This year’s RightsCon is scheduled for 6 to 10 June 2022 and HURIDOCS invites you to join our four sessions. The HURIDOCS team is co-hosting three sessions on ‘Media and investigations’ and one session on ‘Digital security’. Take a look at our scheduled sessions below:
COMMUNITY LAB: Monday 6 June 2022 | 8:30 – 9:30pm CEST
Filling in the gaps: activist-led approaches to accessible documentation methods
Hosted by HURIDOCS, WITNESS, Horizontal, and Carnegie Mellon University, Center for Human Rights Science (RightsLab)
To fill the gaps that exist in comprehensive, accessible, and community-led documentation guidance—the facilitators and the Totem Project recently came together to create a free, online course on getting started with human rights documentation. The next step is to have activists and their communities lead the conversation on which aspects of the course they want expanded. We will begin by giving a short introduction to the course and its development. We will then proceed to facilitate a community conversation via breakout groups. Through these breakout sessions we hope to hear from participants what the remaining gaps in knowledge are, and which ones are most important to their communities to address and have access to. The groups will then reconvene to share with each their discussions.
We hope to have a conversation around content, pedagogy, and community needs. Discussion prompts will include matters surrounding languages, interactive exercises, learning via storytelling, and expert notes as a way to help more non-technical and folks learning outside of a traditional education system understand the steps of gathering, preserving, analyzing, and sharing documentation of human rights violations. We aim to bring together 10-20 activists and documentarians from minoritized communities who will participate in 20 minute breakout sessions and later share back with the rest of the session participants. The remaining slots will be open to other RightsCon attendees.
WORKSHOP: Tuesday 7 June 2022 | 3:30 – 4:30 pm CEST
Human rights documentation security challenges and solutions: let’s work on a comprehensive approach
Hosted by HURIDOCS and Conexo
Human rights documentation and information management is a challenging task and as such requires a comprehensive security approach. While the growing community of digital and holistic security practitioners tries to address numerous risks that civil society, human rights defenders, activists and journalists face on a daily basis, the common approaches do not always fully incorporate an information management perspective.
From data collection, to its processing and preservation, to the safety of documenters and victims of human rights violations, there is a wide spectrum of threats and risks involved in human rights documentation and information management. As digital and holistic security play an integral and vital role in these processes, the tools, practices and solutions employed require continuous refinement and strengthening. HURIDOCS, Digital Defenders Partnership and Conexo have been working with organisations to increase their security for years, striving to strengthen the support they provide and focusing on human rights documentation in particular as a sensitive and important aspect.
The goal of this session is to highlight the need for a more comprehensive digital security approach in the aspects particularly related to the safety of the human rights documentation data and the data management processes, and to collaborate with like-minded practitioners on strengthening this area of digital security assistance to help human rights groups protect the information they steward.
TECH DEMO: Wednesday 8 June 2022 | 4 – 5 pm CEST
Tella and Uwazi: joining forces to improve security, functionality, and reliability of human rights information
Hosted by HURIDOCS and Horizontal
In this session, we will demo the integration of Tella and Uwazi, two human rights documentation tools.
Mobile devices have become critical tools for human rights documentation, but those documenting and collecting data have been facing increasing levels of physical repression. Device searches and seizures are rife and individuals caught with sensitive material are often detained, assaulted, or worse. Another key challenge is aggregating, managing, preserving and analysing data collected on mobile devices, especially when coming from several sources in a variety of locations. We are combining two leading open source solutions for human rights investigations: Tella and Uwazi.
Both are uniquely strong in supporting mobile documentors to work safely (Tella) and enable advocates to combine information from various sources to build cases that advance justice (Uwazi). By creating an easy way to connect Tella with Uwazi, we enable human rights defenders to work more safely and smoothly, while preserving their unique first-hand data, by relying on trustworthy technology that is created with them.
PANEL: Friday 10 June 2022 | 7 – 8 am CEST
Databases as memory objects: perspectives and practices in Asia
Hosted by HURIDOCS, Korea Future and Tibet Action Institute
This panel brings together human rights defenders from Asia to talk about their experiences in designing, populating, maintaining, and utilising databases. We will collectively reflect on the emergence of databases not only as a central documentation tool and information infrastructure in human rights work, but also as a memory object. The discussion centres on the unique and shared memory practices, politics, and philosophies that shape such technologically driven work. The facilitator will begin by situating the discussion broadly as the connection between human rights documentation and memory work. Thereafter, the facilitator will ask the panellists to briefly introduce their organisation as well as their ongoing human rights database initiative.
The panellists are composed of human rights defenders from various countries working on different projects at various stages. The facilitator will then ask the panellists specific pre-set prompts on the relationship between technology and memory concretely manifesting in the various aspects of their database work. While the panellists answer the first couple of questions from the facilitator, the audience/participants will be asked to post their comments, questions, and own experiences. The facilitator will then draw connections and raise questions from the participants where applicable. A particular focus is on figuring out some initial ideas regarding memory-sensitive database design and data practices.
About RightsCon 2022
RightsCon was established in 2011 to provide a civil society-led space where tech companies, government representatives and human rights defenders could come together to build a rights-respecting digital future. It has since evolved as one of the most prominent global events on human rights in the digital age.
This year, the summit is offering more than 500 sessions, which will be held online from 6 to 11 June across all timezones.
The RightsCon platform allows registered participants to login, explore, and start building a personalised programme schedule ahead of the summit to ensure the best possible experience.
We hope to see you there!