RightsCon Tunis 2019

The Knowledge Hub Framework: A new tool to automate open source research for more efficient human rights fact-finding (Swansea University)

Speakers: Yvonne McDermott Rees, Riza Batista-Navarro, and Victoria Ikoro

This session will demonstrate a prototype of the ‘Knowledge Hub Framework’ (KHF), a tool under development as part of the OSR4Rights project. The KHF is a set of core tools for automatically gathering data from social media, news feeds, and direct sources, and for carrying out specific analytical tasks. These analytical tasks include: comparing documents for semantic similarity, identifying place names within free text so they can be located on a map, and checking the origins and assigning weightings to data sources based on crosschecks and historical accuracies. This tool is intended to facilitate the discovery stage of a human rights investigation, where investigators identify huge quantities of potentially relevant content.

An open source alternative to online office suites (Greenhost)

Speakers: Maarten de Waard

NGOs face a dizzying array of bad options for their communications and information technology needs. Many of the core systems on which many groups rely are subject to levels of tracking and surveillance that are not compatible with the goals and principles of these organizations. Besides tracking and surveillance, by using online services like the Google Suite, Slack and Dropbox, they are sharing their precious data with big commercial parties. This first part of this session gives an overview of the alternatives that are available to these organisations. The focus lies on chat, file storage and collaborative document editing. All applications discussed in this session are open source and can be hosted on self owned infrastructure. With running applications on self owned infrastructure a new challenge arises: somebody needs to keep the software up to date, configure it to work together and make sure people can log into the it. This is where OpenAppStack comes in. The second part of the session describes how OpenAppStack solves these problems.

NEMO an Open-Source Data Collection System for the Future (The Carter Center)

Speakers: Zied Abaoub

The main goal of this session is to demonstrate the open-source, NEMO data collection tool. NEMO can be used to collect data from multiple sources (SMS, android app or online) and facilitates real time reporting. NEMO has been used successfully for election observation (ELMO), human rights reporting, public health reporting, human rights alert and protection, academic research, and program monitoring and evaluation in Asia, Africa, and the Americas.