The role of citizen journalism in promoting good governance in Sri Lanka

An Abstract submitted to e-India

Background
Citizen Journalism can help move the country towards peace. The potential of citizen journalism, however, is its ability to provide a forum for all citizens - male and female, of all ethnicities, castes, classes and religions - to express themselves freely, society will better accommodate ideas and measures that engender peace. Also it has a potential to hold the Government officials accountable and answerable to the citizens through the process of citizen journalism - Web-based public forum the government’s performance will be scrutinized and monitored. Since it’s operated by the citizen its can simply play watchdog role in attaining public involvement with governance. In Sri Lanka numbers of active citizen journalism movements are on action in terms of promoting good governance and rural democracy.
Some considerations in Sri Lanka
Though the government of Sri Lanka announced its glory and victory over the three decades of terrorism, sustainable peace, sense of democracy, strengthen process of governance are yet to be achieved. Child sexuality, displacement, violation of human rights, violence and crushing of aspirations of individual and those detained continue to occur. Some citizen media movement such as Groundview (www. groundview.org) is continuing to record above injustice crimes and create forum for public debate on the issues affecting their life. www.vilakpa.org, another active citizen media, is continues to disseminate public woes and report on the effectiveness of local government activities at the rural level.
Blogs including www.kottu.org, http://negombonews.blogspot.com/ continue to disseminate people’s views considerably with zest. Personnel of the Dambadeniya Community Radio continue to record people’s views in the voice record www.dambadeniya.org and disseminate them in the form of CD’s free of charge. Dambadeniya community Radio continuously produces stories of the activities of Kurunegala local government authorities. It also play a vital role in promoting public participation in the local decision making process.
Print website related publications like www.meepura.com demonstrate somewhat a strong stance with regard to citizen journalism and good governance. Meepura mostly involve in investigating the nature of decision taken by the government authorities. The investigative reports of the meepura have had created at the ministerial level when meepura investigate about the Gunathmaka school development budget was misused by the school development board.
At this juncture, it has very important to assess the Role of citizen media in Sri Lanka in promoting good governance. The full paper is involve in SWOT analyze current citizen media, in order to offer its proposals for the efficient move of CJ in promoting good governance and heard the citizens.