The Knight News Challenge is looking for ways to make the Internet open, equitable, and free, so Benetech’s Human Rights Program has submitted an idea for a secureApp Generator to benefit journalists, citizen reporters, activists, and other organizations or individuals who need reliable channels for secure mobile data collection and information exchange over the Internet. Check out and support the full concept on The Knight News Challenge website.
Last week, Benetech participated in the third annual RightsCon conference in San Francisco—which brought together tech executives, policy advocates, and security experts to examine ways in which the digital sector can be used to protect and expand the rights of people worldwide. The program included multiple sessions with members of Benetech’s Human Rights team.
In the light of the recent political reforms in Burma, for the first time, our partners at the Network for Human Rights Documentation – Burma (ND-Burma) felt comfortable planning a comprehensive Martus training in Rangoon. In late November 2013, jointly with ND-Burma, our team co-led a training for seven human rights groups issues such as digital security tools and methods, approaches to documentation, and, of course, a deep training on using Martus. We are honored to have been able to support ND-Burma member organizations at this memorable training and are deeply grateful for their continued partnership.
Members of our Engineering/ Product/ Project Management / Design teams recently participated in a hack day, where they came up with some valuable proof of concepts for our Human Rights and Global Literacy initiatives and experimented with microcontrollers. Granted, hack days are no panacea for solving the world’s problems. Did we complete the proof of concepts we worked on? Of course not. But did we make great progress on various fronts and are we using what we learned to design our way forward? YES!
I recently returned from a weeklong training in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where I worked with our partner, Housing Works, to set up a nation-wide human rights documentation project using Martus, Benetech’s secure, open source documentation tool. The new initiative follows on the heels of a spate of homophobic violence experienced by the Haitian LGBTI community earlier this year. By the end of our training week, we graduated 20 new Martus Human Rights monitors representing 10 organizations working across the country with the goal of ensuring that no human rights violation motivated by homophobia, misogyny or stigma based on HIV status goes undocumented.
