RightsCon Toronto 2018

To report on conflict, journalists need sources, verified information and visuals in order to accurately report what is happening in conflict zones. In the case of Sudan, there is not much visual evidence on online and social media available, which is different than the conflict in Syria where hours of conflict are recorded and published. In Sudan people share information, photos and videos on more closed of channels: the Sudanese Radio Dabanga, a project of Free Press Unlimited, is one of the first to tap into this: https://www.freepressunlimited.org/en/blog/journalism-through-chat-media. This resulted in a daily flow of over thousand messages shared with the radio station. Without people reporting on the bombings in the Darfur Jebel Marra area or sending visuals of demonstrations turning violent, nobody will know these human rights abuses are happening.

Together with Humanity X, the innovation lab of Leiden University, Radio Dabanga is working to create an open source digital tech solution: a chatbot that filters incoming messages and talk to the audiences about what they report to Radio Dabanga. This chatbot will be used by Radio Dabanga's journalists to parse and filter the most important information and visuals as well as prompt the submitter with additional questions to better understand the situation being reported. We have developed a rule based chat engine and adapters for various chat platforms, adhering to data responsibility. By prompting and securing digital documentation relating to the conflict in Sudan, Radio Dabanga can report important information more effectively.

In this engaging fishbowl session, team members of the chatbot project will showcase the chatbot that is the result of the collaboration between Humanity X and Radio Dabanga. To start with, an overview will be given of where the project stands now including a short overview of Radio Dabanga’s work and a description of their daily struggles to report on the conflicts in Sudan.
* This introduction will primarily look into how an open source technical solution can be used effectively in a conflict context, where human rights are abused.
* The talk will dig deeper into the technical features of the chatbot ‘s prototype build by Humanity X, including the questions, message complexity, analyzing texts and it will showcase the prototype.
* We will also describe the process of the collaboration between Humanity X and Radio Dabanga to create secure online communication channels and the opportunities to make this open-source chatbot for massive engagement available for other organizations, through scaling up. The open source chatbot can be used by other media houses, humanitarian & human rights organizations, which will increase their capacity to communicate with their audiences. This chatbot aims to be a widely used tool that uses audience engagement to demand accountability against perpetrators of the conflict.