The remaining two posts in the series will offer first a practical run-through of how to create and share human rights video safely and effectively in the online environment, and then a piece looking at some of the ethical issues raised by presenting human rights videos online. Please do take a look at the outlet of your choice, and let us know what you think.

This means that I am the Gujarati filling in a Indian sandwich. What other patterns shall we discern by year’s end? Will Len and Daniel be revealed as God-like artist-watchmakers with an impossibly vast yet detailed vision like Aaron Koblin?

Some of the top Kenyan bloggers have been providing compelling updates since the beginning of the election campaign – of those that I read regularly, Kenyan Pundit and Mental Acrobatics particularly stand out – and it’s worth keeping an eye on Global Voices’ Kenya Elections page. That said, we’ve been finding it difficult to track down much citizen video or audio at all from Kenya thusfar – if you come across any, or we’re missing something obvious, please let me know via the comments, or upload it to the Hub. I’ve been wondering why it’s taking time for video to emerge – is the footage out there, but just not online yet? Was it just too insecure and dangerous to film during the first few days? Here’s a by no means comprehensive scour for video, audio and photos out of Kenya in recent days…

Video / Audio / Photos:

The only source providing genuine street-level citizen reporting that I can find is AfricaNews’ Voices Of Africa, which equips local reporters with cellphones, and dubs them “camjos”. It’s a general news site, using traditional media reporters, and the range of post-election reports includes police turning back protesters, and an interview with a Somali refugee, as well as an interview with a tourist industry representative and signs of daily life returning to normal in Nairobi. The reports are of varying quality and interest, but they provide a much more street-level view, and point to the potential video-enabled cellphones might bring to human rights reporting.

It’s not quite clear to me whether this is related to an initiative by Media Focus on Africa, a Dutch-Kenyan NGO, equipped several reporters around the country with high-end video-enabled mobile phones – the reports on this site appear to end on 21st December, before the election.

Over at YouTube, another Kenyan online effort, Kenya Votes, conducted vox pops with ordinary Kenyans in the run-up to the elections, including this young woman expressing her fears about tribalism:

As you might expect, there’s plenty of traditional media coverage on YouTube – Kenya’s own Nation TV, the BBC, Al Jazeera English, and CNN are all putting video reports and interviews online. Rocketboom’s Ruud Elmendorp has a short video report from the days before the election. Currently individual users, like YouTube newbie theweepingsoul, seem to be using news images culled from the web in homages to the photojournalists and other journalists getting images out and in pleas to end the violence.

Kenya Indymedia is beginning to upload some brief audio interviews, including one with a Somali man considering returning to Somalia (mp3) after the recent violence. Slum-TV is blogging, but yet to upload video.

As for photographs, there’s some extraordinary photojournalism online – Reuters and Panos Pictures (click through to the News section for their latest pictures from Kenya), for example – and a quick scan of Flickr reveals a handful of users such as Kenyan photojournalist DEMOSH, blogger Afromusing, and other individuals who witnessed events while in Kenya, but as with video, the lack thusfar of citizen or activist images online has been striking. Blogger Joseph Karoki has been pulling together images from a variety of news sources to provide visual updates.

Mapping:
The UN provided some striking images via satellite, showing the worst concentration of violence by looking at the number of fires burning, available in lo-res (1, 2) and hi-res (1, 2) (via IRIN).

Perhaps the most promising and practical initiative to date is Ushahidi (via White African), a Google Maps mashup enabling individuals to report incidents of post-election violence, including some video already (taken by Afromusing). What’s particularly interesting about this is that the incident reports are being verified with local civil society before being posted, but individuals visiting the site can also submit further information related to particular incidents.

It also demonstrates how rapidly these new tools can be adapted and updated. One commenter asks that “rape” be added to the list of incidents, and lo, there it is. As a basic template for tracking this kind of crisis, it’s a very good start. Inclusion of some kind of timeline, a la Oakland Crimespotting, would be a useful addition, but for 2 days’ work, kudos goes to the team (Kenyan Pundit, Mental Acrobatics, and White African).

Ways to act:
Pambazuka has been active in coordinating with a wide cross-section of civil society, calling for assistance in establishing Rape Crisis Centres, setting up an international petition, and posting regular updates on its Action Alert Blog, including a planned March for Peace, Truth and Justice today.

Avaaz has a tool to help individuals to write to their Foreign Minister to call for a transparent inquiry into the disputed election.

On Sunday morning I sat in on a conference call with three of The Elders – Graça Machel, Mary Robinson and Archbishop Desmond Tutu – and 5 bloggers from Global Voices (including Solana Larsen, who blogged here and here). The odd technical hiccup aside, it was fascinating to hear these titans of international human rights speak so passionately of the power of individual stories of human rights to create change – and, in the words of Graça Machel, of the role that sites like the Hub can play in “helping the world to know.”

Desmond Tutu kicked off the call, marking International Human Rights Day as “the beginning of a year-long commemoration, a celebration of the 60th anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights.” [UPDATE, 10 Dec: audio versions of the UDHR here] The Elders hope, he said, in what would comfortably be the largest sign-up/pledge/petition ever, to “encourage [and] persuade a billion people to sign the declaration to take possession of what is an incredible legacy.”

That’s an astonishing target – and Tutu was clear that “if the people are not engaged, then you can forget it. [...] When we were struggling against apartheid, we talked about people power – galvanising what are usually called ‘ordinary people’ – there are no ordinary people, everyone is extraordinary.”

Mary Robinson referred to the “extraordinary power of communication”, and she had kind words for not only the Hub, but also openDemocracy, Global Voices, and Business & Human Rights. “We want to amplify marginalised voices, that tend not to be heard,” said Desmond Tutu, stressing the importance of “people being able to tell their own story – of human rights abuses, of human rights being recognised and enjoyed” and “people’s own journey in claiming their rights, and exercising their responsibilities and duties.”
Continuing the theme, Mary Robinson quoted Eleanor Roosevelt, and stressed her call for “concerted citizen action”:

“Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home – so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.”

But it was left to Graça Machel to speak particularly of human rights organisations at the grassroots. She made clear the Elders’ own feeling of “responsibility to bring forward the stories of the world,” but she recognised the power of new media to do the same with real immediacy, and she appealed to bloggers to bring out “stories of resistance and success.” And then she hit on what we see as one of the Hub’s most important roles: “For [the Every Human Has Rights] campaign to be global,” it needs to connect with “small organisations that don’t have the space or the resources to get recognition or power.” We’re looking forward to playing a role in helping those organisations tell their stories to wide audiences – and, in the process, in “helping the world to know.”

And you have a part to play too: Tell Your Story…

[Note: WITNESS' co-founder, Peter Gabriel, was also instrumental in forming the Elders project.]

COHRE (the Center on Housing Rights and Evictions) has posted two reports – one on Displacement and Dispossession: Forced Displacement and Land Rights in Burma (pdf) and the other naming Burma as a recipient of the Housing Rights Violator Award for 2007 (pdf).

More directly related to the monks’ protest, over at the Berkman Center, John Palfrey recently pointed up this OpenNet Initiative study (pdf). :

Many reported the story of how the junta “shut off” the Internet before they carried out some of the worst acts in the process of suppressing the demonstration. The ONI is today releasing a careful technical review that describes what in fact the military junta did, set in context of the demonstrations and the state’s history of Internet filtering. [...] It’s the first time, with the exception of Nepal in 2005, that a state has sought to shut off access to the Internet altogether.

The report itself concludes with the following analysis (my italics):

Burmese netizens, operating in a constrained and challenging space in a country with especially low Internet penetration rates, have demonstrated that the tools of information technology can have a strong impact on the global coverage of events as they are unfolding, and sometimes on the events themselves. The events in Burma also provide a chilling example of the limitations of the Internet, access to which was ultimately vulnerable to the unilateral choices of a repressive regime. However, even the vast majority of Burmese without access to or knowledge of the Internet may have benefited from the enduring achievement of a small band of citizen bloggers and journalists—the uploading of vital, relevant information to the Internet was broadcast back in via television and radio and spread through personal networks and communities throughout the country.

As we watched the events in Burma unfold in September, we were working on the alpha version of the Hub, wishing it were ready to release, not just for that “small band” in Burma, but the bands of activists, bloggers, citizens and journalists everywhere.  We’ll be working actively to ensure that the Hub continues to evolve to meets the needs of all of these participants, but we’re especially keen to hear from activists on the ground, and we really encourage you to participate, engage and give us your feedback.

COHRE (the Center on Housing Rights and Evictions) has posted two reports – one on Displacement and Dispossession: Forced Displacement and Land Rights in Burma (pdf) and the other naming Burma as a recipient of the Housing Rights Violator Award for 2007 (pdf).

More directly related to the monks’ protest, over at the Berkman Center, John Palfrey recently pointed up this OpenNet Initiative study (pdf). :

Many reported the story of how the junta “shut off” the Internet before they carried out some of the worst acts in the process of suppressing the demonstration. The ONI is today releasing a careful technical review that describes what in fact the military junta did, set in context of the demonstrations and the state’s history of Internet filtering. [...] It’s the first time, with the exception of Nepal in 2005, that a state has sought to shut off access to the Internet altogether.

The report itself concludes with the following analysis (my italics):

Burmese netizens, operating in a constrained and challenging space in a country with especially low Internet penetration rates, have demonstrated that the tools of information technology can have a strong impact on the global coverage of events as they are unfolding, and sometimes on the events themselves. The events in Burma also provide a chilling example of the limitations of the Internet, access to which was ultimately vulnerable to the unilateral choices of a repressive regime. However, even the vast majority of Burmese without access to or knowledge of the Internet may have benefited from the enduring achievement of a small band of citizen bloggers and journalists—the uploading of vital, relevant information to the Internet was broadcast back in via television and radio and spread through personal networks and communities throughout the country.

As we watched the events in Burma unfold in September, we were working on the alpha version of the Hub, wishing it were ready to release, not just for that “small band” in Burma, but the bands of activists, bloggers, citizens and journalists everywhere.  We’ll be working actively to ensure that the Hub continues to evolve to meets the needs of all of these participants, but we’re especially keen to hear from activists on the ground, and we really encourage you to participate, engage and give us your feedback.

Jay Rosen of NewAssignment.net is talking about some of the lessons learned from their first networked journalism experiment with Wired News, which focused on trends in crowdsourcing. He said there were six lessons, but he threw in a seventh for good measure.

1. Division of labor is key in distributed reporting projects. You need to think about what task, and what size of task, you expect people to do.

2. You have to get the motivations right. If you don’t understand participants’ motivations, you can’t figure out how to define the work.

3. Watch for rising coordination costs. More users=more costs, ie answering questions, giving out instructions, etc. You can get your project run into the ground by succeeding with lots of people.

4. If I go off and do something for you, now I have to come back and give you that data. When this happens, people need to see how their contribution fits into the puzzle.

5. Share background knowledge. The more background they have, the easier it’ll be to find data that’s significant.

6. Existing communities already know how to interact and work. They’re better than starting from scratch.

7. The one percent rule – only about one percent of users will actively get involved in creating content, while 10 percent might be involved in peripheral activities like commenting.

Jay Rosen of NewAssignment.net is talking about some of the lessons learned from their first networked journalism experiment with Wired News, which focused on trends in crowdsourcing. He said there were six lessons, but he threw in a seventh for good measure.

1. Division of labor is key in distributed reporting projects. You need to think about what task, and what size of task, you expect people to do.

2. You have to get the motivations right. If you don’t understand participants’ motivations, you can’t figure out how to define the work.

3. Watch for rising coordination costs. More users=more costs, ie answering questions, giving out instructions, etc. You can get your project run into the ground by succeeding with lots of people.

4. If I go off and do something for you, now I have to come back and give you that data. When this happens, people need to see how their contribution fits into the puzzle.

5. Share background knowledge. The more background they have, the easier it’ll be to find data that’s significant.

6. Existing communities already know how to interact and work. They’re better than starting from scratch.

7. The one percent rule – only about one percent of users will actively get involved in creating content, while 10 percent might be involved in peripheral activities like commenting.