Hi, this is Ginny Hunt live-blogging for Human Rights and New Communication Technologies at the NetSquared conference. I'll try to catch as much as I can as fast as I can. Apologies for errors.

We're getting three different perspectives on how different technologies have been used to further the international human rights movement from Patrick Ball from Benetech, Bryan Nunez from Witness, and Dan McQuillan from Amnesty.

The speakers highlight the questions and challenges that face the human rights community and technology providers:

1) How is technology generally being developed in ways that protect human rights?

2) Who is the technology serving and what are their needs? The needs of Amnesty differ greatly from the needs of a local human rights defenders. In that sense, can it be talked about as one community with one set of technology needs?

3) How can the human rights community expand their "architecture of participation" in ways that continue the participatory practices of orgs like Witness, while also building things that let people take part to grow activism?

4) Has the community done too much with technology without reflecting on the lessons learned and the actual effectiveness of the technology solutions?

The best ideas from the session:

Patrick: Start with your partners problems, not with your own nifty idea, and plan to dig in for the long haul. Technology adoption at the grassroots level is a gradual process, with a timeline of years.

Dan: The biggest human rights battles are being faught on the Internet, and it's the duty of human rights orgs to overcome the fear of letting go of control to engage with this. By using new technology to connect the people who care about these issues and produce new ways for activism, it's likely that activism won't look the same [i.e. writing letters online/offline, the dominant action in traditional activism, will be replaced].

Bryan: If you're already based on a participatory/partnership model, think about how you can use  technology to move the model to the web and expand your audience to capitalize on the "smartest people in the room." To do this, Witness is building an online solution to connect human rights footage, filmmakers, activists and defenders.

As a closing, Bryan paraphrased Dan's wise & optimistic words that motivate the human rights community: A successful "architecture of participation" will lead to an era where ordinary people around the world can do small but extraordinary things.