ICT for Humanity
Information & Communication Technology for Human Rights, Humanitarian action, and social change
The Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference (also known as rightscon.org) took place in San Francisco on October 25th-26th 2011, and brought together some of the world’s leading technology companies, academics and policymakers to discuss how the high-tech sector can better manage the human rights implications of new technologies.
During the Conference the participants crafted the Silicon Valley Standard, which sets out a series of best practices to guide the activities of technology companies. Read those guidelines here:
“One of the objectives of the Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference is the creation of a Silicon Valley Standard (SVS). This is a principled statement incorporating the issues discussed at the 2011 Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference. The document includes 15 principles based on the 15 workshop topics covered at the conference.
The document is designed to complement other existing frameworks and uses the international human rights framework as its foundation. These principles served as a useful basis for discussion during the panels and represent a standard, which we hope the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector will use after the conference.
1. Technology and Revolutions: Technology companies play an increasingly important role in enabling and supporting the end user’s capacity to exercise his or her rights to freedom of speech, access to information, and freedom of association. ICT companies should respect those rights in their operations and also encourage governments to protect human rights through appropriate policies, practices, legal protections, and judicial oversight.
2. On Human Rights: In both policy and practice, technology companies should apply human rights frameworks in developing best practices and standard operating procedures. This includes adhering to John Ruggie’s Protect, Respect, and Remedy framework outlined in the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.
3. Frontline Lessons from Other Sectors: Technology companies should look to the innovative examples and incorporate important lessons from other sectors, such as the apparel and extractive industries. The experiences of these sectors can and should guide them as they develop their human rights policies. These must be reflected in their operating practices in a transparent and accountable manner.
4. On Internet Regulation: To ensure innovation and the protection of human rights, internet regulation should only take place where it facilitates the ongoing openness, quality, and integrity of the internet and/or where it enables or protects users’ ability to freely, fully, and safely participate in society. To achieve this end, it is critical that ICT corporations engage in multistakeholder dialogue.
5. Human Rights by Design: During the research, development, and design stages, technology companies should anticipate how and by whom their products and services will be used. Developing a human rights policy and engaging in due diligence at the earliest stages helps companies prevent crises, limit risk, and enable evidence-based assessment of company activities and reporting.
6. Encryption of Web Activity: Effective internet security is essential to ensuring freedom of speech, privacy, and the right to communicate. Technology companies must provide a basic level of security (e.g., HTTPS and its improvements) to their users by default and resist bans and curtailments of the use of encryption.
7. Getting Practical: Technology companies should implement human rights-respecting policies and practices in their day-to-day operations. These companies should utilize multi-stakeholder and cross-sector dialogues to review challenges faced within their markets with a view to improve their best practices.
8. Coding for Human Rights: Recognizing the human rights implications in code, engineers, developers, and programmers should ensure that technology is used in the exercise of fundamental freedoms, and not for the facilitation of human rights abuses. Technology companies should facilitate regular dialogue between engineers, executive leadership, and civil society to ensure that all parties are informed of the potential uses and abuses of their technologies.
9. Social Networking: Social networking platforms are both increasingly important to their users’ capacity to communicate and associate online and are most used when customers trust the service’s providers. When companies prioritize the rights of their customers, it is good for the long-term sustainability of their business, their brand, and their bottom line.
10. Intermediary Liability: In an era of computer-mediated communications, freedom of speech, association, and commerce increasingly depend on internet intermediaries (e.g., broadband service providers, web hosting companies). These intermediaries should not be required to determine the legality of, or held liable for, the content they host.
11. Legal Jurisdiction in a Borderless Virtual World: To foster the continued growth of an open and interconnected internet, technology companies should work alongside governments and civil society to ensure that users’ rights are protected to the fullest extent possible. Governmental mandates that infringe upon freedom of expression and other human rights should be interpreted so as to minimize the negative impacts of these rules and regulations.
12. Visual Media and Human Rights: Technology companies should pay special attention to the unique human rights challenges of visual media technologies and content — especially on issues such as privacy, anonymity, consent, and access.
13. Social Media in Times of Crisis: Technology companies should resist efforts to shut down services and block access to their products, especially during times of crisis when open communications are critical. Blanket government surveillance of corporate networks should be resisted. Moreover, the burden of proof for privacy-invasive requests should lie with law enforcement authorities, who should formally, through court processes based on probable cause and rule of law, request a warrant for each individual whose information they would like to access.
14. Privacy: Technology companies should incorporate adequate privacy protections for users by default. Furthermore, technology companies should resist over-board requests from governments to reveal users’ information, disclose no more information about their users than is legally required, and inform their users so that they can choose to legally respond to these requests. Furthermore, technology companies should be transparent about how user data is collected, processed, and protected — including disclosures of unauthorized access to user data.
15. Mobile and Telcos: Telecommunications companies must protect their users’ fundamental human rights, including support for the protection of human rights in their operating licenses, and ensure that the free flow of communication is not curtailed or interfered with, even in times of crisis.”
The next in the series Tech@State concerns Open Source. It would be interesting to engage with the idea of openness in light of the controversies and contexts wherein transparency and participation seemingly are at odds with US Foreign Policy.
““We recognize that the world’s information infrastructure will become what we and others make of it.” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Remarks on Internet Freedom
Tech@State: Open Source is a conference designed to convene those with an interest in government use of Open Source technologies and those who can envision an “Open Source future” that supports improvements to the world’s information infrastructure. Whether your interest is policy, code, data sharing or communication, you’ll find the right people in attendance to help you get things done. Save the date now, and join us on February 11, 2011.
The Open Source movement has opened a window for rapid development and implementation of technological solutions in the government space, but there are unresolved issues. How do we address procurement, accessibility, and security issues? Do policies written for other forms of technology apply in this space? What standards are in place for developing Open Source projects and documenting them? What can the larger government community learn from organizations that are already using Open Source technologies, and how might they use them better? And, ultimately, what is the role of government in creating a healthy community for open source innovation?
To develop a more thoughtful information infrastructure for our global community, we need to collaborate across governments, communities and networks. Important initiatives like Civil Society 2.0 and Open Government are taking advantage of Open Source technologies to enable innovation, coordinate communities, and engage citizens in the United States and around the world. Organizations and individuals are developing projects that rely on Open Source technologies to rapidly respond to disasters, provide reliable citizen services, and design information resource collectives. Discussing Open Source at Tech@State is a natural means of gathering more collaborators and methods around today’s most pressing multinational issues.”
“Mobile Voices wins UN information technology award
Mobile Voices/Voces Móviles, the microblogging project designed in collaboration with USC Annenberg and the Institute of Popular Education of Southern California, or IDEPSCA, has won a United Nations-sponsored World Summit Award for innovative mobile applications.
“Today, we fulfilled where we said that Mobile Voices is a window to the universe where the voices of those who for centuries have been excluded can be heard,” read a statement prepared by the IDEPSCA Popular Communication team, the group of day laborers and household workers who developed the Mobile Voices system.
Mobile Voices is an open-source platform that lets mobile phone users post text, photo and video content to a publicly available website. Day laborers and household workers across Los Angeles, as well as members of the Los Angeles Community Action Network (LACAN), have used the interface to report news, distribute information and share stories about their work, lives, and their points of view.
The awards are given by the United Nations in recognition of online and mobile content that promotes global digital access and inclusion in the communication revolution, especially in developing countries and underserved communities. More than 420 products from nearly 100 countries were considered for awards.
Mobile Voices is one of five winners in the “m-Inclusion & Empowerment” category, targeted to those apps that “support integration within the global information society.” Other winners in the category included a German application providing resources for handicapped people and an SMS-integrated program linking remote communities in Guatemala.
The winning project teams will receive their awards in December at the World Summit Award Mobile Winners’ Gala, Conference and Expo in Abu Dhabi. In addition to an awards ceremony, the three-day conference brings together global leaders in mobile application development for networking and knowledge exchange.
Bar said the award was “a great honor for everyone who has worked hard to make VozMob a success — IDEPSCA and LACAN workers, community organizers, Annenberg students and open-source programmers.”"
Random Hacks of Kindness is holding a their third “hackathon” on Dec 4th and 5th, 2010. Hackathons are “a global gathering of hackers in many locations around the world, coming together in real time for a marathon weekend of coding around problems relating to natural disaster risk and response.”
“Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) is all about using technology to make the world a better place by building a community of innovation. RHoK brings software engineers together with disaster relief experts to identify critical global challenges, and develop software to respond to them. A RHoK Hackathon event brings together the best and the brightest hackers from around the world, who volunteer their time to solve real-world problems.”
RHoK was developed by a team from the funded by Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, NASA and The World Bank.
“Sustainable, Affordable Support to Stressed Populations
TIDES is a research project dedicated to open-source knowledge sharing to promote sustainable support to populations under severe stress—post-war, post-disaster, or impoverished, in foreign or domestic contexts, for short-term or long-term (multi-year) operations. The project provides reach-back “knowledge on demand” to decision-makers and those working in the field. It helps catalyze public-private, whole-of-government, and trans-national approaches to encourage unity of action among diverse organizations where there is no unity of command. TIDES maintains this website, where anyone in the project’s network (called STAR-TIDES) can publish their work for feedback and critique.”
“This research project is coordinated at the Center for Technology and National Security Policy (CTNSP) at the National Defense University (NDU), which is part of the Department of Defense.”
http://www.endslaverynow.com/newundergroundrailroad/about.html
Created in the autumn of 2008, End Slavery Now (ESN) is a charitable organization based in Washington DC. Their mission is to utilize the widespread capabilities of the Internet to help fight against human trafficking. To do this, they have created an aggregate website that both serves to inform the public about trafficking while being a host to a bevy of links and information in how to get involved.
“Our purpose is to support the work of grassroots activists and anti-trafficking organizations, and to grow and advance the anti-trafficking movement, by consolidating and sharing resources, best practices, and events; and by promoting their work through various social media channels and free listings in the New Underground Railroad™.
ESN leverages the power of the Internet combined with database technology to empower members of the anti-trafficking movement to efficiently coordinate their efforts to combat slavery; to share information with partners and stakeholders; to coordinate grassroots efforts through social networking; and to make meaningful contributions in the anti-trafficking movement.”
http://www.endslaverynow.com/?goto=main§ion=about
Their website consists of: an up-to-date global news feed (as of 10/5/10), a self-published blog, photo and video galleries, a basic overview of the human trafficking situation, a global calendar of anti-trafficking events, governmental and organizational links that are anti-trafficking based, and additional ways to keep receiving updates via email to social networking tools.
