ResearchImpactReconciliation
Potential impact on peace building and reconciliation
There are parts of Northern Ireland where community polarisation is so high that people never talk to people from other communities. When there are disputes, the representatives may even refuse to sit in the same room.
Well, the quickest intermediary for a proximity talk is a computer network. Messages can be passed on immediately, without risk of physical violence. Or messages can be sent anonymously, so that initially you do not know whether you are talking to a protestant or catholic: as young people using Internet Relay Chat in Bytes for Belfast found 10 years ago. Or you can use the same means to exchange experiences with people in other parts of the world: the first users of the Manchester Community Network were Bangladeshis wanting to keep in touch with people and events in Bangladesh.
IT can be used to allow people to communicate over social and political distances. The virtual meeting places provide a safe space for talk with strangers. When the East Belfast Partnership Board searched for a neutral venue for discussions between young people about human rights, they found only one: the Internet.
The main focus of this project is on ways to develop reconciliation, mutual understanding and respect between and within communities and traditions. Software can be used to support human mediation, negotiation and decision-making processes. IT can be used to collect issues and needs from many people (e.g. via on-line chats). Other software can be used to map out arguments and possible solutions, as used in Germany by citizens planning circles. And computers allow quite subtle voting, rating and ranking, allowing us to find out possible consensus between people whose first choice solutions remain resolutely opposed (as in the referendum). It is hard to summarise all the ways in which software can support mutual understanding, so see the diagram on p. 184 and accompanying text on p. 182-7 of Morison and Newman.
Each e-consultation experiment or trial will bring together people from different communities into the same virtual space to deliberate on issues, needs and solutions. Software can be used at three levels:
- Exchanging messages. Allowing communications over physical and psychological distances.
- Understanding others. Reading of the needs of others, so that even if you don’t agree with them, you begin to understand what is important to them.
- Creating shared models. In business decision-making, people use software to map out issues and solutions until they come to a shared understanding of the problem. In community consultation, it is unlikely there will be a single shared model, but the software can help map out the areas in which there is agreement, and voting software can discover which options have consensus support.
Each level provides one step in improving cross-community and inter-cultural relations. 12 years ago the Council for Christians and Jews got together with the AI for Society Club in London to look at using expanded hypertext to explore cultural attitudes to food and drink, linking from statements of what you could serve guests at a meal, through explanations provided by each community and eventually down to their religious texts. People with little understanding of Jewish or Muslim dietary practices could finally understand something about the cultural roots of their practices.
More recently, Democratic Dialogue and the Women’s Resource and Development Agency have already done experiments in which women’s groups from unionist and nationalist areas, on opposite sides of a ‘peace wall’ came together to discuss a local issue using Group Systems software.
In this project we intend to turn this theoretical possibility into a practical guide for groups planning to run public consultations or community reconciliation processes using Information and Communication Technologies. This guide will be based upon the research results, and validated in trials.
