I just attended a very interesting presentation by Sanjana Hattotuwa about using CSCW in conflict transformation and peacebuilding. What is really great is that initial efforts are already underway to use this software in Sri Lanka. There has already been some success in getting the opposing factions to sit down and use this tool so that each party can describe the conflict from their point of view, air grievances and so on. Great to see technology being used for things that really matter, though, as Sanjana stated, lasting peace will not be brought about by technology but by the people involved in the conflict.
During his presentation, Sanjana said a few things that made me wonder about how context can be used in conflict transformation/resolution. He emphasised the difficulties introduced by cultural differences. A nod in one country means something else in another country (or even within different regions of the same country). It seems to me that the current context has a lot to do with the way you gesture, the way you speak and so forth. This is no different in a virtual setting than in a physical setting, except that in a physical setting the human needs to be aware of these cultural differences, whereas in a virtual setting (like the CSCW system presented by Sanjana) it should be theoretically possible to remove the burden of understanding cultural differences from the human, at least in part, and place that burden on the software.
Another possible channel of research is looking at the ownership of the virtual space that these peace negotiations take place in. Perhaps the paper written by KMH et al about security and access control in context management could throw some light on this?
