Following up from our last two human rights documentation community calls, we’d like to invite you to join us for the next call on May 4th at 6pm CEST (find your timezone here.) We also have a survey now open: https://engn.it/hrsurvey for human rights defenders to fill in, and we’d love your contributions to it (and your help in sharing it move widely!)
In this community call, we’re interested in testing our assumptions around the challenges faced by human rights defenders in using data. We’re coming up to a key stage in our own human rights documentation project; at the end of May, we’ll be bringing together a group of people to create resources + fill necessary gaps to help human rights defenders to be able to use “emerging” data streams in their documentation work – such as geospatial data, social media data, and more.
On the call, we’re interested in answering and discussing the following questions:
- What are the gaps in resources that the human rights community is seeing, in helping people use emerging data streams? (–> and what would be useful for us to create?)
- What are some common problems that human rights defenders are having when trying to engage with new and emerging data streams?
We’ll be sharing what we’ve found from the past few weeks of desk research, and inviting a few people to share with us their thoughts on the topics. Questions and more thoughts are always welcome on the call, too – if you’d like to be one of those speakers, do get in touch.
We’ve also put together this very short (3 question) survey, so that we can really get a good reality check from the human rights community on what we’re doing, and make sure that we really are addressing challenges that people are facing. Your help in sharing this survey with relevant networks is really appreciated (https://engn.it/hrsurvey ) – and if you work on human rights documentation, please do fill it in yourself.
The answers gathered through both the survey and the next community call will help us make sure we’re not duplicating efforts, and help frame our work in the most useful way possible – and we’ll be sure to responsibly share back summaries of what we find from the survey, as well as a list of the resources that we gather.
Anyone with an interest in the above questions, or the broader topic, is very welcome to participate – either just by listening, or by sharing what you’re working on. We’ll be using this Etherpad to document notes for the call in a comprehensive, participatory way, and all are welcome.
Details on joining the call
We will be using an online conferencing service called UberConference. This service allows us to connect up to 100 participants using VOIP or phone. This is not a video conferencing system, so don’t worry about brushing your hair!
To join the discussion on UberConference, just follow these steps at the time of the meeting:
- Using Firefox or Chrome, go to https://www.uberconference.com/theengineroom .
- If you have trouble using your computer for audio, you can connect using your phone. Just dial 607-821-7499 (you don’t need a PIN).
UberConference’s System requirements. For help, visit the UberConference user guide, or the UberConference support portal.