A Guest Reflection by Dr. Patrick Ball, Benetech's Chief Scientist
I am terribly sad to learn today of the untimely death of a friend and mentor, Dr. Karen Ramey Burns. Kar was a forensic anthropologist who specialized in human rights cases, and she was a founders of our Colombian partner organization EQUITAS). Over the last 17 years, Kar and I crossed paths in Haiti, Guatemala, Colombia, and many times at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, AAAS. She did amazing work, from dressing pigs in human clothing and leaving them on Colombian hillsides to measure how dogs and other animals disturb human remains, to putting uniquely identified titanium screws in human bones to learn how crabs move remains on Pacific islands. Every time we met, she had a story that taught me a little more about scientific ingenuity, integrity, and persistence. The Benetech Human Rights Program will greatly miss her warmth, wit, and guidance in the application of science to human rights.
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Guatemalan National Police Archive Goes Online
Guest Beneblog by Ann Harrison
In 2006, the Benetech Human Rights Program was asked to participate in one of the most important human rights data projects in the world. The Guatemalan government human rights ombudsman invited the Benetech Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) to analyze the contents of the estimated 80 million documents in the Guatemalan National Police Historical Archive or the Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional (AHPN). HRDAG designed a process to randomly sample the Archive and the archivists began using Benetech’s Martus software to organize and secure information generated from the samples. Just last month, the University of Texas at Austin made a large portion of the Archive available to the public unveiling a digital repository that contains 12 million of these critical records. This repository is an important step forward for the people of Guatemala and those seeking information about human rights abuses that occurred during the country’s 36 years of armed internal conflict.
The Guatemalan government and the police long denied the existence of these records - particularly during investigations by truth commissions organized by the United Nations and the Catholic Church during the final years of the conflict. Discovered by chance in 2005, the Archive has revealed a trove of documents dating from 1882 to 1997 including millions of arrest warrants, surveillance reports, identification documents, interrogation records, snapshots of detainees and informants, and unidentified bodies, fingerprint files, transcripts of radio communications, and ledgers of names and photographs. These records shed light on the complicity of police and other security forces during the years of violence that killed tens of thousands of Guatemalans. The Archive has also provided valuable information corroborating findings that involve the U.S. in medical experimentation on Guatemalan citizens as part of syphilis research in the 1940s.
According to Archive Deputy Director Alberto Fuentes, the Archive contains key information about crimes and violent acts, as well as records of social control and surveillance, especially of opposition politicians. Fuentes says archivists have found more than 900,000 personal dossiers containing names, photographs and fingerprints of individuals, as well as notes about their political activities. Documents from the Guatemala City-based Archive have already provided critical information in the prosecution of former members of Guatemalan security forces accused of human rights abuses. Expert testimony by Benetech statistician Daniel Guzmán, based on analysis of Archive documents, provided key evidence in the conviction of two former Guatemalan National Police officers accused of disappearing and murdering Guatemalan union leader Edgar Fernando García.
Dr. Patrick Ball, Chief Scientist and Vice President of Benetech’s Human Rights Program, presented research data from six years of Archive analysis during a conference at the University of Texas where the digital repository was unveiled. You can read about Benetech’s findings from the Archive here and here. In addition to producing findings used to convict former police officers, the Archive has produced documents that have provided evidence for the arrest and prosecution of senior officials.
Family members of those who disappeared during the years of violence are also using the Archive to help locate their loved ones. José Suasnabar, Assistant Director of the non-governmental Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation (FAFG), told the Inter Press Service (IPS) that investigators have found records in the Archive that will help them identify bodies buried in unmarked graves. The creators of the repository said in a statement that the online records, “will bring together previously disparate experiences of personal memory and trauma, and promote public dialogue.”
“Documents about our family members have been found, and it is helping bring the cases to trial,” Aura Elena Farfán of the Guatemalan Association of Families of the Detained and Disappeared (FAMDEGUA), told the IPS. "Our concern now is that everyone who in one way or another has come under scrutiny for the repression during the war wants the archive to disappear.”
Documents in the Archive continue to be digitized by a committed team of archivists and added to the digital repository to help secure historical memory, legal and scholarly use. Benetech is proud to support this project and our ongoing work with the Archive to analyze the contents of the records. According to the organizers of the University of Texas conference, the repository will provide “researchers, human rights activists, and prosecutors around the world an archive that has already begun to help rewrite the history of state repression in Guatemala.”
You can read more about the Guatemalan National Police Archive digital repository here.
In 2006, the Benetech Human Rights Program was asked to participate in one of the most important human rights data projects in the world. The Guatemalan government human rights ombudsman invited the Benetech Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) to analyze the contents of the estimated 80 million documents in the Guatemalan National Police Historical Archive or the Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional (AHPN). HRDAG designed a process to randomly sample the Archive and the archivists began using Benetech’s Martus software to organize and secure information generated from the samples. Just last month, the University of Texas at Austin made a large portion of the Archive available to the public unveiling a digital repository that contains 12 million of these critical records. This repository is an important step forward for the people of Guatemala and those seeking information about human rights abuses that occurred during the country’s 36 years of armed internal conflict.
The Guatemalan government and the police long denied the existence of these records - particularly during investigations by truth commissions organized by the United Nations and the Catholic Church during the final years of the conflict. Discovered by chance in 2005, the Archive has revealed a trove of documents dating from 1882 to 1997 including millions of arrest warrants, surveillance reports, identification documents, interrogation records, snapshots of detainees and informants, and unidentified bodies, fingerprint files, transcripts of radio communications, and ledgers of names and photographs. These records shed light on the complicity of police and other security forces during the years of violence that killed tens of thousands of Guatemalans. The Archive has also provided valuable information corroborating findings that involve the U.S. in medical experimentation on Guatemalan citizens as part of syphilis research in the 1940s.
According to Archive Deputy Director Alberto Fuentes, the Archive contains key information about crimes and violent acts, as well as records of social control and surveillance, especially of opposition politicians. Fuentes says archivists have found more than 900,000 personal dossiers containing names, photographs and fingerprints of individuals, as well as notes about their political activities. Documents from the Guatemala City-based Archive have already provided critical information in the prosecution of former members of Guatemalan security forces accused of human rights abuses. Expert testimony by Benetech statistician Daniel Guzmán, based on analysis of Archive documents, provided key evidence in the conviction of two former Guatemalan National Police officers accused of disappearing and murdering Guatemalan union leader Edgar Fernando García.
Dr. Patrick Ball, Chief Scientist and Vice President of Benetech’s Human Rights Program, presented research data from six years of Archive analysis during a conference at the University of Texas where the digital repository was unveiled. You can read about Benetech’s findings from the Archive here and here. In addition to producing findings used to convict former police officers, the Archive has produced documents that have provided evidence for the arrest and prosecution of senior officials.
Family members of those who disappeared during the years of violence are also using the Archive to help locate their loved ones. José Suasnabar, Assistant Director of the non-governmental Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation (FAFG), told the Inter Press Service (IPS) that investigators have found records in the Archive that will help them identify bodies buried in unmarked graves. The creators of the repository said in a statement that the online records, “will bring together previously disparate experiences of personal memory and trauma, and promote public dialogue.”
“Documents about our family members have been found, and it is helping bring the cases to trial,” Aura Elena Farfán of the Guatemalan Association of Families of the Detained and Disappeared (FAMDEGUA), told the IPS. "Our concern now is that everyone who in one way or another has come under scrutiny for the repression during the war wants the archive to disappear.”
Documents in the Archive continue to be digitized by a committed team of archivists and added to the digital repository to help secure historical memory, legal and scholarly use. Benetech is proud to support this project and our ongoing work with the Archive to analyze the contents of the records. According to the organizers of the University of Texas conference, the repository will provide “researchers, human rights activists, and prosecutors around the world an archive that has already begun to help rewrite the history of state repression in Guatemala.”
You can read more about the Guatemalan National Police Archive digital repository here.
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Why We're Blacking Out Sites: PIPA and SOPA
In November, I wrote a blog post entitled: Why I’m Scared of the SOPA bill. Part of my objective was to show the unintended consequences of Internet censorship bills like SOPA and PIPA (SOPA's Senate buddy bill), responding to alerts from organizations I trust like the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The Copyright Alliance had the courtesy of engaging with multiple comments in favor of the proposed bills, but they failed to directly address (either a deliberate omission or because it was a robot) my major concerns about two of our main technology programs: the Bookshare online library (largest in the world for people with print disabilities) and our Human Rights program.
Today, we're joining what is probably the largest online protest in history, by blacking out significant portions of the Benetech website, as well as our Martus and HRDAG human rights websites. We're not alone: far larger sites like Wikipedia and Google and hundreds of others (if not thousands).
Copyright hawks like Rupert Murdoch and the MPAA have attacked this movement as being for piracy, against jobs, and dangerous. But, we're not for piracy. Like almost all libraries, we're scrupulous in following the law, because we're serving incredibly important communities. But, badly crafted bills like SOPA and PIPA do far more collateral damage to freedom and economic wellbeing than they do good for the putative beneficiaries.
Make no mistake, we are for the Internet, we are for jobs, we are for legal access to content, and we are for human rights and freedom of speech. And we're part of a movement that believes passionately that the Internet is a treasure: a force for equality and economic growth.
Don't Break the Internet! And, let's follow up Blackout Day with a campaign to pass laws that protect this critically important resource!
Today, we're joining what is probably the largest online protest in history, by blacking out significant portions of the Benetech website, as well as our Martus and HRDAG human rights websites. We're not alone: far larger sites like Wikipedia and Google and hundreds of others (if not thousands).
Copyright hawks like Rupert Murdoch and the MPAA have attacked this movement as being for piracy, against jobs, and dangerous. But, we're not for piracy. Like almost all libraries, we're scrupulous in following the law, because we're serving incredibly important communities. But, badly crafted bills like SOPA and PIPA do far more collateral damage to freedom and economic wellbeing than they do good for the putative beneficiaries.
Make no mistake, we are for the Internet, we are for jobs, we are for legal access to content, and we are for human rights and freedom of speech. And we're part of a movement that believes passionately that the Internet is a treasure: a force for equality and economic growth.
Don't Break the Internet! And, let's follow up Blackout Day with a campaign to pass laws that protect this critically important resource!
Saturday, January 14, 2012
Engineers Without Borders Canada
I greatly enjoy talking to students, and I am now in Ottawa, Canada, just having spoken to an incredible group of students, Engineers Without Borders Canada. Now, I had heard of EWB before, but I hadn't grasped how large, sophisticated and ambitious an organization this is!
I'm at the annual Canadian EWB conference (each of the EWB country groups is independent of the other), and there are hundreds and hundreds of students here. Mainly engineering students, but as EWB Canada has grown and matured, they've increased the size of their umbrella and welcome non-engineering students. Oh, and at least half of the engineering students here are women. Hint to the profession: if you link engineering to helping people rather than gadgets, women seem to be more interested!
Dr. Pamela Hartigan, head of the Skoll Centre at Oxford University's Said Business School, noted in her keynote that EWB was the largest single source of Skoll Scholars at Oxford. That made me realize how important this channel of engineers doing social good was to the social entrepreneurship movement. As someone who has both recommended a Skoll Scholar (Jesse Fahnestock of our Bookshare team was in the first class of Skoll Scholars) and hired a fabulous MBA from Jesse's class: Barbara Morrison, who led our business development team for years, I can see how important this is!
I gave two talks here: one on failure, and one on engineering for social good, Benetech style. The first was on our Landmine Detector Project and why we think it failed. Right after my session, EWB released its own report on how it had failed in numerous project. I think it's incredibly important for the social sector to acknowledge and learn from failures. Bravo to EWB for prominently featuring its Failure Reports.
My second session spent a lot of time on the Benetech process for choosing projects, which Aaron Firestone, our current head of business development, spent a lot of time updating last year and had our board approve last month. We'll be putting it up on our website in the next couple of months. What was exciting was that EWB Canada had just put up their version of project development, which they call Intelligent Development. And, it's very similar to our approach. Like Benetech, EWB started with a technology-centric focus and moved to realizing that system change and improving the lives of real people is the true way to do good with technology. I'd say the main difference is that as a software-focused organization, Benetech thinks mostly about products, and then does projects utilizing our products. EWB, as a more hardware focused organization, tends to do projects, and so their focus on exit options by turning over projects to local partners is even more intense than ours.
As an engineer who has been working on social good for over twenty years, and felt pretty lonely the first ten or so, it's exciting to run into an organization that has many engineers in the field (in Africa), and tens of thousands of members around Canada! I'm leaving Ottawa today with optimism for the future, based on the incredible young people I met here!
I'm at the annual Canadian EWB conference (each of the EWB country groups is independent of the other), and there are hundreds and hundreds of students here. Mainly engineering students, but as EWB Canada has grown and matured, they've increased the size of their umbrella and welcome non-engineering students. Oh, and at least half of the engineering students here are women. Hint to the profession: if you link engineering to helping people rather than gadgets, women seem to be more interested!
Dr. Pamela Hartigan, head of the Skoll Centre at Oxford University's Said Business School, noted in her keynote that EWB was the largest single source of Skoll Scholars at Oxford. That made me realize how important this channel of engineers doing social good was to the social entrepreneurship movement. As someone who has both recommended a Skoll Scholar (Jesse Fahnestock of our Bookshare team was in the first class of Skoll Scholars) and hired a fabulous MBA from Jesse's class: Barbara Morrison, who led our business development team for years, I can see how important this is!
I gave two talks here: one on failure, and one on engineering for social good, Benetech style. The first was on our Landmine Detector Project and why we think it failed. Right after my session, EWB released its own report on how it had failed in numerous project. I think it's incredibly important for the social sector to acknowledge and learn from failures. Bravo to EWB for prominently featuring its Failure Reports.
My second session spent a lot of time on the Benetech process for choosing projects, which Aaron Firestone, our current head of business development, spent a lot of time updating last year and had our board approve last month. We'll be putting it up on our website in the next couple of months. What was exciting was that EWB Canada had just put up their version of project development, which they call Intelligent Development. And, it's very similar to our approach. Like Benetech, EWB started with a technology-centric focus and moved to realizing that system change and improving the lives of real people is the true way to do good with technology. I'd say the main difference is that as a software-focused organization, Benetech thinks mostly about products, and then does projects utilizing our products. EWB, as a more hardware focused organization, tends to do projects, and so their focus on exit options by turning over projects to local partners is even more intense than ours.
As an engineer who has been working on social good for over twenty years, and felt pretty lonely the first ten or so, it's exciting to run into an organization that has many engineers in the field (in Africa), and tens of thousands of members around Canada! I'm leaving Ottawa today with optimism for the future, based on the incredible young people I met here!
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
A Tale of Two Angels
When I first started pursuing the idea that technology can be harnessed to the cause of social good, it was pretty far out. Now, more than twenty years later, what has become known as social entrepreneurship is a hot global movement that is transforming the ways in which we approach the world’s most pressing problems and in which society organizes itself to solve them. Social entrepreneurship has its own conferences, publications, academic programs and awards. We celebrate the notion that nothing is as powerful as a great idea when put in the hands of a bold entrepreneur, and the lionization of entrepreneurs is a trend.
Let’s remember, though, that behind the entrepreneurs are equally daring angel investors: those who bet on these men and women when they have nothing to show but passion and excitement, and who empower them to realize their vision. After all, any great idea needs a vote of confidence, great advice and an infusion of cash to have a large-scale impact!
Even today, it’s not an easy task to find investors who are willing to take a chance on socially responsible ventures that prioritize social good over profitability. You can imagine how difficult it was back in 1982, when I founded Calera Recognition Systems (originally named the Palantir Corporation). My first successful tech company created technologies that could read just about any book or document. My very first angel investor who helped us get Calera off the ground was Sheldon Breiner. Sheldon is an amazing guy: a Silicon Valley serial inventor and entrepreneur who’s known as the Indiana Jones of geophysics. He’s an expert in magnetometers for natural resources and defense applications, and the inventor of the security walk-through metal detector and many other cool devices. Sheldon invested his own money in the newly born Calera and made important connections to key figures. Sheldon saying “I’ll invest in you” was the catalyst that led to Calera's first round of venture capital. Today, Calera is part of Nuance, the leading company in its field.
Sheldon was someone who I stayed in touch with even after leaving Calera to start a nonprofit social enterprise to make the Arkenstone reading machines for the blind (Arkenstone was the original name of Benetech). At a crucial turning point in Benetech’s history, I ran into Sheldon and outlined my dreams of doing more. I remember the event well: it was a rare speaking engagement by Bill Gates in 1999 when Gates was starting to shift into philanthropy in a big way.
Sheldon’s quick-shot reaction was, “you need to meet my friend, Robert.” And so, my very first for-profit angel introduced me to my first nonprofit angel! Robert Levenson had a tremendous impact on shaping the incredible organization we now know as Benetech.
At the time, I was in the process of selling the Arkenstone product line to a for-profit. I was eager to repeat the experience under our new name of Benetech. I thought if I was lucky, I could use the money from the sale of the Arkenstone assets to start a second successful social enterprise.
Robert, however, changed my mind about what the new nonprofit should be like. His first comment after hearing the Arkenstone story and my dreams to start another Arkenstone-style enterprise was that if I did so, he’d consider that a failure. I was flabbergasted. But Robert went on to explain that he felt that the best use of my efforts was to drive the creation of five or ten new enterprises at Benetech, not just a second one. And, he made the case that I should work to help build the field of social enterprise, and see if I could help build a movement that would lead to the creation of hundreds of technology social enterprises! He argued that I could have a bigger impact on the world by mentoring new social entrepreneurs, finding resources for them and helping them avoid the pitfalls I had experienced. Robert felt that, by aiming high, I would help build a movement of technologists who were more engaged in meeting humanity’s critical needs.
It was a breathtaking moment for me, to have a first-time meeting go in this completely unanticipated direction. What was stunning was being told that I lacked ambition, something I had never felt short of in the past! But, Robert was right. If I really wanted to make more social impact, I had to take on a different role. I’d have to become more like an angel like Robert and Sheldon.
But, Robert wasn’t just about giving me advice. He was a big believer in finding the precise intervention that would have the maximum impact. Like many angels, Robert didn’t have the most money to donate to us, but he was sure he could find a way to utilize leverage to help us. He connected me with two fabulous senior fundraising consultants, who mentored me at Robert’s expense for more than a year on how to become a better fundraiser for social innovation. He introduced me to leaders in the social innovation space, expanding my network and my understanding of the opportunities ahead. As a result of Robert’s help, one of the very first donors I met was Sally Osberg, who was just starting as the head of Jeff Skoll’s foundation (Jeff was the first CEO of eBay, and also the founder of Participant Media, the people behind incredible movies like Good Night and Good Luck, An Inconvenient Truth and The Help, among dozens more). Sally and Jeff have been the largest and longest term supporters of Benetech since that early meeting.
Robert went further and personally pitched Benetech to a very wealthy donor. At my first meeting with this donor and Robert, Benetech received an incredible unrestricted one million dollar gift. That funding, along with backing from Skoll Foundation and the Omidyar Network, was the rocket fuel for what Benetech has become today. Benetech was no longer just what I was going to do next, but a new phase in the search for innovative ways to apply maximum leverage to solving pressing problems on a scale well beyond a single project.
So here’s to Sheldon, Robert and all the other angels out there. You, who much like the entrepreneurs whom you support, act as society’s change agents. Thank you for unleashing resources where others see only problems. Thank you for seizing opportunities, which others miss, enabling new approaches and creating social value. And thank you for believing in crazy entrepreneurs, even those with little or no track record. Let’s hope that, as the social entrepreneurship movement continues to build, even more socially responsible angel groups and venture funds will arise and with them more opportunities for social enterprises to change the world for the better!
Let’s remember, though, that behind the entrepreneurs are equally daring angel investors: those who bet on these men and women when they have nothing to show but passion and excitement, and who empower them to realize their vision. After all, any great idea needs a vote of confidence, great advice and an infusion of cash to have a large-scale impact!
Even today, it’s not an easy task to find investors who are willing to take a chance on socially responsible ventures that prioritize social good over profitability. You can imagine how difficult it was back in 1982, when I founded Calera Recognition Systems (originally named the Palantir Corporation). My first successful tech company created technologies that could read just about any book or document. My very first angel investor who helped us get Calera off the ground was Sheldon Breiner. Sheldon is an amazing guy: a Silicon Valley serial inventor and entrepreneur who’s known as the Indiana Jones of geophysics. He’s an expert in magnetometers for natural resources and defense applications, and the inventor of the security walk-through metal detector and many other cool devices. Sheldon invested his own money in the newly born Calera and made important connections to key figures. Sheldon saying “I’ll invest in you” was the catalyst that led to Calera's first round of venture capital. Today, Calera is part of Nuance, the leading company in its field.
Sheldon was someone who I stayed in touch with even after leaving Calera to start a nonprofit social enterprise to make the Arkenstone reading machines for the blind (Arkenstone was the original name of Benetech). At a crucial turning point in Benetech’s history, I ran into Sheldon and outlined my dreams of doing more. I remember the event well: it was a rare speaking engagement by Bill Gates in 1999 when Gates was starting to shift into philanthropy in a big way.
Sheldon’s quick-shot reaction was, “you need to meet my friend, Robert.” And so, my very first for-profit angel introduced me to my first nonprofit angel! Robert Levenson had a tremendous impact on shaping the incredible organization we now know as Benetech.
At the time, I was in the process of selling the Arkenstone product line to a for-profit. I was eager to repeat the experience under our new name of Benetech. I thought if I was lucky, I could use the money from the sale of the Arkenstone assets to start a second successful social enterprise.
Robert, however, changed my mind about what the new nonprofit should be like. His first comment after hearing the Arkenstone story and my dreams to start another Arkenstone-style enterprise was that if I did so, he’d consider that a failure. I was flabbergasted. But Robert went on to explain that he felt that the best use of my efforts was to drive the creation of five or ten new enterprises at Benetech, not just a second one. And, he made the case that I should work to help build the field of social enterprise, and see if I could help build a movement that would lead to the creation of hundreds of technology social enterprises! He argued that I could have a bigger impact on the world by mentoring new social entrepreneurs, finding resources for them and helping them avoid the pitfalls I had experienced. Robert felt that, by aiming high, I would help build a movement of technologists who were more engaged in meeting humanity’s critical needs.
It was a breathtaking moment for me, to have a first-time meeting go in this completely unanticipated direction. What was stunning was being told that I lacked ambition, something I had never felt short of in the past! But, Robert was right. If I really wanted to make more social impact, I had to take on a different role. I’d have to become more like an angel like Robert and Sheldon.
But, Robert wasn’t just about giving me advice. He was a big believer in finding the precise intervention that would have the maximum impact. Like many angels, Robert didn’t have the most money to donate to us, but he was sure he could find a way to utilize leverage to help us. He connected me with two fabulous senior fundraising consultants, who mentored me at Robert’s expense for more than a year on how to become a better fundraiser for social innovation. He introduced me to leaders in the social innovation space, expanding my network and my understanding of the opportunities ahead. As a result of Robert’s help, one of the very first donors I met was Sally Osberg, who was just starting as the head of Jeff Skoll’s foundation (Jeff was the first CEO of eBay, and also the founder of Participant Media, the people behind incredible movies like Good Night and Good Luck, An Inconvenient Truth and The Help, among dozens more). Sally and Jeff have been the largest and longest term supporters of Benetech since that early meeting.
Robert went further and personally pitched Benetech to a very wealthy donor. At my first meeting with this donor and Robert, Benetech received an incredible unrestricted one million dollar gift. That funding, along with backing from Skoll Foundation and the Omidyar Network, was the rocket fuel for what Benetech has become today. Benetech was no longer just what I was going to do next, but a new phase in the search for innovative ways to apply maximum leverage to solving pressing problems on a scale well beyond a single project.
So here’s to Sheldon, Robert and all the other angels out there. You, who much like the entrepreneurs whom you support, act as society’s change agents. Thank you for unleashing resources where others see only problems. Thank you for seizing opportunities, which others miss, enabling new approaches and creating social value. And thank you for believing in crazy entrepreneurs, even those with little or no track record. Let’s hope that, as the social entrepreneurship movement continues to build, even more socially responsible angel groups and venture funds will arise and with them more opportunities for social enterprises to change the world for the better!
Sunday, December 18, 2011
A Slice of the Joy of Being at Benetech
My job is so much fun! I get to spend most of my time talking to people about social good: what we're doing with technology, what our partners are doing and what the many cool people we get to meet are doing along the way. I realize that it's rare that I can share some of these meetings with our team and with the blogosphere, so here are few tidbits just from last week!
- The first group was the De Novo Group, co-founded by famed Internet entrepreneur Eric Brewer to take cool, socially beneficial software (often created at UC Berkeley) and bring it to the world. We connected at the recent Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference and decided we should get together. Scott McNeil came to Benetech and we talked about their MetaMouse project (getting multiple mice to work on the same PC, so that kids in low-PC resource places can work together). KoBoToolbox is a toolkit for making it easy to collect survey data on mobile devices (turns out, I later found out we're already proposing to use this to do a survey in Africa). Plus, we discussed much more exciting tech that's in the De Novo pipeline, contributing to areas Benetech is very interested in!
- Next, our Palo Alto neighbors D-Rev (for Design Revolution) dropped by in the form of CEO Krista Donaldson. D-Rev wants to create solutions to help the poorest people in the world. We talked about their Jaipur knee project, and a low-cost lighting solution to fight jaundice in newborns. Krista and I had a wide-ranging conversation, the kind that social entrepreneurs tend to have when they get together (like, how to get projects to have impact at scale and where to find the money to launch new projects and scale them).
- Then, I heard that one of our partners had just been recognized as the first recipient of the David Kato Vision & Voice Award, which honors the murdered Ugandan LGBT activist. Jamaican lawyer and activist Maurice Tomlinson of J-FLAG will be recognized next month. We've been honored to support J-FLAG in their work, and we believe that our work with J-FLAG has helped lead to our new major project helping LGBT groups in Uganda and other African countries.
And that was on top of the normal hubbub at Benetech: meeting on existing and new projects, talking to donors and supporters, and even having our quarterly board meeting (went really well) and our annual holiday party (hope to provide more soon on the holiday party, we did something really cool with another social enterprise).
As we look forward to 2012, it's easy for us to be optimistic when we see the quality of the work of our partners, and see other technical people working to see technology fully serve all of humanity!
Saturday, December 10, 2011
International Human Rights Day 2011
Today, December 10th, the international community is observing Human Rights Day to commemorate the 63rd anniversary of the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Since its adoption at the United Nations General Assembly in 1948, the Declaration has become a universal standard for the promotion and protection of human rights worldwide. On International Human Rights Day, we pay tribute to all human rights defenders, celebrate the recent victories of the human rights community, and recognize the challenges that still lie ahead in the global struggle to advance justice, accountability and an end to impunity.
2011 has been an amazing year for human rights defenders. We have witnessed thousands of people taking to the streets to demand fundamental human rights and social justice; ordinary citizens turning into activists by using social media to mobilize protest movements that brought repressive governments to an end; and dramatic changes transpiring – like Tunisia’s first elections, or the encouraging signs of progress in Burma.
The Benetech Human Rights Program (HRP) is hard at work to ensure that technology and science best meet the needs of human rights defenders in these critical times. This past year, our HRP team helped the human rights movement achieve great things. Here’s a sample of our accomplishments:
Looking ahead to 2012, training NGOs in collection and effective use of data, and developing new technology tools to enable these efforts will be core components of our agenda. In that regard, we recently got terrific news about our Martus project. First, last June, the HRP received a generous multi-year grant from The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to develop the next generation of Martus. The new Martus will harness today’s emerging technologies in order to ensure that human rights organizations, journalists and other social justice actors achieve more with the invaluable stories that they collect. It will make data visualization and comprehension, as well as information collection and sharing much easier by integrating mobile applications, cloud hosting and innovative tools while maintaining the highest level of security. We’re so excited to embark upon this new project!
2011 has been an amazing year for human rights defenders. We have witnessed thousands of people taking to the streets to demand fundamental human rights and social justice; ordinary citizens turning into activists by using social media to mobilize protest movements that brought repressive governments to an end; and dramatic changes transpiring – like Tunisia’s first elections, or the encouraging signs of progress in Burma.
The Benetech Human Rights Program (HRP) is hard at work to ensure that technology and science best meet the needs of human rights defenders in these critical times. This past year, our HRP team helped the human rights movement achieve great things. Here’s a sample of our accomplishments:
- Martus, our secure, open-source information management software for human rights defenders continued to empower many human rights groups worldwide to secure thousands of stories of human rights violations and to use this information strategically to advance their causes. Our new and long-term Martus partners crossed a milestone and backed up to our public servers over 200,000 bulletins, each of which captures crucial, sensitive information about incidents from a victim’s story or from a field investigation.
- Our Martus team trained two new partners focused on rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) people: Jamaica Forum for Lesbians, All-Sexuals and Gays, or J-FLAG and AIDS-Free World. Both organizations work in the Caribbean, where sexual minorities face widespread violence, bigotry and marginalization. In the case of J-FLAG, Martus enables the organization to protect the identity of victims of abuse who come forward to tell their stories, to secure the information from their interviews, to report on the types of crimes documented, and to aggregate evidence for future court proceedings. Our support of groups advancing LGBTI rights is opening up new opportunities for helping many more such groups around the world.
- HRP members produced scientifically sound analysis that is advancing the process of legal justice in Guatemala. In a recent blog post, I described how HRP statistician Daniel Guzmán’s expert testimony in a breakthrough legal case against two former police officers helped score a remarkable victory in the fight to end impunity in Guatemala. I invite you to read Daniel’s first-person account of his expert testimony as published in the statistical magazine Chance. The testimony prompted further investigation that led to the arrest of three former senior officials. I’m proud to report here that, at the request of the Attorney General of Guatemala, our team has prepared statistical analysis to inform the prosecutions of these high-profile officials. We’re honored to support the process towards justice and accountability at this critical time in Guatemala’s history.
- Our team members are creating an “accountability toolkit” – a set of innovative techniques for identifying patterns of responsibility for grave human rights crimes. To that end, we combine statistical analysis of patterns of violence with information about military and police hierarchy, communication flow and deployment patterns. The combined analysis supports scientific arguments about responsibility for mass atrocities – arguments that are successful in court cases.
- Through projects that integrated statistical analyses into multidisciplinary human rights work, we engaged in the public debate about human rights violations in Colombia. First, in partnership with Colombian NGO Corporación Punto de Vista, we assessed a methodology for studying conflict-related sexual violence in the country. We identified important opportunities for developing a substantive, quantitative-based sexual violence research agenda. This analysis is now helping to reframe how sexual violence is studied and understood by groups in Colombia and by the United Nations. Second, we strengthened the public debate about the free trade agreements that Colombia negotiates with the U.S. and the European Union. Colombia’s record of violence against trade union members has been an obstacle to finalizing the agreements. HRP’s calculated estimates of trade union member homicides – part of our work with the Colombian Commission of Jurists – brought clarity to this intense debate.
- We advanced human rights advocacy and the community more broadly by placing human rights at the forefront of academic research and by educating wide audiences about statistical best practices in the analysis of violence. HRP team members presented papers at academic conferences, published articles in academic journals, and offered many public talks. All HRP’s publications are available online.
In addition, our work is praised in a report and recommendation for donors entitled “Human Rights and International Justice: Challenges and Opportunities at an Inflection Point,” which was commissioned by The Atlantic Philanthropies. Based on extensive conversations with experts in the human rights and international justice field, the authors – Jonathan Fanton (former President of the MacArthur Foundation and of New School University) and Zachary Katznelson – provide an overview of the state of the field along with concrete recommendations that aim to stimulate more philanthropic investment in it. Among their recommendations is that NGOs be trained to collect, analyze and use data effectively, since the impact of their advocacy depends on establishing credibility through good data. They state: “An investment in Benetech to allow it to train leading NGOs in how to gather, verify, and use data and evidence could significantly raise the quality of information.” In another section they add: “[Benetech’s work in] human rights data collection and analysis … should grow at least tenfold.” We’re deeply grateful for this strong support of our work.
Looking ahead to 2012, training NGOs in collection and effective use of data, and developing new technology tools to enable these efforts will be core components of our agenda. In that regard, we recently got terrific news about our Martus project. First, last June, the HRP received a generous multi-year grant from The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to develop the next generation of Martus. The new Martus will harness today’s emerging technologies in order to ensure that human rights organizations, journalists and other social justice actors achieve more with the invaluable stories that they collect. It will make data visualization and comprehension, as well as information collection and sharing much easier by integrating mobile applications, cloud hosting and innovative tools while maintaining the highest level of security. We’re so excited to embark upon this new project!
Moreover, in September, our Martus project received a 2-year grant from the U.S. State Department Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor to train partner African human rights organizations that gather information about violations against LGBTI people. The award will enable us to increase the capacity of local human rights organizations in Uganda and key Southern African countries to sustain a long-term monitoring and documentation effort. We’re delighted about the opportunity to advance the strategic goals of local NGOs working to end discrimination against LGBTI people.
The year 2011 has shown in many ways that the arc of history is bending toward justice. But the road toward justice is long and nothing is inevitable. Many challenges to global respect of human rights still lie ahead, and many more groups around the world need our help. In 2012, we will also continue to carry out multiple, high-stakes projects in which we provide scientific assistance with statistical analysis of violence. True to our organizational values, our team is working hard to ensure that the upcoming projects we undertake in the service of the human rights community are the right ones to do and that we do them right.
There are a lot of things that – for privacy and security reasons – we can’t reveal about our future projects. But we can promise that we’re going to continue to develop innovative technology and science solutions to defend human rights defenders, promote legal justice by strengthening court cases, and advance post-revolutionary accountability. We invite you to visit the HRP’s websites (Martus; HRDAG) for updates about our work, and to join us in celebrating global human rights.
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