Human Rights Media Central Workshop Summary Report

This document is a report of a workshop held at Carnegie Mellon University on July 29-30, 2015 to discuss the current state (and future) of the use of video and images in human rights advocacy, accountability and fact-finding. It begins with a brief background note, and then provides a summary of the some of the main points that emerged during two days of conversation. We hope that participants will provide us with additional questions, issues and challenges that ought to be added to the ones that we included. The third section includes a compendium of current projects in the human rights media domain along with a description of their workflows and component tools. The fourth section is comprised of ideas and opportunities for moving forward that emerged during discussion. It includes both short-term, incremental steps to improve what already exist (i.e., low-hanging fruit), and medium and long-term proposals that will require more significant outlays of time and resources. Finally, we include a references and resources section that serves as a bibliography and a list of tools that participants currently use on a regular basis. This report is meant to be a living document and common log of the conversations held during the workshop. Its main purpose is to promote further dialogue as well as to enhance the group’s ability to device projects that can be moved forward collaboratively. We welcome your feedback and request that you send us suggestions for making this report more useful (especially by alerting us to resources and tools that we may have missed) via email or through Google Doc’s commenting function.