[Announce] Human Rights Tools

Sat Oct 24 16:04:54 CDT 2009

From: Human Rights Tools <editors at humanrightstools.org>

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Dear readers,

Today we have no less than FIVE interesting tidbits to read and watch... 
and also to forward to your friends and colleagues who share your 
passion for human rights work.

This may be the first newsletter for some of you... so you should know 
that we don't write very often, only when we have something to share. So 
appreciate this latest edition, you may not get another for a loooooong 
time!

ONE: Join an on-line dialogue on "Geo-Mapping for Human Rights", October 
28 – November 3, 2009

Have you heard of these online dialogues yet? New Tactics regularly 
organises these online one-week sprints, on practical topics like shadow 
reporting, and engaging pro bono lawyers. The discussions are led by 
experts, and once you've signed up you can also interact and ask all the 
questions you want, and share your own experience. Or just lurk!

The next one is starting reaaaaally soon, so if you're interested in 
Geo-Mapping, sign up to join without any delay!!!
http://www.newtactics.org/en/blog/new-tactics/geo-mapping-human-rights

The blurb:

New Tactics is pleased to feature 'Geo-Mapping for Human Rights,’ as the 
topic of our October featured online dialogue. Join New Tactics, our 
co-moderator, Christian Kreutz, and our featured resource practitioners 
from October 28 – November 3, 2009 in a conversation about the ways in 
which geographical mapping has been used to share critical information, 
promote transparency and engage communities.

With the growing use of satellite imagery and easy-to-use technology, 
geographical maps are being used more often by human rights 
organizations. These maps can help an organization map crises, places of 
heritage, visualize data, monitor the impact of conflict, uncover 
critical evidence, and more! The goal of this dialogue will be to take 
the stories shared by practitioners with experience using these tools 
and tactics and draw out lessons to enable other organizations to 
strategically apply these resources.

Our featured resource practitioners include:

Lars Bromley, director of the Geospatial Technologies and Human Rights 
program at the AAAS, United States
Patrick Meier, of Ushahidi, United States
Jason Guberman-Pfeffer, founder of the Diarna Project, United States
Michael Graham, of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the World Is 
Witness project, United States
Sandra Sudhoff, Calum Davey, Yann Rebois and Bernard Wright of CartONG, 
France
Gillo Cutrupi, GreenPeace Community Manager, Italy"

More info and previous dialogues:
http://www.newtactics.org/en/dialogues/home

So a big thanks from all of 3700 of the Human Rights Tools readers, to 
Kristin Antin, the online community builder at New Tactics, for her 
great and useful work.

TWO: The first Crisis Mapping Conference just ended

OK, so as we're still on the theme of mapping... we'd like to inform you 
that you probably just missed the first International Conference on 
Crisis Mapping, held in Cleveland from 16 to 18 October. Tough luck!

The blurb: "The purpose of the 3-day conference was to bring together 
the most engaged practitioners, scholars, software developers and 
policymakers at the cutting edge of crisis mapping to define the future 
of the field along with best practices and lessons learned. Over 60 
organizations were represented and multiple partnerships were formed on 
specific projects during the conference."

The website: http://crisismapping.ning.com/page/iccm-2009

Why is crisis mapping relevant to human rights? Well its essentially a 
fresh look at the process with which we monitor the human rights 
situation and document violations... the familiar process of collecting 
data, processing it, analysing it, and disseminating it... but with a 
focus on a emerging set of mapping tools and technologies to support 
this process. You can read about crisis mapping on Patrick Phlippe 
Meieir's blog "iRevolution", he has really done a great job of framing 
this emerging field:

Blog: http://irevolution.wordpress.com/2009/08/08/proposing-crisis-mapping/

So you probably missed the Conference... Well you can read about crisis 
mapping on Patrick Phlippe Meieir's blog "iRevolution, download the 
slideshows, and in the coming days also watch the videos of the 
presentations:

Slides: http://crisismapping.ning.com/group/conferencepresentations
Videos: http://crisismapping.ning.com/video

Next years conference is already set, so don't miss it this time! 
http://crisismapping.ning.com/page/iccm-2010

THREE: Videos to watch: the Soul of the New Machine

OK, you'll have to wait a few days to watch the video of the above 
conference.... We anticipated your frustration: in the meantime we have 
some other ones for you to watch.

In May this year, the Human Rights Center UC Berkeley organised a series 
of panel discussions, called "Soul of the New Machine", and luckily they 
were filmed and put online at Fora TV.

You can find the whole collection here: 
http://fora.tv/partner/Human_Rights_Center_UC_Berkeley
.. and also on the Human Rights Center's website: 
http://hrc.berkeley.edu/events/NewMachineConference/video.html

You'll find a lot of valuable ideas and experience and passion in what 
these speakers have to say, although not all of them may have Obama's 
oratory skills.

Our favorites:
Blogging for Human Rights: http://fora.tv/2009/05/05/Blogging_Human_Rights
Documenting violtions with databases: 
http://fora.tv/2009/05/04/Human_Rights_Databases_Data_Sharing_and_Data_Security

As you can see, there's even a panel on satellite imagery, in case you 
can't wait for the New Tactics dialogue (or to prepare for it...).

We really find it useful to tape presentations so that they can be 
shared widely over the web. If you're organising a conference or event, 
don't forget to tape it and post it online: http://hub.witness.org/ ... 
and let us know of course at editors at humanrightstools.org.

FOUR: Call for Proposals: Build useful transparency and democracy 
websites for Central and Eastern Europe

We're cross-posting a very interesting call for proposals from our 
colleagues at mySociety... so if you have an idea for a web tool to 
track transparency and democracy in your country, and if you happend for 
be from Central and Eastern Europe, well it could actually get funded!

Learn more about their fascinating work here, just explore some of the 
websites they've created, some amazing ideas:
http://www.mysociety.org/projects/

You may remember, we interviewed two mySociety developers last year:
http://humanrightstools.org/cgi-bin/dada/mail.cgi/archive/news/20080305120228/

Now here is their call for proposals:

http://cee.mysociety.org/

mySociety has teamed up with the Open Society Institute (OSI) to help 
people in Central and Eastern Europe build transparency and democracy 
websites suited to the needs and realities of their countries. In the UK 
mySociety runs a variety of sites such as TheyWorkForYou.com, 
FixMyStreet.com, and our Freedom of Information website 
WhatDoTheyKnow.com. As a result of running these, we know that there are 
lots of people outside the UK longing to build similar sites that help 
increase transparency and accountability in their own government 
institutions.

We have now launched a Call for Proposals for participants in Central 
and Eastern Europe, similar to the one we recently ran in the UK. The 
big difference is that this time we’re not looking for projects that we 
will build. We’re looking for projects you want to build, but that for 
lack of funds or lack of the right skills, you can’t get started 
yourself, so could use our help.

Over the coming months we will be selecting a series of projects to fund 
and mentor — up to ten in total. At each of four monthly intervals, 
starting November 15th, OSI and mySociety will convene to consider and 
choose from the proposals submitted so far. To help us understand 
project strengths and weaknesses in the given local or national context 
we can draw on the knowledge of regional OSI staff, but we’ll also be 
paying very close attention to the public comments on the submissions — 
so please join in the discussion. The shortlisted projects, and the 
people behind them, will then undergo a formal vetting process, during 
which project funding details will be requested (but we can help you 
with that if you’ve no previous experience of budget planning). 
mySociety will work closely with the winning projects to develop 
specifications for the launch version of the tool, advise on technology 
choices and usability decisions, help hire suitable technical talent if 
needed, and help
connect winners to the nascent but growing international network of 
transparency and accountability website builders.

It’s crucial to note that this call isn’t solely for existing NGOs: the 
process is absolutely open to submissions from individuals or groups 
with no prior direct experience of working in the transparency and 
accountability sector. Experience from around the world suggests that 
some of the best websites in this field have been set up by individuals 
with no specific NGO background, such as New Zealand’s 
TheyWorkForYou.co.nz. Others are run by NGOs with strong track records — 
we will not discriminate either way. We will, however, look most 
favourably on applicants who already have access to the advanced 
programming skills required to build sites like this.

The criteria are simple, though demanding:

1. The projects have to generate some kind of meaningful transparency, 
accountability, or democratic empowerment of another kind.

2. The projects must seize the unique benefits that the Internet brings 
with it, such as scalability, two way communication, easy data analysis 
and so on.

Projects will be required to follow Free/Open Source licensing and 
development practices and to adhere to appropriate Open Data principles. 
Projects making use of mobile communications tools will also be 
considered. And although projects will obviously be delivered in 
appropriate local languages, proposals through this website must be in 
English.

If you are based in one of the eligible countries and have an idea for a 
project (or, even better, more than one!), please submit a proposal. 
Even if you don’t, please help us spread the word! Tell everyone you 
know about this. Blog it. Link to it on Twitter or Facebook. Go to local 
events and make sure everyone knows about it (or ask us to come talk 
about it) — just talking about it could be the difference between 
someone building a KildareStreet or an OpenCongress in your country and 
them never getting started. For more ideas on how to help, please join 
our mailing list, or follow us on Twitter.

http://cee.mysociety.org/

Deadlines: it’s a rolling call: there are four monthly deadlines from 
November 15th. The timeframe for implementation will likely be different 
for each project: that’s something we will discuss at a later stage.

AND FIVE: Jobs

The recession may still be raging, but you wouldn't know it from looking 
at our job listings... there seem to be more jobs than ever:
http://jobs.humanrightstools.org/

Also a whole raft of jobs at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights:
http://tbe.taleo.net/NA4/ats/careers/searchResults.jsp?org=HUMANRIGHTSMUSEUM&cws=1

So if you want to work in human rights and in Canada, this is your chance.

This museum is currently under construction, so there's not much you can 
see, but at least there's a nice webcam to watch the build (and see what 
the weather is like in Winnipeg): 
http://www.humanrightsmuseum.ca/weekly-1-minute-video-updates

Its not really clear to us what this museum will hold... the website 
doesn't tell us much and they probably don't have set ideas yet. What 
would YOU put in a human rights museum? Do you know of similar museums?

Well thats all for this edition! Again, if you enjoyed it or found it 
useful... then please share.

And... very importantly... if you know of something that we should write 
about... a new tool, or manual, or online resource, or conference with a 
practical and practitiner-oriented focus... then write to let us know! 
Write to editors at humanrightstools.org

Best regards, and good luck in your efforts to promote and defend human 
rights,

Daniel D'Esposito
Editor, Human Rights Tools
editors at humanrightstools.org
http://www.humanrightstools.org