#peacehack London 2017: hacking for peace at our #robotsforpeace workshop
Last month, we built a flock of twitterbots at two #peacehacks in London and Brierfield to spread messages of peace on Twitter for International Peace Week. #peacehack is a hackathon series for peacebuilding with tech, hosted by International Alert with fourteen hacks in 3 years under our belts and more to come later this year. Events are open to all, bringing together designers, developers, peacebuilding practitioners and anyone else interested in working on ideas and building tech to support peacebuilding work.
The latest hackathon joined a campaign from Build Up and International Alert to build #robotsforpeace reaching as many people as possible with automated messages of peace and get #peaceday trending on Twitter. Tech mentors and bot-building workshops on the day supported anyone with no coding experience.
Hackathons have been questioned for the idea that big problems get solved by bringing people together to build tech over a weekend. We’re under no illusions that a hackathon will bring world peace. Peacebuilding work is complex, difficult and takes time. We work with peacebuilding practitioners at International Alert and other partners to bring local context and understanding about the specific challenges faced by local peacebuilders in a particular situation.
Rather than thinking of hackathons as events where people get together, solve problems and build finished tech products all in one weekend, a hackathon event can be an opportunity for bringing people together and learning in an open and welcoming environment — to learn about peacebuilding, think about the hard challenges of peacebuilding work, share knowledge and ideas about technology, development and design. Like a conference, it’s a beginning not an end in itself — the start of a conversation and sharing of ideas, building new relationships.
And bringing people together in a room to meet each other face to face, share ideas, make new friendships, and develop a shared understanding of difficult problems, is one of the fundamental activities of peacebuilding.
Peacebuilding work is about transformation, structural change, participation, relationships. We’ll always need humans for this — robots won’t be replacing this human activity any time soon. Tech tools present opportunities to optimize human peacebuilding work, to augment and amplify. But tech is not a tool alone; tech processes and structures reflect their makers and shape our dialogue and relationships. All the more reason to bring technologists and peacebuilders together to learn from each other.
In 2016, our London #peacehack brought together technologists with young peacebuilders from Marsden Heights School in Lancashire, to share insights and work together on Islamophobia and online abuse.
Each #peacehack brings a unique approach and insight on local conflict issues. Technology alone won’t resolve conflict, and we’re increasingly learning how the online world can increase polarisation and communication practices that divide people and exacerbate conflict through filter bubbles and echo chambers.
Yet technology does have the potential to augment approaches to peacebuilding, bring people together across divides, build new relationships and to challenge traditional structures and hierarchies, amplifying voices.
Last year’s hack in Zürich at the Build Peace conference saw Build Peace fellows from Colombia, Burundi and Myanmar working together with developers to test out approaches and ideas for specific tech tools to support their peacebuilding work.
This year’s #robotsforpeace campaign takes the concept of twitterbots, which have been used extensively to spread division and misinformation, and puts bots in the service of raising awareness of International Peace Day and its message of peace.
The idea for #robotsforpeace was inspired by an article looking at how ‘inhumanly loud’ twitterbots were used in the Trump campaign to manufacture consensus online. By repurposing automated twitterbots, we’re turning them around to support a broader process of engagement with peacebuilding.
Helena Puig Larrauri from Build Up outlines the risks inherent in adopting a tool used for division and polarization to spread messages of peace in her article, ‘Automatic for the peaceful’ — both the risk of the campaign being targeted and derailed, or ‘manufacturing consensus to the point where it loses credibility’. This campaign experiments with automation for peacebuilding, and is the start of a conversation about opportunities and challenges of using online automation for peacebuilding to be continued at this year’s Build Peace conference in Bogotá.
#peacehack London 2017 kicked off with a discussion on the ethics of using twitterbots for peacebuilding. Jen Gaskell from Build Up and International Alert’s Phil Vernon presented various scenarios, looking at how twitterbots tweeting for peace might be gamed, breach privacy, spamming, exceeding rate limits. Everyone signed up to a code of conduct to follow Twitter automation rules, not mislead users into thinking they are human, not spam, harass or do any malicious stuff, and not to directly contact users unless they have initiated contact.
Then Alan Thomson, our resident bot-building expert, ran a workshop on how to build a bot using CheapBotsDoneQuick.com which writes bots in Tracery and is easy to use even with zero coding knowledge and the hackers got started hacking.
By the end of the day after lots of hard work and a quick hello to our fellow hackers at the parallel Brierfield hack at Marsden Heights School, everyone built bots with all different kinds of functionalities. Hacker teams and solo bot-builders presented multi-lingual bots, joke-making bots, peace placard creating bots, bots using sentiment analysis and more at the final show and tell …
Top prizes for top tweet, most original bot name and all round top bot went respectively to:
@bot2u‘s tweets generating peace campaign placards:
@MabotmaPeacedi for most original bot name
@tyrellbot won top prize for originality, technically impressive and creative approach, with a bot that searches for and rewords tweets from negative to positive sentiment.
Everyone made fantastic contributions to the day, bringing new and exciting ideas, and even cartwheels to their bot-building approaches.
At #peacehack, technologists learn about peacebuilding and conflict and peacebuilders learn about tech. Ideas are formed, new friendships grow. We’re building a community beyond the events, and working together with hackers to grow the tech ideas and products — Everyday Peace is a platform for everyday peacebuilding actions and last year’s London winning team built the browser based app HateFree to tackle hateful speech online, available on the Chrome Web Store.
We’ve hacked together in Beirut, Manila, Barcelona, Colombo, London, Brierfield, Washington and many more places — the next peacehack will be in Bogotá at this year’s Build Peace conference — come and join us!!
Catherine Dempsey works on partnerships and development with #peacehack — a hackathon series bringing together technologists and peacebuilding practitioners to strengthen peacebuilding work. #peacehack is an initiative by International Alert.
