Talking about human rights organisations missing out on harnessing the potential of ICTs presents some strange contradictions for me.

I've spent the last 9 years working on a range of diverse ICT projects, all driven by a belief in the potential of the internet to provide spaces for silenced and marginalised voices. And for me that lies at the heart of human rights activism.

I was introduced to the internet in the mid 90s by some visionaries at GreenNet, who were busy developing protocols which connected a whole swathe of disconnected countries in Africa to the Internet, via the Fido Gateway in London. It was post-apartheid 1995, and not long since earlier protocols had been used to make a connection with SangoNet (then WorkNet), in South Africa to get reports of abuses out of the country, thus usurping the country's draconian state of emergency laws. Meanwhile AsiaLink was making similarly brave connections with banned writers in Indonesia and China.
When the APC was founded in 1990, it wasn't company directors who exchanged email addresses - it was activist geeks. Human rights and environmental activists were at the forefront of harnessing the internet for social change - people who saw the value of sharing information in a 'many to many' way.

They found a medium which made space for the voices of anyone who could access the technology. It became a medium of and for free expression, and the challenge was to improve that access.

And so it seems interesting to examine how the movement which was once so avante garde in its approach to new technologies, can now be accused of lagging behind. It may be true that there are more people blogging about whether Wayne Rooney's foot will be better in time for him to strike for England in the World Cup, than there are writing about the detained activist Alaa, jailed for supporting an independent judicaiary in Egypt. And maybe the New York times has done a better job with its RSS feeds than Human Rights Watch, but must we conclude from this that the Human Rights organisations are missing the boat? Would more prolific use of the tools improve their results, or are they just acting rationally - using their scarce resources in ways that their impact assessments tell them, work best?

Surely we should also be asking how approapriate these tools are anyway. Skype locks its source code so we can never know how secure it really is (a not-insignificant detail to an underground human rights worker at risk from what they communicate about online). Podcasting and blogging looks a lot less fun when you're faced with the international bandwidth costs experienced by most people in Africa - the most expensive part of the world for internet access. Meanwhile we can see that older - albeit less sexy - email-based list technologies are as popular and productive as ever. And whilst we may have learned out lessons and moved on from the days of ineffectual email petitions, we are now seeing a resurrgence of the traditional campaigning strategies of street demonstrations backed up by the organising power of email.

Defending human rights has never been about using new technologies - it's about letting the silenced be heard, and freeing the unfree. Our challenge is in finding the best means we can for making that happen. If organisations are not adopting Web 2.0 applications with enough zeal, maybe we need to ask if the applications are appropriate.