5
Introduction
Human rights documentation is a core part of human
rights advocacy. And while there is a rich history and
community of practice in collecting, storing, organising,
analysing, and communicating human rights data, the
landscape is quickly changing.
Thanks to digital technologies, there are new tools, new
possibilities, new challenges, and new expectations of
human rights documentation initiatives. It is increasingly
difficult for organisations to know which way to go, what
tool to adopt, or what new opportunity to seize. These
challenges persist despite an ecosystem of support
organisations that work to make this new landscape
navigable, and an increasing number of technologists
designing with human rights initiatives in mind.
This report is designed as a first attempt to detail
available technologies that are designed for human
rights documentation, understand the various
perspectives on the challenges human rights
documentation initiatives face when adopting new tools
and practices, and analyse what is working and what is
not for human rights documentation initiatives seeking
to integrate new tools in their work.
This is offered as a scoping study; we have not set out to
make explicit recommendations for specific projects, nor
have we exhaustively catalogued all tools that are possible
to use in human rights documentation work. That said, we
do offer takeaways based on trends we found conducting
this study, and some frameworks of thinking about tool
functionality that will be helpful for organisations.
The majority of this report’s insights come from two
series of interviews: sixteen conducted between
February and April 2016, funded by the Oak Foundation,
and 20 related to our work producing DatNav in
partnership with Amnesty International and Benetech.
These interviews were supplemented by our desk
research on tool functionality and other case studies.
Our sample size is far too small to make claims about
the sector as a whole, but we hope to carry out future
research that enables broader conclusions.
Our interviews were conducted with individuals from three
main groups (and in the report we include the group that a
particular quote comes from):
• HRDs:
human rights defenders
• Intermediaries:
supporters of HRDs to use technology more
effectively, such as digital security trainers
• Tools developers:
creators and developers of technology tools for HRDs