RightsCon Toronto 2018

This session includes human rights technologists from four organisations who will focus on the ethical collection, authentication, and preservation of documentation of sensitive mobile media captured by mobile phones. Panelists from OpenArchive, Guardian Project, Freedom of the Press Foundation, and GreenHost will discuss their work to create a secure ecosystem for managing the lifecycle of at-risk mobile media, with a specific focus on improving usability by tailoring tools to the communities they serve by incorporating ethnographic research early in the process. Each panelist will discuss use cases and the ways their work strives to improve digital agency and security in order to protect civil liberties. We will share how the technologies we build address issues arising at the intersection of human rights, free speech, ethical technology, and narrative agency.

We are a diverse panel and want to take advantage of the uniquely attuned group assembled at RightsCon to bring the narrative to the forefront in a cohesive, substantial, and action-oriented way. The panelists will provide an overview of the successes, challenges and opportunities faced by human-rights technologists working to create accurate, preservation-standard records online from a technical and community-based participatory design perspective. We will share mobile and desktop applications we work on and identify pain points and insights gleaned since their respective deployments with the goal of collaborating with each other and audience members to address these challenges. The panelists will then have a discussion with the participants to learn about concerns and new threat models, discuss inventive ways to manage pain points, and strategize creative and effective ways to leverage the work into participant communities.

The panel will be followed by a workshop and training where we can share our technologies with the RightsCon community and gain valuable feedback for future improvements.