Cameras as Evidence: What does it mean for Ushahidians?

Deep in the mountains of Italy, Centro d'Ompio, we sat in a circle brainstorming Cameras as Evidence. What would it take to collect a good and actionable citizen report using photos or video? Lead by Chris Michael of Witness, we discussed and brainstormed. The Witness team and some of the participants have amazing experience in building human rights cases. Inspired by the beautiful setting for Info Activism Camp, we collectively pulled out all the stops to consider how we can help activists and citizen reporters create valuable and usable content for their mandates. While our session aim was not tool specific (e.g.Ushahidi), it remains very applicable for Ushahidians: our software, our community. (Photo by Heather Leson, Venice Biennale. Art by Magdalena Campos-Pons)

3.0, Rich media content: Categories and custom forms

Some Ushahidi deployers use the power of rich media content, including video to give voice and document their projects. As we journey down the 3.0 road, we are thinking about how to improve. The path to building 3.0 is very much considering how should categories be used and how can we make custom forms as flexible as possible. See our current discussion about the future of categories on the developers mailing list. This is a critical juncture, so you input will help us serve you better. People are using both categories and custom forms to drive their data colletions missions. We've seen items that could be either a category or a custom form item. To be honest, I think that sometimes people use categories as work-around because custom forms have sometimes been buggy or are hard to use. I will say that I am grappling with the different Ushahidi users - those who want to collect and analysis data and those who simply want to file a report. As you can imagine, this is a balance. Our community has discussed too many categories, very unclean/unclear data in the past. If you are collecting videos and/or photos as part of an evidence-based project, here are some of the recommended data points to consider:

Title (useful)

Description

Location/GeoCode

Time and Date

Time point Highlights

Reference or corroborating information

License (use, consent, eg. creative commons)

Chain of Custody

visual geolocation (land marks)

clock, timeline, length

context - before and after

violations

weapons - materials

identification of people in footage, groups involved

other contextual videos

verbal information - context, language

security concerns

other filmakers

translator - references

timeline

details, serial #, clothes, id, tattoos, wounds

length of video

filmaker name and contact details

device details

surrounding scenes

locations of all involved

original video

bitrot - is it playable

posting information - all, originals, copies

missing clips, edited?

transcribed?

file format

resolution

frame rate

livestreaming?

who has it been sent to, who has the files, where to share and not to share purpose of video? - eg. change situation, document, share, influence, action

Unique id

categorization by file

sound quality, notes about sound (eg. guns, shouting, tone)

Alright, that list makes me contemplate: how are we going to incorporate this without scaring off reporters? How can we make video useful as part of the map mandate? What do you think? What is missing? Do you think we should have a suggested custom form for video reports?

Some resources

Ushahidi Toolkits Witness Toolkits Thanks to Tactical Tech Collective for bringing us together to collaborate.