge new partnerships, start long-lasting discussions, and prompt actions to promote peace and prevent conflict.

And, if you know of computing for peace work we should feature on our blog, e-mail us at hciforpeace@gmail.com.

Interview with Thomas Smyth

Thomas Smyth is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research focus is on technologies for international development. At CHI 2010, he will present a paper titled "MOSES: Exploring New Ground in Media and Post-Conflict Reconciliation," which was selected as an Honorable Mention. We recently had a chance to interview Thomas about his research in Liberia and his thoughts on the use of computing in post-conflict reconciliation efforts.

HCI for Peace: Could you tell us a bit about MOSES and your experiences in Liberia?

Thomas: Sure! The MOSES project was conceived in partnership with Liberia's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, in an effort to promote and support a national dialogue on the causes and effects of the war, as well as on other topics. Together, we realized that Liberia's severely limited post-war communications infrastructure could not support rich communications across large distances. So we designed a mobile, video-sharing kiosk system allowing users to record and browse comments, opinions, and discussions. I've attached a few photographs of the system in use.

MOSES has been across much of Liberia, thanks to the tireless work of our country program manager, John Etherton. We have collected over 900 videos and thousands have used the system. We found that MOSES was very well received by Liberians. They were quite willing to engage seriously with the system, talking about a wide range of serious issues, and also contributing lots of lighter content such as jokes and songs. In an interview study we conducted, the results of which appear at CHI this year, users expressed feelings of empathy and solidarity they derived from the system, as well as a general enthusiasm towards the experience of using the novel machine. Users were especially affectionate towards the system's cartoon helper character, also called Moses. As a result, we are particularly excited about the potential of animated agent technology for novice, low-literate user groups. In general, we've learned a huge amount about designing for such groups.

Of course what we can't claim is that MOSES has had a general, positive impact on Liberia's prospects for peace. Measuring such a thing would nigh to impossible given the time scales we're faced with (the TRC's mandate has now expired and our project has since wound down along with the TRC itself.) On the other hand, we can claim to have built and fielded an advanced, interactive, new media technology for dialogue, and found that it was understood, embraced, and engaged with on a deep and meaningful level by ordinary Liberians from all strata of society. We saw that the system supported rich connections and communications between far flung regions of Liberia, where none would have been possible otherwise. We feel that this is a great first step in this largely unexplored territory.

My personal experiences in Liberia were truly unforgettable. I spent three weeks there last year helping to ready MOSES for deployment. I travelled to several rural areas within a few hours of the capital, where the sheer beauty of the Liberian countryside and warmth of its people were in plain and abundant view. Remnants of the era of conflict were also sadly everywhere, be they bombed out buildings, amputee ex-combatants, abandoned tanks, UN checkpoints, or a feeling of insecurity among locals in some areas, due to the regular occurrence of armed robberies. Twice, Liberian research assistants I was working with had to intervene to prevent me from wandering off into dangerous situations. Luckily, I did not actually get into any trouble while I was there. Despite all the reminders of turmoil, though, I experienced a palpable degree of hope among the people I met. This came out both through discussions I had with people as well as through what they recorded using MOSES. Issues of development--better schools, better roads, better hospitals, better economic performance--were hot on everyone's tongues. The war received far fewer attention. I look at this as a good sign.

HCI for Peace: What role do you see for computing technologies in future post-conflict reconciliation efforts?

Thomas: I think supporting communication should and will continue to be a focal point. I would be interested to explore using new media technologies in conjunction with a human moderator to support in-person synchronous discussions, as a complement to the more automated approach we adopted with MOSES. It would also be great to see MOSES scaled up, perhaps in a different context, to include multiple kiosks--our initial pilot only included one.

Sadly, intra-state conflict of the sort experienced by Liberia is on the rise in today's world. As such, I think that efforts to incorporate ICTs into post-conflict reconciliation efforts will only increase, as the cost of technologies continues to drop. It will be interesting to follow the results of these experiences in the future, as a consensus on best practices hopefully emerges.

I would close, though, by putting a large set of parentheses around this work and other efforts like it. I think anyone would agree that the most important factor in preventing repeated civil conflicts is strong and careful leadership both from within the country and from the international community. We position MOSES as an example (and we hope an inspiring one) of some of the tools at the disposal of those who must work tirelessly to build and maintain peace. We remain at their service.