Date: October 21st, 2009

Dear readers,

Today we have no less than FIVE interesting tidbits to read and watch... and also to forward to your friends and colleagues who share your passion for human rights work.

This may be the first newsletter for some of you... so you should know that we don't write very often, only when we have something to share. So appreciate this latest edition, you may not get another for a loooooong time!



ONE: Join an on-line dialogue on "Geo-Mapping for Human Rights", October 28 – November 3, 2009

Have you heard of these online dialogues yet? New Tactics regularly organises these online one-week sprints, on practical topics like shadow reporting, and engaging pro bono lawyers. The discussions are led by experts, and once you've signed up you can also interact and ask all the questions you want, and share your own experience. Or just lurk!

The next one is starting reaaaaally soon, so if you're interested in Geo-Mapping, sign up to join without any delay!!!
http://www.newtactics.org/en/blog/new-tactics/geo-mapping-human-rights

The blurb:

New Tactics is pleased to feature 'Geo-Mapping for Human Rights,’ as the topic of our October featured online dialogue. Join New Tactics, our co-moderator, Christian Kreutz, and our featured resource practitioners from October 28 – November 3, 2009 in a conversation about the ways in which geographical mapping has been used to share critical information, promote transparency and engage communities.

With the growing use of satellite imagery and easy-to-use technology, geographical maps are being used more often by human rights organizations. These maps can help an organization map crises, places of heritage, visualize data, monitor the impact of conflict, uncover critical evidence, and more! The goal of this dialogue will be to take the stories shared by practitioners with experience using these tools and tactics and draw out lessons to enable other organizations to strategically apply these resources.

Our featured resource practitioners include:

Lars Bromley, director of the Geospatial Technologies and Human Rights program at the AAAS, United States
Patrick Meier, of Ushahidi, United States
Jason Guberman-Pfeffer, founder of the Diarna Project, United States
Michael Graham, of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the World Is Witness project, United States
Sandra Sudhoff, Calum Davey, Yann Rebois and Bernard Wright of CartONG, France
Gillo Cutrupi, GreenPeace Community Manager, Italy"

More info and previous dialogues:
http://www.newtactics.org/en/dialogues/home

So a big thanks from all of 3700 of the Human Rights Tools readers, to Kristin Antin, the online community builder at New Tactics, for her great and useful work.



TWO: The first Crisis Mapping Conference just ended

OK, so as we're still on the theme of mapping... we'd like to inform you that you probably just missed the first International Conference on Crisis Mapping, held in Cleveland from 16 to 18 October. Tough luck!

The blurb: "The purpose of the 3-day conference was to bring together the most engaged practitioners, scholars, software developers and policymakers at the cutting edge of crisis mapping to define the future of the field along with best practices and lessons learned. Over 60 organizations were represented and multiple partnerships were formed on specific projects during the conference."

The website: http://crisismapping.ning.com/page/iccm-2009

Why is crisis mapping relevant to human rights? Well its essentially a fresh look at the process with which we monitor the human rights situation and document violations... the familiar process of collecting data, processing it, analysing it, and disseminating it... but with a focus on a emerging set of mapping tools and technologies to support this process. You can read about crisis mapping on Patrick Phlippe Meieir's blog "iRevolution", he has really done a great job of framing this emerging field:

Blog: http://irevolution.wordpress.com/2009/08/08/proposing-crisis-mapping/

So you probably missed the Conference... Well you can read about crisis mapping on Patrick Phlippe Meieir's blog "iRevolution, download the slideshows, and in the coming days also watch the videos of the presentations:

Slides: http://crisismapping.ning.com/group/conferencepresentations
Videos: http://crisismapping.ning.com/video

Next years conference is already set, so don't miss it this time! http://crisismapping.ning.com/page/iccm-2010



THREE: Videos to watch: the Soul of the New Machine

OK, you'll have to wait a few days to watch the video of the above conference.... We anticipated your frustration: in the meantime we have some other ones for you to watch.

In May this year, the Human Rights Center UC Berkeley organised a series of panel discussions, called "Soul of the New Machine", and luckily they were filmed and put online at Fora TV.

You can find the whole collection here: http://fora.tv/partner/Human_Rights_Center_UC_Berkeley
... and also on the Human Rights Center's website: http://hrc.berkeley.edu/events/NewMachineConference/video.html

You'll find a lot of valuable ideas and experience and passion in what these speakers have to say, although not all of them may have Obama's oratory skills.

Our favorites:
Blogging for Human Rights: http://fora.tv/2009/05/05/Blogging_Human_Rights
Documenting violtions with databases: http://fora.tv/2009/05/04/Human_Rights_Databases_Data_Sharing_and_Data_Security

As you can see, there's even a panel on satellite imagery, in case you can't wait for the New Tactics dialogue (or to prepare for it...).

We really find it useful to tape presentations so that they can be shared widely over the web. If you're organising a conference or event, don't forget to tape it and post it online: http://hub.witness.org/ ... and let us know of course at editors@humanrightstools.org.



FOUR: Call for Proposals: Build useful transparency and democracy websites for Central and Eastern Europe

We're cross-posting a very interesting call for proposals from our colleagues at mySociety... so if you have an idea for a web tool to track transparency and democracy in your country, and if you happend for be from Central and Eastern Europe, well it could actually get funded!

Learn more about their fascinating work here, just explore some of the websites they've created, some amazing ideas:
http://www.mysociety.org/projects/

You may remember, we interviewed two mySociety developers last year:
http://humanrightstools.org/cgi-bin/dada/mail.cgi/archive/news/20080305120228/


Now here is their call for proposals:

http://cee.mysociety.org/

mySociety has teamed up with the Open Society Institute (OSI) to help people in Central and Eastern Europe build transparency and democracy websites suited to the needs and realities of their countries. In the UK mySociety runs a variety of sites such as TheyWorkForYou.com, FixMyStreet.com, and our Freedom of Information website WhatDoTheyKnow.com. As a result of running these, we know that there are lots of people outside the UK longing to build similar sites that help increase transparency and accountability in their own government institutions.

We have now launched a Call for Proposals for participants in Central and Eastern Europe, similar to the one we recently ran in the UK. The big difference is that this time we’re not looking for projects that we will build. We’re looking for projects you want to build, but that for lack of funds or lack of the right skills, you can’t get started yourself, so could use our help.

Over the coming months we will be selecting a series of projects to fund and mentor — up to ten in total. At each of four monthly intervals, starting November 15th, OSI and mySociety will convene to consider and choose from the proposals submitted so far. To help us understand project strengths and weaknesses in the given local or national context we can draw on the knowledge of regional OSI staff, but we’ll also be paying very close attention to the public comments on the submissions — so please join in the discussion. The shortlisted projects, and the people behind them, will then undergo a formal vetting process, during which project funding details will be requested (but we can help you with that if you’ve no previous experience of budget planning). mySociety will work closely with the winning projects to develop specifications for the launch version of the tool, advise on technology choices and usability decisions, help hire suitable technical talent if needed, and help
connect winners to the nascent but growing international network of transparency and accountability website builders.

It’s crucial to note that this call isn’t solely for existing NGOs: the process is absolutely open to submissions from individuals or groups with no prior direct experience of working in the transparency and accountability sector. Experience from around the world suggests that some of the best websites in this field have been set up by individuals with no specific NGO background, such as New Zealand’s TheyWorkForYou.co.nz. Others are run by NGOs with strong track records — we will not discriminate either way. We will, however, look most favourably on applicants who already have access to the advanced programming skills required to build sites like this.

The criteria are simple, though demanding:

1. The projects have to generate some kind of meaningful transparency, accountability, or democratic empowerment of another kind.

2. The projects must seize the unique benefits that the Internet brings with it, such as scalability, two way communication, easy data analysis and so on.

Projects will be required to follow Free/Open Source licensing and development practices and to adhere to appropriate Open Data principles. Projects making use of mobile communications tools will also be considered. And although projects will obviously be delivered in appropriate local languages, proposals through this website must be in English.

If you are based in one of the eligible countries and have an idea for a project (or, even better, more than one!), please submit a proposal. Even if you don’t, please help us spread the word! Tell everyone you know about this. Blog it. Link to it on Twitter or Facebook. Go to local events and make sure everyone knows about it (or ask us to come talk about it) — just talking about it could be the difference between someone building a KildareStreet or an OpenCongress in your country and them never getting started. For more ideas on how to help, please join our mailing list, or follow us on Twitter.

http://cee.mysociety.org/


Deadlines: it’s a rolling call: there are four monthly deadlines from November 15th. The timeframe for implementation will likely be different for each project: that’s something we will discuss at a later stage.



AND FIVE: Jobs

The recession may still be raging, but you wouldn't know it from looking at our job listings... there seem to be more jobs than ever:
http://jobs.humanrightstools.org/

Also a whole raft of jobs at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights:
http://tbe.taleo.net/NA4/ats/careers/searchResults.jsp?org=HUMANRIGHTSMUSEUM&cws=1

So if you want to work in human rights and in Canada, this is your chance.

This museum is currently under construction, so there's not much you can see, but at least there's a nice webcam to watch the build (and see what the weather is like in Winnipeg): http://www.humanrightsmuseum.ca/weekly-1-minute-video-updates

Its not really clear to us what this museum will hold... the website doesn't tell us much and they probably don't have set ideas yet. What would YOU put in a human rights museum? Do you know of similar museums?


Well thats all for this edition! Again, if you enjoyed it or found it useful... then please share.

And... very importantly... if you know of something that we should write about... a new tool, or manual, or online resource, or conference with a practical and practitiner-oriented focus... then write to let us know! Write to editors@humanrightstools.org



Best regards, and good luck in your efforts to promote and defend human rights,

Daniel D'Esposito
Editor, Human Rights Tools
editors@humanrightstools.org
http://www.humanrightstools.org