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Digital Democracy's Handheld Human Rights
Challenges:
A Chin woman is raped by Burmese soldiers in Northwest Burma. Handheld Human Rights allows this incident to be reported via SMS on Indian cell phone and securely broadcast over the border. This abuse is then databased, mapped, and relayed onto the cell phone of a woman in New York as she is on her way to work. The advocacy organization that she is connected to is building a case for charging the Burmese government with systematized violence and genocide, and this update allows her to put more pressure on international lawmakers, and build more grassroots support.
Handheld Human Rights is designed to accomplish two goals: to make Human Rights data 1) more accessible, and 2) more actionable.
Inside Burma, gross human rights violations such as political imprisonment, torture and forced labor are a daily reality for too many Burmese citizens. Women's groups have reported on the systematic use of rape as a tool of war against Burma's ethnic minorities. Human Rights Watch estimates that there are more child soldiers in Burma than any other conflict zone in the world. Genocide Intervention Network and the US Campaign for Burma report that more than 3200 villages have been destroyed in Eastern Burma in the last 10 years alone.
Ending these violations will require the efforts of a broad range of actors from international governments to members of local communities. Effective methods for reporting, compiling and disseminating human rights data are critical for stopping these violations.
Many community organizations operate from Burma's border areas to report abuses and educate the community how to recognize these human rights violations, collect pertinent data and protect themselves. These organizations face numerous obstacles to their work including logistical and technical limitations and lack of coordination. Specifically, they lack the tools to communicate effectively and securely with other groups working on the same issue area who are separated by international borders, as well as the tools to report these violations in a way that is rapidly shared turned into action by the international community while protecting their personal identity.
Our solution:
Handheld Human Rights addresses these issues through a simple, cheap and flexible mobile phone network that allows users to send information and messages over SMS. We envision the system being used to:
• Disseminate key information and messages to field workers.
• Facilitate communication between groups working on these issues.
• Collect data that can be mapped on the site.
• Rapidly spread news of human rights violations to the international community and advocacy groups.
Handheld Human Rights is a component of the Virtual Community Center (VCC), an online hub that Digital Democracy (D2) is developing for members of the Burmese community living along Burma's borders in Thailand, India and Bangladesh. Similar in principle to traditional community centers, the VCC is a central hub, a place for groups to come together to work on solutions to shared problems. Mobile phone access is key to making the platform useful to our target population. Handheld Human Rights (HHR) is a test case for VCC's mobile functionality.
To make this project a success we are partnering with local Burmese technology and human rights organizations in Thailand, India and Bangladesh. In the next year, we will install the network portals with four technology groups who will be responsible for the administration of the network on the ground. We will train staff in the uses of the programming who will train the 16 human rights organizations we are partnering with to use HHR in the ways it can best suit their needs.
Project Partners:
Academic
o Harvard Humanitarian Initiative
Burmese Organizations
o Human Rights groups located in Thailand, India, China and Bangladesh
o Tech groups located in India, Bangladesh and Thailand
Tech Organizations
• InSTEDD
o Mesh4x
• FrontlineSMS Forms
o Free, large scale SMS messaging and receiving
• Ushahidi
o Crisis Mapping
Wonderful...potential allies...
What a wonderful, inspirational, well thought out project. Two collaborators come to mind:
The great folks at Flip Video are, I know, very motivated by this kind of work and will make their technology available. TechSoup is working with them now. Let's be sure and make this connection for you.
Benetech's Martus project seems relevant, tho I expect you are on top of this.
Check out our code :)
Hey there, not sure if you've decided on your CMS yet or begun coding on receiving the messages from the gateway, but we have been working on a similar project at http://vozmob.net.
We use Drupal as the CMS, and have been developing code to filter out all the crap the phone providers add to sms and mms when you use sms/mms to email gateways.
Soon we'll be launching mms story maps on openstreetmap engine.
Check out http://code.vozmob.net, and we'd be happy to talk w/you about any of this stuff. Thanks!
Change we want
Keep going, D2 you can change what we want, Change we need.Two Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} mysterious path walking in the same way .
God Bless Rohingya, peace peace peace, Amin.
Well thought out and promising
Burma is a very tricky case being just about the only country in the world were Internet usage is not increasing and one of the few countries in the world where the government will actually shutdown mobile phone networks and the Internet if things go against them. In this type of case there is the need for some unique innovation and this project in powerful in this regard.
Frontline SMS/forms, while I would need some clarification on the terms free and large scale for SMS, does appear to be a good fit, Ushahidi is of course ideal for this type of project and InSTEED appear to be experts in this field. So from a tech partner point of view - full marks. The project also appears to be trying very hard at the grassroot level which as the project description already recognises will be key.
Ambitious & inspired
This project, though by no means a panacea, is unique in that it gives users the opportunity to report human rights abuses in real time. For a population long inured to every sort of disenfranchisement, the ability to comment meaningfully on injustices as they take place could prove immensely emotionally empowering. What's more, the information will be used to aid democratic governments in their heretofore anemic efforts to pry open Burmese society to let the light in. It is ambitious but realistic, totally user-driven anddefinitely an idea whose time has come.
Amazing project! Advocacy and organizing ideas
HHR has great applications for advocacy organizations trying to leverage foreign governments and intergovernmental organizations like the UN and Association of SouthEast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Imagine being able to find the $2billion in arms and military equipment sold to the junta by China inside Burma, being used to conscript forced labor or crack down on protests, in order to put pressure on China at the UN. Or being able to rapidly highlight reports of abuses at the same time as yet another fruitless visit by UN Envoy Gambari.
On the organizing side, how could this project crowd-source (perhaps an expansion of the original hub proposed here) to create the useful visualizations (maps and charts sorted by types of abuse, locations, and time) that many advocacy organizations don't have time or resources to create themselves? Imagine a high-school students' research project becoming a visualization or a wideget used in a transnational grassroots campaign, or at the UN or in the mass media.
This also lays the groundwork for effective rapid response to another Saffron Revolution or Cyclone Nargis, even specific diplomatic opportunities - provided that there's an interface/cms that can sort all the data HHR will receive (especially during a crisis).