Tech Matters: Using tech for positive social change

A guest Beneblog by Max Schneider People don’t typically associate boisterous merengue music with high-tech statistical analysis. Then again, I shouldn’t have been surprised when I heard the playful notes of a street band wafting through the window while in Guatemala with Benetech's Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG). You see, HRDAG is anything but a typical organization. But first: why was I, a fresh graduate of UCLA, in Guatemala in the first place? (It’s funny, my parents asked the same question.) As an intern with HRDAG , I was part of the team analyzing data drawn from documents in the National Police Archive, a cache of approximately 80 million sheets of paper kept by the police system during the Guatemalan Civil War, a 36-year long conflict that ended in 1996. Our statistical analysis is being used as evidence for an upcoming trial charging former Police Chief Colonel Hector Bol de la Cruz with crimes related to the disappearance of a trade union and student leader in 1984...

Guest Beneblog by Vijaya Tripathi As a Program Associate for the Benetech Human Rights Program (HRP), I train and support human rights advocates who use Benetech’s free and open source Martus program to securely document human rights violations. Human rights documentation can take many forms including interviews, photographs, and official documentation. It is vital to the work of human rights investigations, and it serves many purposes. Sometimes this material is generated in the context of providing relief services, legal aid, or other support to victims. Other times it is collected to record the human rights environment in a given context, perhaps a conflict or post-conflict situation. In some cases, the information is intended for use in court cases or international prosecution, to support a human rights report, or advocacy campaign. This type of documentation is often a critical step in the large-scale data analysis projects conducted by Benetech’s Human Rights Data Analysis Group...