Our wonderful podcast volunteers, Ryan MacArthur and David Collin, put up some more audio recordings from the NetSquared Conference on the NetSquared Podcast this weekend for your listening enjoyment:

New Web Tools and Their Revenue Models with panelists:

• Lee Davis
• Jim Fruchterman
• Clara Miller
  
• Vince Stehle (immoderator)

Human Rights and New Communication Technologies with panelists:

On May 31, my favorite all-around blogger Jason Kottke wrote that "The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is exploring the use of satellite imagery to detect and prove human rights abuses."

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.

Here's some notes for the session 'Human rights and new communication technologies: building an architecture of participation'.

 If you haven't heard of 'an architecture of participation' it's one of the original web2.0 buzzwords. (I picked it up from the o-reilly article that started a lot of the hype: http://www.oreillynet.com/lpt/a/6228) So that's what web2.0 mostly means for me: a chance to up the level of human rights activism by riding a wave of user participation. In the first place this is about increasing people's engagement with Amnesty by giving them ways to contribute; beyond that, it's about matching the social network side of web2.0 to the task of building a movement of activists. We don't yet know what this will look like, except that it will be different to Amnesty's traditional activist model (e.g. local letter writing group). Most of our ecampaigning is really just online letter writing - actions taken by individuals. If we use web2.0 ways to connect these people we open this out to a social network which can spread. Perhaps, for Amnesty, the social network is another route to solidarity. Certainly we hope it will lead to new forms of activism, especially ones that connect the online to the offline, empowering people to do something small but extraordinary for human rights.

I came across a Joi Ito post today about how he's joined the board of WITNESS, an incredible nonprofit that helps other nonprofits and NGOs to use video to document, create educational materials about and advocate against human rights abuses. You can read case studies of how their videos have made a difference here, and you can also hear WITNESS' Technology Manager, Bryan Nunez, when he presents at the NetSquared conference in the spring.