Tech Matters: Using tech for positive social change

Guest Beneblog by Megan Price New York City has many attractions – people often visit Times Square, the Statue of Liberty, Central Park, among many other sights. Me? I go to New York City to spend the weekend staring at my computer screen. Data Without Border’s kickoff Data Dive is what tempted me across the country, and after a much longer than expected day of travel I found myself surrounded by fellow nerds (data scientists, as this particular group prefers to be called). The group included statisticians, epidemiologists, computer scientists, engineers, political scientists, journalists, and ‘data wranglers.’ We were all there thanks to the efforts of Drew Conway, Jake Porway, and Craig Barowsky (Data without Borders’s founders) who had the crazy idea of bringing together well-intentioned data analysts and non-profits with data in need of analysis. This particular weekend we divided into teams and tackled projects from the New York chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (N...

Benetech’s Human Rights Program supports critical human rights cases around the world helping to end impunity and bring justice to communities torn apart by violence. Benetech statistician Daniel Guzmán has just published his account of one legal case which set a historic precedent for human rights in Guatemala. Guzmán’s article, entitled Speaking Stats to Justice: Expert Testimony in a Guatemalan Human Rights Trial Based on Statistical Sampling , appears in the most recent issue of CHANCE, a quarterly journal published by the American Statistical Association. The story illustrates the crucial role that scientists can play in analyzing large collections of human rights data and presenting findings that can help hold perpetrators accountable for terrible crimes. The article describes Guzmán’s presentation of key evidence in the trial of two former Guatemalan National Police agents accused of forcibly disappearing 26-year-old student and union leader Edgar Fernando García. A husband and...

Thanks to commenter Differance bringing up in response to to our last post on this topic that made me want to take a new tack. You're absolutely right that information quality comes from people and that data's fitness for a particular purpose is very contextual. To continue in this direction, let’s look at how people use this information. The people who are in most need of information about humanitarian disasters are the organized responders. [Commenter Iraqi Bootleg might have some very helpful ideas/examples here.] They are especially in need of big picture information that will help guide their response to do the most good with the resources employed. Civil authorities, humanitarian organizations, military units with a humanitarian mission, all hopefully have well-trained and experienced professionals in positions to make these critically important decisions. Let’s call our example professional Captain Lopez. Successful approach to crowdsourcing data: Captain Lopez’ ...

Guest Beneblog by Patrick Ball, Jeff Klingner, and Kristian Lum After the earthquake in Haiti, Ushahidi organized a centralized text messaging system to allow people to inform others about people trapped under damaged buildings and other humanitarian crises. This system was extremely effective at communicating specific needs in a timely way that required very little additional infrastructure. We think that this is important and valuable. However, we worry that crowdsourced data are not a good data source for doing statistics or finding patterns. An analysis team from European Commission's Joint Research Center analyzed the text messages gathered through Ushahidi together with data on damaged buildings collected by the World Bank and the UN from satellite images. Then they used spatial statistical techniques to show that the pattern of aggregated text messages predicted where the damaged buildings were concentrated. Ushahidi member Patrick Meier interpreted the JRC results as su...

Guest Beneblog by Megan Price I recently had the opportunity to present several of HRP’s projects to the local San Francisco chapter of the American Statistical Association (SFASA). Despite an audience of fellow statisticians, I chose to focus my talk more on the research questions and challenges posed by our work in human rights and less on the nuts and bolts of our statistical methods (though I did include a few equations and Greek letters!). Specifically, I presented the audience with the following questions: Were acts of genocide committed against the Mayan people in Guatemala? How many Kosovars were killed between March and June 1999? How much did Hissene Habré know about political killings during his presidency? Did high-ranking officials within the Guatemalan National Police know about Edgar Fernando García’s disappearance? As I told the audience, for those who like to skip to the last page of novels, the answers are 1) yes, 2) approximately 10,000, 3) a lot, and 4) we’re not s...

We had an all-company movie, The Reckoning during lunch this last week. One of the top issues that came out during our recent strategy meeting was the team's eagerness to hear about other projects. This was an opportunity to hear about human rights: The Reckoning is about the International Criminal Court. The movie is excellent: it does a good job of covering the issues around the establishment of the court and its early years including its earliest cases. John Bolton, the U.S. Ambassador to the UN during the Bush Administration, is quite direct about why he opposes the court today as he did then. The ICC is still in its infancy: one of the challenges the movie brings up is the inability to get most of its indictees into the court. The current president of Sudan is a good example of the challenge. After the movie, Patrick answered questions of the team about his experiences working at the court and his take on some of the issues raised in the movie. Patrick believes strong...