About

This blog is a personal initiative of Sanjana Hattotuwa, started in 2006 and updated regularly since.

At the time, as Sri Lanka was heading into the final and most bloody stage of war, civil society, NGO and other web based initiatives critical of the government and published material on human rights violations were at risk of sudden deletion or being blocked in the country. Additionally, some initiatives just folded and along with the termination of their operations, took down their web presence as well. A good example is the website of the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission (SLMM), which was shut down shortly after the SLMM wrapped up its work in Sri Lanka around 2006 (not all is lost however). There was no intimation before the site was taken down. Another example is the Task Force for Rebuilding the Nation (TAFREN) initiative, on which there is little to no information to be found anymore on the web. 

A litany of issues fuels this entropy. Successive governments in Sri Lanka have actively sought to delete web content featuring inconvenient narratives and content. Compounding this, there is a significant lack of business continuity planning amongst NGO and civil society actors in Sri Lanka – donor funded initiatives are left to die online once the funding ends. Furthermore, social media is ephemeral and over time, significantly less discoverable. Initiatives like Twitter Q&A’s or even election campaign videos uploaded to Facebook are either taken down subsequently or, given the nature of the platform, extremely difficult to search for and rediscover. 

This blog is an effort to archive some of this vital content, preserve it posterity and make it more discoverable. It was inspired by the Internet Archive’s Waybackmachine, which sadly does not archive Sri Lankan civil society content with any useful degree of comprehensiveness or frequency.

I simply cannot and will not archive every significant website in Sri Lanka. See Disclaimer for more information. In addition to civil society sites, this blog will also archive vital Government and political party websites. These websites usually are unreliable to use, very slow to load and sometimes go offline with no warning.

More details on why I do what I do here.

Additionally, please visit a Google Doc containing links to other digital archives I have curated, with content going back to 2002. An easy to remember URL for this document is bit.ly/slarchives.