The Brown & White

The United Nations chose Lehigh to create and run a Twitter page with the latest updates from Darfur.

Ramu Damodaran, deputy director of the Outreach Division of the Department of Public Information of the United Nations, contacted Bill Hunter, Lehigh's director of the Global Union and Lehigh University/United Nations Partnership to initiate the project.

Damodaran initially contacted Hunter to obtain student feedback on the U.N.'s statement called the Academic Impact.

The Academic Impact is a contract that was sent to universities worldwide to ask them to subscribe to the ideals of the U.N. The universities that were interested then chose to support and actively do programming for the U.N.

Lehigh students were chosen to review the document to see how identifiable the document was with college students, not just administrators.

Because of Lehigh's work with the Academic Impact, Damodaran approached Hunter about creating a Twitter page dedicated to information coming out of Darfur.

Darfur is an eastern region of Sudan undergoing a genocide that began in 2003 and currently affects 4.7 million people of the 6 million who live there, according to the SaveDarfur Web site.

Damodaran asked Hunter to select students who would update a Twitter page about the conflict in Darfur with information not only from the U.N. but from other sources as well.

Hunter said Damodaran did not want the page to be in any way censored by the U.N., and ultimately the goal of the page is to become the primary source of information about the conflict. Essentially, the students choose issues about Darfur and tweet a summary of the latest news.

"They're providing the person who's following them and seeing the information a chance to see the original source material, which is a huge credibility thing on Twitter," said Jeremy Littau, who studies social media in the department of journalism and communications.

Littau said Twitter was the chosen information medium because it was not directly tied to journalism, and people could see not only what the U.N. was releasing, but other sources on the subject all in one place.

"There's power in this idea of passing on ideas," Littau said. "Twitter is, in a lot of ways, a social sharing of news and ideas."

Hunter contacted every college at Lehigh to obtain the best students from each school based upon faculty recommendations. Those students were then asked if they were interested.

The students read articles from the U.N. and from other sources and then tweet a summary of the latest news from the region.

Matt Kilbride, '09, who is in the College of Education, was contacted by a professor to see if he was interested in the project.

"I got involved because I wanted to see how the U.N. would use Twitter," Kilbride said.

Now that the page has been up and running for a few weeks, the students have established a system in which they rotate who tweets.

Kilbride said he was interested in issues involving education, and that the students have a lot of freedom in choosing which articles they want to tweet about from the UN releases.

Kilbride said the students also tweet about the history of Darfur and their opinions on the issues that surround the region.

He said that by using an alternative news source like Twitter, people who do not follow the news can still get updates about Darfur and can choose to get involved.

Lehigh is the first college to ever enter into a program like this, but Hunter has been in touch with visiting Fulbright Scholar, George Kankam from the University of Winneba in Ghana.

The goal of keeping in contact with Kankam is to have students from the University of Winneba to also update the Twitter page with information about Darfur, but from an African perspective.

Hunter said the conflict in Darfur was the first topic chosen because of the vast amount of information that comes out of the country every day.

Newsworthy issues are constantly evolving, and after the U.N. reviewed the information outputs on Darfur, it was clear by the sheer volume of information released that Darfur's conflict provides enough changes to tweet daily.

The Twitter page is currently in a "soft launch," which means that the number of followers increases simply by word of mouth and proximity. The students are mostly focused on tweeting regularly and gaining more of a following.

In the future, Hunter hopes to gain enough followers that the Twitter page will be recognized not only by the Lehigh community, but by U.N. officials as a legitimate source of information on Darfur.

The feed has more than 50 followers and is updated several times a day.

To visit the page and become a follower go to www.twitter.com/darfurconflict.