WITNESS, Author at WITNESS Blog

Measuring Impact in Human Rights Work: A Look at WITNESS’s Dashboard WITNESS has just published it's annual performance dashboard covering 2010. We publish a dashboard twice a year that shows how we measure the impact of our work, both in qualitative and quantitative terms. This is important to the entire WITNESS team since we want to be sure that our efforts and passion travel in the right direction. March 21, 2011
Communities in Rio de Janeiro Blame Olympics for Evictions Communities in the West Zone (Zona Oeste) of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil have been earmarked for eviction and removal by the City Hall in preparation for the 2016 Olympics. Recently, at least two of them, 'Vila Harmonia' and 'Vila Autódromo', have witnessed the presence of tractors, government staff and police. March 7, 2011
The Rodney King Video: 20 Years Later Exactly 20 years have passed since the beating of Rodney King by the LAPD was captured by George Holliday, a bystander, on a hand-held video camera. Millions around the world saw the footage. This incident was the impetus for the creation of WITNESS. March 3, 2011
Video Dispatch from All Out, a New Global LGBT Campaign At no other time have global LGBT issues been making headline news so frequently—from the continuing controversy over the proposed “Anti-Gay” bill in Uganda, to the marriage equality law recently passed in Argentina, to the historic repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell in the United States. The struggle for LGBT equality is the civil rights movement of our time—a movement that is increasingly global. January 6, 2011
My year in review… It was only a little over a year ago that I joined WITNESS. I was freelancing and one of the assignments I had was working with Matisse, our Communications Manager, to help produce web pages and the e-newsletter for the organization. December 21, 2010
A TED Conference Dedicated to Women and Men? Last week I attended the first ever TEDWomen conference in Washington DC, held in partnership with the Paley Center for Media. The main question underlying TEDWomen was “How are women and girls shaping the future?” December 15, 2010
Mike Volpi Shares Why He Supports WITNESS As a new member of the board, I am incredibly excited about being able to contribute to WITNESS and its cause. WITNESS is an innovative organization at heart. The notion of using video to raise awareness and create action around human rights issues in the world was novel when WITNESS started – and even today, the organization continues to leverage technology to create and deliver it’s messages to people around the world – especially decision-makers. November 26, 2010
Reimagining the Archive: Rethinking Archival Practice and Theory The tone was set on Friday evening with Rick Prelinger’s animated keynote presentation, in which he spoke about the dynamic nature of moving image archives as sites of creation, participation, artistic practice, and activism rather than as places where content goes to die. November 19, 2010
Kate Doyle: “Archivists Can Be At the Heart of Accountability and Justice” On October 27, the UNESCO World Day for Audiovisual Heritage, I spoke with Kate Doyle, Senior Analyst of U.S. policy in Latin America at the National Security Archive (NSA), about the Guatemala Project, the notion of the activist archivist and how archives can advocate for open societies. October 29, 2010
Archiving Practices Strengthen Human Rights Video Online My name is Taz Morgan. I’m a new intern at the WITNESS Media Archive and was able to attend the two-day Open Video Conference last weekend. There were a few panels dedicated to the discussion of open video specifically in relation to archives, such as the session Yvonne wrote about a few days ago. October 8, 2010
Pump Up Your End-of-Year Fundraising Using Online Video We've teamed up with See3 Communications, the interactive media and marketing experts for nonprofit and causes, for a series in how to use video creatively and effectively for fundraising online. We're pleased to host the first post in this series, authored by See3 CEO Michael Hoffman. October 6, 2010
Are There Enough Women Who Tech? When our blog editor asked me to write a blog post about Tech Crunch’s recent rant by Michael Arrington about women in tech and the numerous responses, such at Allyson Kapin’s post on FastCompany’s blog, I immediately thought about another recent blog I had read on Slate.com by Dahlia Lithwick about the U.S. Supreme Court now having three women titled, “The Female Factor.” September 15, 2010
Celebrate World Humanitarian Day By Jenni Wolfson Today is World Humanitarian Day. What does that mean? It’s a day to raise awareness of what it means to be a humanitarian aid worker and provide a window into that world. World Humanitarian Day also honours those who have been injured or killed in their work. It was in fact designated […] August 19, 2010
Video Report on Reproductive Rights in the Philippines The Center for Reproductive Rights released a powerful video to accompany its report Forsaken Lives: The Harmful Impact of the Philippine Criminal Abortion Ban. August 3, 2010
What We’re Reading+Watching, July 26-30, 2010 This week we’re sharing ‘tweeted’ bits of news discussing copyrights issues, video of residents in China protesting a land seizure, the death of Khale Said possibly being related to the uploading of a video, the ACLU letter to Lindsay Lohan and how video can be contextualized to fit a news networks' needs. The last item is from our Board of Directors, Mallika Dutt, who is the founder and executive director of Breakthrough. July 28, 2010