Human Rights and New Communication Technologies

Building an architecture of participation

Speakers:

Patrick Ball PhD, Director, Human Rights Program of the Benetech Initiative

Dan McQuillan, Interim Program Director, Internet & E-Communications Program, Amnesty International

Bryan Nunez, Technology Manager, Witness

Immoderator:

Anna Feldman, Strategic Use Programme Project Developer, Association for Progressive Communications

Note Taker:

Amit Asaravala, Manager of Editorial & Content Strategy, TechSoup

Key Points

Technologists must keep their partner's mission goals at the absolute center of their thoughts

·        Start with your partner's problems -- not with your nifty idea.

·        Technical progress is not the goal.

·        It's the role of ICT practitioners to vet technologies and make sure they're the best tools for the human rights organization you're serving.

When it comes to human rights work, dig in for the long haul

·        If you think you're going to introduce technology to an NGO, you're going to be there for years.

·        Your tool won't be helpful until you've listened to your partners and you've rewritten, repositioned, and rethought the features several times -- think in terms of years of development time.

Introduce technology in a way that is at the core of the NGO's mission goals

·        Telling people they should encrypt their data is like telling people to get more exercise and eat their vegetables.

·        But Benetech created a free-form database that structures their partner's info in a way that lets them get found data, surveys, and qualitative statements together. "Oh, and it happens to encrypt their data and replicate on servers around the world."

·        In Kosovo, human rights activists kept data in spiral notebooks hidden in many different houses and only brought those notebooks together at key moments. Unfortunately, a lot of data was lost when houses were burned. At this point, the technology -- redundant backup, encryption, access control -- helps the mission goals.

Just because they work for NGOs doesn't mean they automatically want to share their data

·        The closer the NGOs are to the ground, the less interested they are in sharing data. Data is their capital. If they tell you their story and then you walk away, you've taken something away form them.

·        It's not about data sharing at that level -- at that level, it's about having a conversation.

·        Semiotic democracy: People don't always understand what you intend them to understand -- they make their own meaning out of it -- which is important in Web 2.0 technologies.

·        Consider the risks for the participants: What does it mean to take part in online activism in a country where it might be dangerous to do that?

·        Consider the "naive way" in which we're connecting up and giving up our information. A lot of data is ending up in the hands of proprietary interests.

If you don't build in human rights from the beginning, you may regret it later

·        Network neutrality debate is an example of this. Pornography and dissident voices -- it's a sliding scale. Once you enable the filtering of one, you enable the filtering of the other.

Further Reading

Web:

Human Rights Data Analysis Group

http://www.hrdag.org/

Benetech Martus Tool: Human Rights Bulletin System

http://www.martus.org/

Witness

http://www.witness.org/

Amnesty International

http://www.amnesty.org/

Association for Progressive Communications

http://www.apc.org

YouTube

http://www.youtube.org

PledgeBank

http://www.pledgebank.com/