Bridging Human Rights And Digital Rights In Romania

Grantee Project

The Context

In Romania, human rights groups and technical communities have only a limited history of collaboration. Their interactions have been ad-hoc with little understanding of how the other works. Moreover, some of the traditional human rights organisations have practical problems using digital rights tools for their own work.

The project

This project, presented by Asociația pentru Tehnologie și Internet (ApTI) for our 2015-2016 grant cycle, is to hold a series of meetings between human rights activists and techies in Romania to develop a better understanding of digital rights and to initiate a process of working together.

The meetings are envisioned as follows:

• The first two sessions by members of the technical community will cover topics such as decentralized networks, free software principles, open data, and maximizing the online work of human rights experts.
• The next two sessions by human rights experts will cover online free speech, privacy in the digital age, open licenses, copyright issues, and other human rights issues.
• Finally, there will be a human rights hackathon designed to identify, train and/or produce open software tools for activists.

All speakers and facilitators will act on a purely voluntary basis. All presentations will be available online under a Creative Commons attribution-only license, and all tools developed in the process will be available under free licenses, allowing for the projects to be easily adopted or continued by any interested group, irrespective of its field of activity. The added value of the project is that it ensures a stable and coordinated framework for both communities to interact, learn from each other, share ideas and collaborate on creative tools for digital engagement.

Contact

Visit ApTI’s website.