Case study specification
Objectives of the project
The general goal of the project under study was to develop and implement an information
system to receive, track and manage complaints related to human rights issues.
Complaints are presented by victims or complainants (they could be the same or different
persons) using a submission form on a website. This step launches the handling process.
Once the admissibility of the complaint is approved, it passess through several stages until
it is closed. In this example, the case is closed for the purpose of this organization when the
complaint reaches an endpoint in the workflow.
As we will see in the workflow later in this document, the case can be closed in several
ways: the complaint is not admitted, the complaint has no substance, a conciliation
agreement has been signed and verified, the complaint has been referred to another
authority, or legal proceedings are instituted, meaning that the case is referred to to a
higher authority.
This information system was implemented using Uwazi, the free open-source software
developed by HURIDOCS for organising, analysing and publishing information. For this
project, as we will see later in the database design section, the platform was adapted to
handle complaints and provide valuable insights about the internal performance of the
partner.
The discovery phase: from an idea to a data model design
The purpose of the discovery phase is to gain understanding about the partner’ needs and
the challenges they want to overcome from their preexisting data model and/or workflow.
Therefore, the design of the new database took into account these considerations:
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Partner’ needs and challenges they wanted to overcome.
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What an actual complaint procedure looks like and the different responses it could
get: this required research on existing complaints proceedings, and designing
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