Human Rights
Against Seniors Discrimination
People over fifties who are actually a marginal population will have the opportuntity live with dignity.
We cannot change the world with this project but we can make a better world.Â
We need to create a new way of business opportunities to provide a source of employment for people that cannot access the local employment market due ¿age discrimination. Ww will need to retrain this people to live according the times in this way people will be still productive for our nation. Peruvian elderly population is going to increase in the next three years to be over 12% of the total population that it is actually over 28 Millions.
I m preparing a pre-factibility project, capturing all information available about the population over 5o years old.
The project require a financial support of around $18,000Â to complete the study and three months to provide the final report.
Givvy - Giving Management + Network for Good
Givvy is a comprehensive online giving management system launching in early June. This is a real project with a dedicated team working without funding at this point.
Charitiable giving is personally and emotionally rewarding. By providing a framework and set of tools to improve the way we support our causes, Givvy users will feel more satisfied and successful with their giving.
Givvy is a system to enable donors to accomplish the following:
- easily create and manage their giving plan
- research over 1 million charities/nonprofits
- execute their giving (donate thorugh Network for Good) and track donations made via other methods (mail, phone, etc.)
- analyze their giving footprint - what types of charities, what geographic reach, how close their actual giving is to their plan, etc.
At Givvy we believe that better tools for giving can result in a better world.
We are mashing up IRS data on 1.4m charities, user reviews and ratings, wiki pages for each charity, and more. In addition, we are joining this data to merchant-funded rebate malls to generate donations through shopping, auction services and more.
This is our first social venture.
We need funding to cover license fees and initial launch activity.
Network for Good: http://www.fundraising123.org/files/NFG_DonateWebSvc_Guide.doc
IRS Data: www.irs.gov
Online Mall: www.mallnetworks.com
Here Are Those Who Care
Human rights violations in far away places -- Americans will turn away if they feel a “certain hopelessness of remedying excessive and organic ill.†* If instead they work to end the injustice or bring about a fair rule of law by contacting their elected representatives and senators, the intervention can exact a positive outcome all the way across the world.
Elected representatives are more motivated to take action on behalf of any good cause, e.g. the environment, consumer safety, gun control, election reform, or, as in our work, international human rights, when the campaign is well articulated and constituents form broad coalitions with growing numbers. A feedback loop forms between the constituent group and the staffer as questions asked and concerns raised by the constituents are answered by the staffer when they call the state department and foreign embassies.
The Rebuilding Alliance seeks to create a set of web-based tools to show constituents they can make a difference when it comes to human rights violations in distant land – and how. The Rebuilding Alliance seeks to create the “Here Are Those Who Care,†Project by combining a set of web-based database, mapping, and teleconference tools and testing these tools with constituent groups focused on our current project, Saving the Kindergarten and Village of Al Aqabah. We want to show constituents see they are not alone, and help them find like minded people who are close-by in their congressional district. We want to help elected representatives learn about issues first-hand in a secure and trustworthy manner through face-to-face meetings and technology common to the business world so that these representatives can better respond to constituent requests and take action.
* Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street, by Herman Melville, paragraph 93
Our current campaign is to save the kindergarten of Al Aqabah (our earliest project) and its village. When newcomers join this campaign, we would like to show them a web-based map of others in their congressional district who have registered and invite them into a discussion forum. People will be interacting with our staff, with those directly involved with the cause there on the ground, with other constituents who are concerned with the village, and possibly with others nationwide or worldwide who want to help develop a particular idea or aspect of the case. They’ll use a web interface that includes event management and constituent mapping in each congressional district to gain a sense of how we all fit together. We use “Contact Congress Teleconferences†to link constituents with the people directly involved and senior staffers for their senators and representatives.
Below is a film we made in 2004 about Al Aqabah, when it seemed as if an "eastern wall" was the reason for the mass demolition order.
The Rebuilding Alliance is a Palo-Alto based nonprofit organization working to rebuild communities in conflict zones and make them safe. We began our work in 2003, helping Israelis and Palestinians work together to rebuild Palestinian homes and schools starting in East Jerusalem. In Gaza, we partnered with the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, www.GCMHP.net, to rebuild a home for the family Rachel Corrie sought to protect. In the West Bank, we are now working to save one of our earliest projects, a kindergarten, and its village of Al Aqabah from demolition orders, asking elected officials to call the Israeli Embassy to urge a compromise. President Carter recently recognized our work on the CarterCenter.org website when we helped him link to NGO representatives in Gaza via video and web. We bring Israelis and Palestinians to the U.S. to tell their story directly to communities, Congress, and the State Dept.
Technical help to overlay Rebuilding Alliance Salesforce data on congressional district maps, and also a web communities expert to help invite constituents to join the map district on behalf of our cause. Let's demonstrate this concept in one congressional district, focusing the invitation specifically on saving the kindergarten and village of Al Aqabah (an initiative that is urgent and is attracting good participation worldwide, and good congressional response).
Salesforce Developers, please get in touch with us!
Database from www.salesforce.com, and web-to-lead forms for Contact Congress Teleconference registration
Threaded communities such as www.leveragesoftware.com, a Salesforce ApExchange partner or http://dreamfish.com/
Congressional district maps: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/findyourreps.xpd
www.networkforgood.org for DonateNow integration
www.MeetingOne.com for good audio teleconference technology
Network for Good & Google Maps Donation Mashup
This is a simple mashup using Network for Good’s donation API, with a particular focus on enhancing the donor experience with a virtualization of recent donations.
The NFG API mashed-up with a Google map would show all donations made to specific causes (by location) for a given time period over a US or World map.
This could be used on the homepage of Network for Good - to inspire others based on the action currently taking place.
As with any Google Map, all the "bubbles" will be clickable to show detailed information.
The WITNESS Video Hub map is a good example of other work we have done similar to this project:
Financial resources to make it happen.
Simply the Google Maps API and the NFG API.
Every Human Has Rights
The Elders, founded by Nelson Mandela, have called for the world to reclaim The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in it's 60th Year.
"We are human only though the humanity of other human beings" - Nelson Mandela
Through the Every Human Has Rights campaign, The Elders have joined with partners around the world to encourage people to embrace the values and goals of the Universal Declaration; to protect the rights of our fellow global villages; and encourage others to do the same in our communities, workplaces and schools.
We're calling for the world to rise up, and declare our committment to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Every one of us has a story, that when shared, is what gives the Universal Declaration of Human Rights it's meaning. Through the Every Human Has Rights mash-up, we're going to bring the Universal Declaration to life. We've started by partnering with WITNESS and Google to collect and map people's stories from around the world, showing them through a powerful human rights lens.
In the end, we hope to contribute to the foundation of a powerful people network seeking accountability, and demanding human rights from all of our leaders.
People will have the opportunity to contribute their own stories to our website, which will be added to our Every Human Has Rights world map. They'll also have opportunities to interact with the various campaign partners (that have already joined, and that will join througout the year), to stand up for their re-affirmed beliefs.
The Elders, a group of twelve leaders from throughout the world, were convened by Nelson Mandela in July 2007 on the occasion of his 89th birthday, to contribute their wisdom, independent leadership and integrity to tackle some of the world’s toughest problems. The Elders’ first mission was to Sudan in September and October 2007. For their report and other information on the Elders, visit www.theElders.org.
Akha Project
We highlight the plight of the Akha people, their unique culture, land rights, child rights, and encourage people to get involved in helping protect these rights so that the Akha have a livable future.
political activism, documentation, spreading the word
17 years of activism work. Documentation, work at the UN, publishing literature, campaigning for political changes which improve the lives of the Akha.
We need more volunteers in the US and in Thailand as well as in Europe. We need donors who can help contribute ideas and strength to our management effort. We need donors and people who can help with fundraising, training, grantwriting. With a better established more stable budget and the skill to accomplish that we can do much better at human rights protection and malaria prevention in Laos.
Map This!
Thousands of communities will be able to access data and map resources in their neighborhoods quickly, easily and at no cost to them. Advocates and service providers will be able to use a high-quality, well-designed, reliable platform for uploading data of their choosing and mapping that data against a wide range of demographic data, area resources, and other variables. This project will also allow nonprofit and community advocates across the U.S. to share and learn from each other how they can better use the power of mapping to advocate for and inform change. Not least, communities will be spared countless hours of effort and scarce dollars trying to build such tools from scratch, enabling them to focus more on the important work of finding the right data locally and interacting with people and organizations in their communities. The goal of our project is to make the public functionality of HealthyCity.org, the mapping tool we developed to serve Los Angeles, available throughout the U.S., free of charge, to nonprofit and community organizations. We believe this can be done in a fairly cost-effective and sustainable way, and we are looking for good thinking on how best to do it.
Examples of how Healthy City has worked in Los Angeles include:
- Mapping of overcrowded, multi-track calendar schools, to support a proposal of $25 billion in school construction bonds approved by California voters
- Analysis of areas of highest need for preschool facilities in Los Angeles, leading to over $100 million commitment of funds to develop preschool space
- Mapping of violent crimes and analysis of prevalence of gang crime, to identify priority areas for the City of Los Angeles
- Mapping the mismatch between concentrations of homeless people and availability of shelter space
- Grants analysis for foundations, including determining the location of grantees, the dimensions of their service areas (with information gathered by survey), and the magnitude of grant dollars relative to target population in grantees’ service areas
HealthyCity.org currently offers users access to over 120 demographic and community characteric variables, from 9 different data sources. Our data and sources are described in detail at: http://www.healthycity.org/c/help/sc/indicator. For the proposed national service, some of the California-specific data sources may not be available nationally (such as data from the California Health Interview Survey or from the WIC program), but their functions may be replaced by other data sets. There are a number of health and economic data that state and federal offices use that are only available at the county level (so they cannot be displayed on our current site); offering a national view will make comparisons and disparities between counties and states accessible to users. Users will be able to:
- Upload their own data sets
- Overlay data points on top of demographic and other data
- Map and analyze data within a radius around an address, or within a ZIP code, city, legislative districts or other jurisdictions
- View core demographic and other data for the selected geography in tables and charts
- View assets, such as schools, parks, fire and police stations, on an interactive map, with types of service (identified by icons)
- Identify information about assets or service providers by scrolling over their icons
- Cut and analyze data by over 60 demographic, health and other indicators
Healthy City is entering its 5th year of service, and will be launching version 3.0, featuring new and upgraded capabilities and features, this June. Using an adaptation of open source software we developed, and the Los Angeles region’s most comprehensive database of public and nonprofit resources (schools, parks, community centers, health clinics), HealthyCity.org enables community residents, nonprofit organizations, advocates, public officials and civic leaders to see and analyze the distribution of critical community assets in relation to essential demographic information, electoral and school district boundaries and the like. HealthyCity.org offers unprecedented access to the largest public database of community resources, demographic and health data for the region, paired with best-of-breed database and GIS mapping technology.
We need help with the design of this planned expansion. Specific questions we will need assistance with include:
- What technical infrastructure will be necessary to support this national service, and enable it to handle high loads with high reliability?
- Should we phase in the development? Should we begin, for example, with covering California, or a specific region, or the most populous states, first, or should we roll out a basic level of service nationally?
- What county, state and federal-level data should we offer to users? (Since our current focus is on Los Angeles County, our data is rich from the level of census blocks up to the county level).
- How can we financially sustain this project as a free service, including the costs of storing data uploaded by thousands of users, going forward? Is there a revenue model (advertising, or custom services for subscribers)?
http://www.healthycity.org/
http://www.healthycity.org/c/help/sc/indicator - Data sources and descriptions
Anti-Genocide Action Tracker: Genocide Scores for Every Legislator and State
The Genocide Intervention Network seeks to create a new website, modeled on our successful Darfur congressional scorecard, DarfurScores.org, tentatively named GenocideScores.org. This grows directly out of our mission, to empower individuals and communities with the tools to prevent and stop genocide.
Our current site tracks each legislator's record on bills relating to Darfur. Hillary Clinton's scorecard, for instance, tracks the senator's record of co-sponsoring and voting for most important bills on Darfur. Sam Brownback similarly scores high for his outspoken record on the issue.
The process of a bill moving through Congress, however, is somewhat obscure. Action alerts are posted when a bill is coming up for a vote, and e-mails are sent to members in important states and districts. Yet most visitors won't know at a glance where a particular bill is, or which states or districts are most important to passing the bill.
Moreover, two additional campaigns have achieved significant momentum: the Sudan Divestment Task Force and the Teach Against Genocide campaign. These measure success on the state level — "Which states have divested?" or "Which state legislatures have approved genocide education?" While visitors to these sites can view information for their particular state, the particular status and action needed in a given state is not always immediately apparent.
Don't other sites track legislation? Why create a new cause-specific site? It's true that other websites track bills as the move through Congress. The difference with GenocideScores.org would be two-fold: First, it would incorporate state-based campaigns as noted above. Second, and perhaps most importantly, it would be curated by our advocacy staff to ensure anti-genocide activists are provided with the most effective information and tools. General legislation-tracking sites will never — and are not designed to — support advocacy on a particular cause, but our staff will ensure that the alerts people get on a particular bill or campaign tell them exactly how they can have the most impact.
GenocideScores.org would provide four main assets to the anti-genocide community:
- Aggregate anti-genocide data. Not only records on Darfur legislation, but on any anti-genocide bills relating to our areas of concern, or recognition of historical genocides such as in Armenia. Each state would also display its status on divestment and genocide education. Subsequent campaigns could also be added.
- Clear illustrations of legislative status. Instead of simply being an entry on a scorecard, each bill would have its own graphical timeline, and members would be able to track progress of a bill through e-mail alerts or RSS feeds.
- Most importantly, cross-indexing, allowing specific alerts to be generated for members based on location. When a bill is coming up for a vote in Congress and a senator from Connecticut is the key vote, Connecticut members automatically receive an alert. When a divestment or genocide education rally is planned at the Nevada statehouse, all Nevadans on the site know about it. This information — where geographical power lies in each case — is viewable on the bill's timeline, so members can notify their friends in CT or NV of the need to take action.
- Finally, embeddable badges to allow people to display the current genocide score of their state and district.
GI-Net raises both funds and political will for civilian protection. Our Darfur program trains peacekeepers for firewood collection patrols; our 1-800-GENOCIDE hotline enables citizen advocacy.
The Sudan Divestment Task Force has successfully lobbied for divestment in dozens of states.
Teach Against Genocide is working with Facing History; only 4 states have genocide education in public schools.
GI-Net embraced social networking and social media as a core part of its mission. Its initiatives are used as models for other organizations. We had a Featured Project in 2007.
We are an partner in the Save Darfur Coalition and worked extensively with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Armenian Nat'l Committee of America, US Campaign for Burma and others.
While we have some talented developers on staff and are active in the Drupal community (upon which DarfurScores.org and most of our websites are built) we unfortunately do not have the financial capacity to take this to the next level. We would appreciate financial support or pro-bono technical assistance.
We believe there are some exciting tools in developing this tool, drawing on some of our ideas from last year, including the ForwardTrack software. We'd be happy to talk to developers about integrating their own tools into this site.
The Disappeared
In the 1980s and 1990s, over 69,000 people were killed in a brutal conflict between the Peru government and Maoist rebels. Of those killed, there are still many unresolved disappearances – and the figures have been put at 8,558 by the Peruvian Truth Commission. The Peruvian Forensic Anthropology Team (EPAF) puts this figure as closer to 14,000 and to date has been able to collect information on 13,721 people who are still missing.
EPAF is seeking a way to develop an interactive map that would mesh the GIS capabilities of GoogleMaps with data on missing persons from their databases and spreadsheets with a feedback form where external audience would supply information to EPAF for verification and later inclusion on the map.
This map/data tool as described above would used as:-
1. GIS Investigative Tool: This would help in establishing any spatial relationships and trends in the people who went missing. Currently, EPAF has information on where people went missing from, place(s) where they are thought to have been taken to and where they were last seen. The use of maps and GIS as an investigative tool has been well established, and we have no doubt that this would be just as useful in this case.
2. National Record of the missing: Currently, there is no national record of those that went missing. While various records with data about the missing can be found – usually this is combined with other information (e.g Peru's Unified Registry of Victims has data on all victim typologies e.g. sexual assaults, torture). This this would be the beginnings of a central database of information for this purpose.
3. Outreach/ Educational Tool: This would also be used on behalf of and for families whose family members still remain unaccounted for. Ultimately, this would evolve to a focal point with information related to the disappeared (e.g. links to support facilities on the ground, news stories related to disappearances etc).
4. Preventative Tool: It is hoped that the success of this tool encourages its use in countries with similar disappearances (e.g. the Philippines). This tool could be used to track enforced disappearances, analyze trends as they occur, solicit information from the public, and rally a public behind an unfolding situation.
1. Google Maps/ Earth
*Incidences of disappearances
2. EPAF Information Sources:
* EPAF's database of ante-mortem data for missing persons. This has documented and verifiable information on people who went missing
* EPAF's spreadsheet of information on the missing.
* Records (hardcopy files) on government activities during the time frame specified. There is a need for EPAF staff members to still comb through mountains of files to get data that is then used to collaborate information on the missing people.
* Information from accredited sources (e.g. the Peru Registry of Victims etc.) with information on locations of places of alleged atrocities and where specific people are thought to have been disappeared.
3. Visitors to the Website:
*Information on places/ locations providing support to the families of people who were disappeared.
*An interactive forum where people could provide information and stories of the missing (if possible).
EPAF applies forensic anthropology to the search for forcibly disappeared persons during the period of internal political conflict from 1982-2000. EPAF was founded in 1997, when a group of Peruvian professionals working for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia decided to apply their expertise in their own country. It is their final goal to restore the identity of the thousands of missing Peruvians that rest in hidden burial sites across the country.
EPAF has created software that captures data on the people who went missing during the period of the insurgency.
The group has carried out interviews and gone through files and files of information to get as comprehensive a picture of the disappearances as possible – a still ongoing task.
Technical Assistance:
* Help us consolidate the various types of information that we have into a visual record of enforced disappearances.
* Use text ante-mortem data (from the EPAF database) to create dynamic records of the victims.
* Map these visual records onto a map (GoogleMaps) that shows the locations of where the people were disappeared.
* A feedback form where people would enter data on disappearances and missing persons.
Financial Assistance:
* Support to pay for data entry from the physical hard copies (files, newspaper clippings, handwritten notes etc) into usable forms.
* Support for data management (cleaning up the data, standardization into the format needed for the map/database tool).
* Small assistance in the development of the campaign on behalf of and for families of the disappeared.
OneWorld Connect
Imagine getting your news from people from around the world, instead of the mainstream media. Imagine getting different perspectives on global issues. Imagine being able to share your own viewpoints and get involved with issues you care about. Imagine OneWorld Connect, where people are better informed about global issues, can easily share their perspectives on what's happening in the world and connect with other people and organizations trying to make a difference. They will be able to create a customizable My OneWorld page to easily and quickly access and share information relevant to the countries and issues they care about the most.
People will be able to create a My OneWorld page with a dynamic world map that allows people to easily select the countries in which they are interested. They will also be able to select issues that interest them. Whenever a new article is published about a country or issue that interests them, they will be able to sign up to receive it via email, rss or sms. Oneworld currently has more than 400,000 articles published in 12 languages. They will also be able to share their stories about global issues and find out how they can get involved.
OneWorld U.S. publishes the latest news, analysis and feature stories on a daily basis and these stories are tagged by country and topic. We also have stories being published by twelve OneWorld centers worldwide. We have the content already, now we want to use mashups to deliver this content in a visual format through maps and customize it for users, so they can stay connected with the world. We hope to aggregate both editorial and user-generated content to illustrate how different global issues are interconnected and how people can work with others locally and globally to help create a better world.
We need technical development resources to help deliver our content on maps and personalize it for users. We also need help in pulling the stories from the different OneWorld sites. We would like to do mashups around maps, rss, mobile technologies and social networking tools. These mashups will enable our users to easily receive the content, find other people interested in these issues and contribute their own stories.
