17 SHARING INFORMATION Digitising documents is helping human rights defenders share information with other stakeholders, too. In Bangladesh, engaging with digital case management is a relatively recent decision, and Ishita Dutta from the Bangladesh Legal Aid and Services Trust says this will make sharing data with researchers easier to do, theoretically allowing for more coordinated advocacy efforts among different stakeholders. In Burma, the data gathered through the National Documentation Network’s Martus database is shared with international advocacy groups and individual researchers so that they can help spread word of the human rights situation in Burma. On the other side, though, one intermediary we spoke to mentioned that HRDs he supports often want to share “subsets” of information with others, and find this difficult to do in terms of technical permissions. MANAGING LARGE AMOUNTS OF DATA For organisations who had previously been using paperbased documentation or database systems, having wellstructured digital databases enabled them to actually use that information in a much more efficient way. For example, the Alkarama Foundation, based in Geneva, entered data they held about victims and violations in the Arab World into a modified open-source Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, which allowed them to pull out long lists of violations in a particular country, and enabled them to provide better evidence proving that there were serious, repeated issues, and keep track of how the cases were moving forward.