[bestbits] Advice on data viz / aggregation / coordination model for Human Rights & Internet Governance Tracking Platform

[James Gannon]

Hey Neils,

I would suggest working the other direction, define who your target demographics are first and then work back from there, until you know the medium of the viewer its ahrd to define tech and process to get to that end point.

For example if you are targeting a security engineer a nice git project with JSON is great, but if your targeting a lawyer with HR experience to get them involved its useless.

-James

-----Original Message-----
From: bestbits-request at lists.bestbits.net [mailto:bestbits-request at lists.bestbits.net] On Behalf Of Niels ten Oever
Sent: Friday, December 16, 2016 2:02 PM
To: BestBits <bestbits at lists.bestbits.net>
Subject: [bestbits] Advice on data viz / aggregation / coordination model for Human Rights & Internet Governance Tracking Platform

Hi all,

First of all I would like to thank you all for participating in mapping Internet Govnerance Processes at the IGF civil society pre-meeting. With the help of Mehwish everything got digitized, you can find the results here:

https://ethercalc.org/4lk9n5u15tpf

Secondly, I have a question for you all, where I would like to harnass your thinking on both vizualization, crowd-sourcing and datamodels.

As some of you might know most of our work is on Internet Governance and Human Rights. I am trying to link these (quite abstract and complex) technical, policy and legal issues to ensure that in all policy and Internet infrastructure development and operations human rights considerations are fully integrated.

We do this in the acronym soup of ICANN, IETF, IEEE, IGF, and the ITU.

And these are not all the forums, actually the amount of forums is expanding, because we see a lot of new technologies looking for a forum (such as the 3GPP for 5G development, and new platforms coming up for IoT as well, not even mentioning Trade Agreements).

I want to make the knowledge on these forums, topics, engagement methods, processes, meetings, more accessible for other people. I want this for three reasons:

1. I want to coordinate with other civil society actors who is covering what, and exchange information in a structured way

2. I want new people to find a way to get involved.

3. I want people to know about the relevance of these topics for their human rights

Over the past years we have done several things to achieve 2 and 3, mostly through sites like https://hrpc.io (and the movie Net of Rights you can find there https://hrpc.io/net-of-rights ), and to a lesser extend http://icannhumanrights.net (working on an overlay for that, full site should be done by the middle of January).

But now I want to create a more more meta-site/database that tracks all the forums, topics, processes, organizations that work on these topics in these processes, relevant documents, agenda of relevant meetings. And I want it to be very accessible.

There are some sites that are trying to do the same:
http://www.idgovmap.org/
http://www.idgovmap.org/map/
http://netgovmap.org/
https://graphcommons.com/graphs/31c36e58-a6ba-4772-928c-77d20a3714bb
https://map.netmundial.org/

But whereas these initiatives have a wealth of knowledge, they all do not really inspire much engagement, let alone an intuitive and inviting opportunity for other people to add information (which is crucial to keep it up-to-date and coordination).

I am currently thinking about using Jekyl because we could input data using Github, and we would not need to make weird (Wordpress) webforms to use / edit the data.

So here comes my question to you: how should I do this? All ideas in terms of tech (Git, Jekyl, Drupal, weird database software, d3, etc), processes (workshops, sprints, etc) and vizualization/ordering/organization are _very_ welcome.

Very curious to hear all your thoughts on this, because the only way in which this could be viable if this happens in collaboration with civil society actors working on these issues.

Cheers,

Niels

PS Of course this site and its contents would all be CC and GPLv3 (or very similar licenses), so your advice will never be in vain ;)

PS2 Feel free to forward this email to other people / lists that could have


--
Niels ten Oever
Head of Digital

Article 19
www.article19.org

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