Use the space as an opportunity to chat with others working in the field, brainstorm, collaborate and learn how we can better support civic witnessing in an era of dangerous populism and authoritarianism in the U.S. and internationally. Learn more about the Citizen Journalists and Activists Meet Up. We hope to see you there!

Here are some other sessions we’re looking forward to attending this year:

• Creating New Stories of Immigration – Saturday, March 10, 3:30-4:30 pm
  • The ACLU of Southern California
  • Bard College
  • The New Yorker Magazine
• Will We Trust Media When Our Own Eyes Deceive Us?  Saturday, March 10, 5-6 pm
  • Data for Democracy
  • The Atlantic
• Innovation, New Media, and the SDG Revolution – Wednesday, March 14, 12:30-1:30 pm
  • Hashtag Our Stories
  • Interbridge
  • City of Oslo
  • United Nations Sustainable Development Goals Action Campaign

If you haven’t registered for SXSW already, you can do it here.

Dia Kayyali, WITNESS’ Tech + Advocacy Program Manager, chimes in on the potential dangers to users, on what The Intercept calls a “Dropbox for cops.”

Read the full article “Taser Wants to Start Building an Army of Smartphone Informants” in The Intercept.

Photo Illustration: Soohee Cho for The Intercept/youtube

In the United States, it is bystander footage of fatal police encounters. In Syria, it is YouTube videos of chemical weapons attacks. In the Ukraine, it is Instagram feeds of soldiers showing the movement of Russian military vehicles.

Around the world, activists, journalists, and human rights investigators are using citizen reports to monitor human rights violations. While any one report may document a single moment, perspective, or abuse, collectively they can show trends over time and geography, corroborate other reports, provide multiple perspectives of one event, and reveal patterns that only emerge by looking at large datasets.

But the process of compiling and verifying dozens, or hundreds, of those reports is not as intuitive as the process of taking out a phone, hitting record, and sharing a single photo or video online. Many of WITNESS’s peers around the world are developing ways to curate citizen footage and other open-source reports, and are looking for models to replicate, tools to use, and resources to help guide their own process.

So we are reaching out to our network of human rights activists with the question: Do you curate online reports to document human rights abuses?

If you have used or created a platform to track open-source reports of a particular human rights issue, we want to hear from you. It could be a map that plots verified tweets of election irregularities, or a database of documented violence against protesters. You don’t need to use a custom-made tool or website–though it is fine if you do–as we hope to share models of open-source curation that are easily replicated. The purpose of this survey is to connect practitioners with one another, share tools, resources, and learnings, and identify shared objectives and challenges. We’ll share findings in the fall on the WITNESS blog.

The only requirements are that:

1.  The project gathers eyewitness reports created by average people, not necessarily with the intended purpose of such a database. Such reports, for example, may be YouTube videos, Tweets, photos shared on WhatsApp, or other such online data often described as “citizen reporting.” This means that finding and verifying the reports will be a necessary part of the data collection process, and safety and ethics may be important considerations in using the data.
2. By organizing such reports into a database, you are able to provide greater context about the human rights issue.

Have you developed a project that fits the bill? Share your work with us by completing the form below.

Feature Image: Flickr/Intel Free Press (CC BY-SA 2.0)

You can login or create a free account and vote here: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/79478

By the time the next SXSW rolls around, we’ll be over a year into the dangerous impact of this administration on human rights in the USA, and growing authoritarianism around the world. Our meet up will explore what we can learn from each other about how citizen journalism and civic witnessing using our smartphones can best challenge injustice, hate, dangerous populism and authoritarianism, in the US and internationally. 

Help us get the word out for collaborators by sharing! Voting closes Friday, August 25 (11:59 PM CT).

The new video provides a brief overview on the importance of archiving in order to prevent your video evidence from potentially being lost or destroyed in the event that your account gets hacked, your hard drive dies, or your video is seized. Archive! and the Archive Guide show you what steps to take to preserve important video evidence that can help expose human rights abuses and support calls for justice. 

https://youtu.be/kAOt3R9l-QY&w=640&h=480

“Of the 56,000 homicides in Brazil every year, 30,000 are young people aged 15 to 29.That means that, at this very moment, a young person is most likely being killed in Brazil. By the time you go to bed, 82 will have died today. It’s like a small airplane full of young people crashing every two days, with no survivors. This would be shocking enough by itself, but it’s even more scandalous that 77 per cent of these young people are black.”

Check out this post or this New York Times Magazine feature on us to learn more about how we’re working to expose police violence in Brazil. We also co-authored to a report with partner organization Article 19 about how video can be better used for justice and accountability in Brazil. And here you can find a host of resources in Portuguese.

As a partner and trainee of WITNESS’, Rooj was interviewed alongside Yvette, discussing the role video has played in documenting conflict in Yemen. Rooj noted that authenticating video is a particular challenge citizen journalists face when sharing stories from conflict affected regions, and recounted a time when her organization in Yemen needed to verify footage they were receiving. She said, “thankfully at the time WITNESS was in Yemen and put together a quick training on how to verify footage” which has equipped citizen journalists she works with to authenticate their videos.

The Road Map segment can be viewed online here.

The panelists’ discussion will include questions such as:

• How can citizen media to move beyond raising awareness of issues to using it for justice including, in some cases, legal evidence.
• What can be done to combat the trend of falsified or recycled video?
• How can today’s technology enable people to more thoroughly authenticate their video, making it more trustworthy?

The conversation will also address some of the ethical questions related to citizen media:

• Where and when should human rights abuse media be shown publicly and who decides?
• What measures can be taken to better prevent this and better protect victims’ identities before sharing media online?

Participants in the Google+ Hangout Discussion will include:

• Madeleine Bair – Program Manager of the Human Rights Channel at WITNESS. Follow her on Twitter @madbair and @ythumanrights
• Christoph Koettl – Advisor, Crisis Response at Amnesty International. Follow him on Twitter @ckoettl
• Irene Herrera – Venezuelan filmmaker, journalist, Assistant Professor at Temple University Japan, and co-founder of Video Venezuela. Follow her on Twitter @herrera_irene
• Moderated by: Dan Mahanty – Senior Advisor for Office of Security and Human Rights in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor at the U.S. Department of State. Follow him on Twitter @danmahanty

The discussion can be viewed live online via Google+ Hangout here. You can also join the conversation by tweeting @witnessorg or any of the participants using #stateofrights and #video4change.

** UPDATE: Here are some recap materials following the panel

Watch the discussion in its entirety here.

Check out the online discussion and questions from the event on Storify here.

We follow dozens of community media outlets, activists, and human rights workers filming, sharing, and reporting news from their own communities, and we recommend you do too. On Human Rights Day, we wanted to share some of the best citizen reporting on human rights issues.

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