Susannah Vila
Mapping Violent Incidents Where There Are Many
What’s the point? To start - building awareness, visualizing patterns, providing data for different kinds of advocacy, and possibly even deterrence (although that’s a stretch). I’m working on a project to do this in a data sensitive environment (there’s lots of surveillance). Have a relevant experience? Get in touch.
Liberationtech: How the Next Generation Diaspora* Should Be Built to Help High-Risk Activists
After leaving Diaspora*, Liberation Technology’s Yosem Companys discusses what would be necessary to create an alternative social network for human rights defenders, issue advocates and other who must be concerned with security. The huge challenge that any new online space has to overcome, of course, is competing with Facebook’s network effect. Here’s liberationtech:
An online privacy activist recently asked me: Suppose you were to build the next-generation Diaspora* — i.e., a secure, private, and decentralized social network — how would you go about it?
The question is an important one, especially considering that many projects preceded Diaspora*…
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.
Susannah works at the intersection of social change and new technologies.
