RightsCon Toronto 2018

Whistler: bringing secure Human Rights documentation to all (Build A Movement)

Speakers: Raphael Mimoun

Whistler is a mobile app enabling secure documentation and data-collection to human rights defenders, citizen journalists, election monitors. We will talk about the various features of the app and its strong security components, and discuss the way forward.

Starting at the source: designing new technology for human rights
documentation and investigations (HURIDOCS)

Speakers: Kristin Antin & Friedhelm Weinberg

HURIDOCS will demo the concept and prototype for our newest tool used for documenting and investigating human rights violations. We will present an example of how this new tool supports human rights investigations managing  large amounts of source documents and media to advance transitional justice  efforts and evidence-based advocacy. In collaboration with human rights  organisations, we have designed this tool with a focus on security,  usability, and functionality. Did we get it right? Attend this session and let us know!

Politifilter: Free, Open Source Social Media Analysis for Hate Speech, Bogus News, and Online Harassment (National Democratic Institute)

Speakers: Chris Doten

The National Democratic Institute (NDI) will present a demo of its Politifilter tool, a free open source software platform that lets users analyze the online speech and conversations of a targeted universe of influencers such as political leaders or public figures. Politifilter uses an ingestion engine that can pull massive amounts of information from Twitter and public Facebook pages providing the basis an understanding of political debate around an issue, helping activists and civil society groups better monitor and track conversations that impact causes they care about. NDI is using this system to highlight online violence against women in politics; tracking politicians who link to dubious news sources; and understanding online conversations. While there are a range of tools for gathering this information, commercial or otherwise, NDI found a gap for something that was easy to use without advanced technical skills, able to provide a basic view into fundamental aspects of social conversations, and scalable across as many different local contexts as possible.

Check and Keep: Advanced Verification and Archival Tools for Journalists and Researchers (Meedan; Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society)

Speakers: An Xiao Mina & Tom Trewinnard

While eyewitness media is increasingly vital to news coverage and human rights research, trust in social media content is rapidly dropping. In this setting researchers are challenged to develop new competencies in verifying and vetting online content. Meedan hopes to demo two tools from our product suite, Check and Keep, which work together for smart verification and archiving of eyewitness media from a wide variety of online sources..

Check helps researchers and reporters make sense of eyewitness media and provides a framework for sharing this work with policy makers, readers and community members. Check combines smart checklists, workflow integrations, and intuitive design to make digital newsgathering an efficient and collaborative process. Invite your team and online community in a secure environment to work together to validate breaking news content. Then, quickly show the work to your audience on social media or your news site.

Keep, a tool developed by RightsLab and Meedan, supports smart, powerful archiving of online videos and images. Keep is designed to work seamlessly with Check, our platform for collaborative newsgathering and verification.

We will demo both tools and how they’ve been used by teams at UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Center, the Syrian Archive and the University of Hong Kong in their work, and we’ll discuss how these tools can be effectively used by human rights researchers and journalists.