WITNESS, Author at WITNESS Blog

A brief chat with The Elders for International Human Rights Day… If you haven’t come across The Elders already, you will soon – not least because we are partnering with them on their Every Human Has Rights campaign. 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 […] December 10, 2007
What really happened in the Burma internet “shut off”? [via John Palfrey] Next Monday, December 10, is International Human Rights Day, and it seems a good moment do our bit to make sure we don’t forget Burma. 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 […] December 7, 2007
Egypt videos back up at the Hub As I mentioned in my last post, a number of the Egypt police brutality videos at the Hub had been embedded from Wael Abbas’ YouTube account. When his account was suspended, these videos on the Hub (and everywhere else they were embedded) stopped playing. We’ve now managed to restore some of the key videos, and […] December 2, 2007
Wael Abbas’ YouTube channel suspended [UPDATED – 29 Nov 07] News just in from Hossam El-Hamalawy…: I’ve just received the following message from blogger and friend Wael Abbas… disaster: youtube disables my account claiming there were complaints about my police torture videos!!! This is un-bloody-believable. YouTube has just disabled probably the most important channel for the Egyptian blogosphere. Wael’s videos have been central in the […] November 22, 2007
Free To Speak (on BBC World Service) [Slight changes below, after a second look at the project…] For me, the 2002 series I Have A Right To… still represents a good benchmark for how the BBC’s World Service can knit together human rights resources of real and lasting value – and that others can use and build on. Now, the World Service […] November 20, 2007
NewAssignment.net’s 6 lessons Another nugget via Andy Carvin – I’d welcome comments on how this might look different when applied to the Hub: 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 […] November 15, 2007
Habermas, Rheingold and the Internet as public sphere The upcoming World Electronic Media Forum includes a session called “Explosion and Fracturing of Public Sphere“, featuring my old boss, James Deane (alongside Aida Opoku Mensah of the Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) and Sharmini Boyle of Young Asia TV). This Howard Rheingold piece (hat-tip, Ethan Z) is a must-read prior to that, particularly the […] November 15, 2007
Amnesty International's "Unsubscribe" campaign video Amnesty International’s UK section has released its Unsubscribe Campaign video, and it’s visceral and powerful. Andy Carvin has an interview with the team behind the videos here (as Andy says on his blog: “Be forewarned that it’s very unsettling, and not at all appropriate for children.“): November 15, 2007
Panel discussion today I am on a panel today at the Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival in New York City, along with Sara Pollack of YouTube, Michael Smolens of DotSub, Jenny Douglas and Silas Hagerty from KarmaTube, and Mike Wesch, who made The Machine Is Us/Ing Us (which gives its title to the panel) and Information R/evolution. […] November 11, 2007
WITNESS launches the HUB WITNESS has launched the HUB. This is the first participatory site devoted to human rights media. November 8, 2007
Take 60 seconds to watch this – and then pass it on See video on the Hub here. November 7, 2007
Fair use in UGC / Legal threats database The Citizen Media Law Project has come out with two excellent resources in the last week, both of which are going to be tools for the Hub: 1. “A report entitled “Fair Use Principles for User Generated Video Content” that sets out six guidelines designed to minimize the collateral damage that copyright enforcement efforts may […] November 7, 2007
Call for applications – GV's Rising Voices Grants David Sasaki, Outreach Director at Global Voices Online, just emailed to alert us to the call for applications for their Rising Voices Grants, which aim to help local citizen media outreach projects around the world. I helped assess the last round of applications, which included some exceptional ideas, and from what I hear, the bar’s […] November 6, 2007
Further thoughts on AMIA-Rochester A follow up to the Association of Moving Image Archivists conference two weeks ago: WITNESS Archive staff attended an thoughtful session entitled “Recording Retribution: Issues in the Curation of, and Access to, Actuality Footage of War and Atrocity.” Speakers included staff from the Imperial War Museum, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and Inkulla Media. Presentations […] October 12, 2007
Archives panel convenes for Rwanda, Yugoslavia tribunals Former ICTY and ICTR prosecutor Richard Goldstone is leading a panel tasked with determining how to ensure future preservation and access for the records of Rwanda and Yugoslavia war crimes tribunals. The archives of both courts comprise – so far – millions of documents and tens of thousands of audio and video recordings. More at: […] October 10, 2007