New Tactics dialogue on human rights documentation

Documenting Violations: Choosing the Right Approach is an online dialogue being facilitated by New Tactics in Human Rights, beginning today and running through February 5, 2010. From NT:

“This dialogue will feature practitioners that have developed database systems to document human rights violations, organizations on the ground documenting violations, and those that are training practitioners on how to choose the right approach and system for their documentation. We will look at options for ways to collect, store and share your human rights data safely and effectively. If you are trying to figure out the best documenting system for your work – or if you have found something that works well, please join us for this conversation to share your questions, ideas, resources and stories!”

Featured resource practitioners participating in this dialogue include:

Vijaya Tripathi and Megan Price work with the Martus database developed by Benetech Agnethe Olesen, Daniel D’Esposito and [...]

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Haiti earthquake – video and resources

We’re not tracking the Haiti earthquake ourselves, but here are a few links to those who are…

- CitizenTube’s rolling playlist of Haiti videos on YouTube

- The NYT’s list of those tracking the earthquake on Twitter

- Reuters Alertnet’s live blog

- Reuters’ own live updates

- Washington Post’s live blog

If you know of other great resources, especially sources of video, please add them in the comments.

Google unmuzzles itself in China

Google has received brickbats a-plenty for its stance in China, where, in order to be permitted to operate by the Chinese government, the search company agreed to censor particular “sensitive” search results – Tiananmen, Dalai Lama, democracy, human rights, and so on.  Last night, Google announced, via a blog post from its senior vice-president of corporate development and chief legal officer, David Drummond, that in mid-December it had been the target of a sophisticated online attack originating in China aimed at perhaps as many as 20 companies, that resulted both in the theft of intellectual property, and in a largely unsuccessful attempt to compromise the GMail accounts of Chinese human rights activists (though it also appears that others working on human rights in China have had their accounts compromised through other means).

“These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit [...]

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'Archives Power' virtual reading group

Archives Power

I’ve mentioned the book Archives Power: Memory, Accountability and Social Justice by Rand Jimerson on this blog on a few occasions but haven’t had a chance to post about it at any length.

Luckily, Kate Theimer of ArchivesNext is convening a group read of the book beginning January 11, the site for which is here: http://readingarchivespower.wordpress.com/. Check it out for more details, including Kate’s proposed schedule and discussion format, and for comments from Jimerson, who will also participate. There are already over 50 readers signed up to take part. Should be fun.

- Grace