Susannah Vila

Technology and Human Rights

Here’s a good write-up of my panel at the Personal Democracy Forum this June, written by The Reboot’s Emma Gardner, who was in the audience (thanks for joining Emma, although why anyone went to our panel over Cory Doctorow’s is a mystery ;). She writes:

In a globalized world, technology originally designed to solve a particular problem for a subset of people in the US (say, allowing college students to stay in touch and flirt through wall posts, photos, and pokes) very well could spread to another part of the world and be used for a completely different purpose (say, organizing protests, demonstrations, and movements in the Middle East). Given this, how can software developers, technology enthusiasts, and designers better anticipate and design for unexpected use-cases? How can we come together to evaluate the impact of our decisions on the lives of people throughout the world?

How human rights organizers can and should use new social platforms is a important question, and one that I hope to be closer to answering after spending some time this summer working with activists in the Middle East and North Africa as well as Southeast Asia. 

10 months ago
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