Janet Haven

Joi Ito notes that he's just joined the board of Witness, an organization that supports the use of video as a tool for human rights advocacy. This is great news: Witness is one of my favorite organizations, and (full disclosure) one whose work the Open Society Institute supports. Witness is now looking to expand their work from traditional film-making (using video cameras) to including more participatory, pedestrian tools and media -- videos made on digital cameras and cellphones, for instance-- which increasingly, these days, is the way activists and witnesses are able capture the dirtier work of repressive governments as it's happening. (For a recent example of the power of handheld media, see these six cell-phone videos of Belarussian protests in Minsk over the repression of opposition parties in their upcoming election.)

Gillian Caldwell, the director of Witness, notes in a recent interview with David Pogue in the New York Times that "our primary intention is not to capture human rights abuses in action, although that has on occasion happened. Instead, most of our footage highlights the aftermath." Capturing the aftermath of human rights abuses is vital and powerful, and Gillian absolutely right -- it's hard to get someone with a video camera to be in exactly the right place at the right time. However, it's a lot more likely that you'll get someone with a cell phone equipped with a camera at the right place at the right time, and I'm delighted that Witness is now thinking about how they can harness this kind of media to create change. Joi Ito is a great person to help move this part of their work forward.

The other good news is that a number of other organizations are also thinking about the power of participatory media in a human rights context. Three of them, EngageMedia of Australia, the Participatory Culture Foundation in Massachusetts, and OneWorld TV, are currently engaged in video platform projects that may actively complement Witness' vision for a web-based community of human rights abuse documentation. I'm a big fan of organizations working towards similar goals exchanging information, creating shared standards, and developing joint projects. If synergies exist between Witness' vision and some of the other work going on in this area, mores the better. I'm looking forward to seeing where this goes.