RightsCon Tunis 2019

Experimental Methodology for Anonymizing Oral History Testimonies (Bassel Khartabil Free Culture Fellowship)

Speakers: Majd Al-shihabi

Cultures have used storytelling to transfer crucial knowledge through generations for centuries, even millennia. In this miniature design workshop session, we will critically evaluate the possibility of using AI to "fuzzify" modern oral history testimonies. An experimental application of this methodology would be to to anonymize identifying information mentioned in testimonies collected for the Syrian Oral History Archive (SOHA). The output of this session will be inserted as an experimental feature in the MASRAD.org open source platform for archiving oral history testimonies.

Connected but Not Connecting: Using Tech to Fight Division & Build Inclusion (Soliya)

Speakers: Dorra Amara and Myriam Labidi

Soliya's tech demo will introduce participants to a platform that promotes civic spaces through virtual exchange, which is the practice of combining technology and facilitation to enable face-to-face and transformative dialogue between people of diverse countries, socioeconomic backgrounds, and perspectives. We will cover how technology, though it has often been used to seed division and has contributed to the decline of civility in difficult conversations, can instead be leveraged for the opposite purpose—bringing the next generation of leaders together across differences and cultures to listen to and be heard by their global peers. Participants will learn how this may be done, how technology can be used to counter the polarization that it has often been accused of strengthening. We will also engage the audience in an activity that we use in our virtual exchange programming to elicit self-awareness around how identity and power dynamics can affect engagement across difference. We will then pose critical thinking questions including: What patterns did you see in what people gave up and what they kept? Looking at all of the different identities in this group, what conversations would be difficult among us? How did it feel to ‘give up’ parts of you?

Bridge: Collaborative Translation Tool (Meedan)

Speakers: Wafaa Heikal

On both the global and national levels, audiences are increasingly multilingual and hungry for reporting and engagement in their own languages. At the same time, non-English content is underrepresented online. New languages for your organization represent new audiences and new forms of engagement. Bridge offers your organization an opportunity to reach communities in new ways, directly through social media and messaging apps. Organizations that have used Bridge to support their social media outreach in other languages have seen a measurable increase in followers and engagement online--by as much as 50%, in some cases.