Sharing insights on ethical considerations from The Whistle’s process, Matt Mahmoudi participates in workshop held at UCL’s Institute of Health, on the topic ‘Can Big Data Help Migration Research?’ 

Matt Mahmoudi talks ‘contextual tech’ and the need to challenge current ICT4HR funding structures with Enrique Piracés (Human Rights Lab) on Wendy Betts’s (eyeWitness to Atrocities, IBA) panel titled ‘One Size Fits All? Taking global human rights apps to scale for use in wildly different local contexts’ at RightsCon 2019 in Tunis. 

May 2019: Ella McPherson gave a masterclass on ‘Truth, Post-truth and Technology’ and participated in a debate on ‘Tribal Truths and New Wisdom’ at the HowTheLightGetsIn festival in Hay-on-Wye.

Devika Ranjan presented about the End Everyday Racism campaign as part of the Equality Fringe the University College Union Congress in Harrogate, UK.

Ella McPherson presented on “Digital Fakery and Boundary-Work by the Civic Truth-Claims World” at the British Sociological Association Annual Conference in Glasgow.

Ella McPherson presented ‘Open Source Investigations and the Technology-Driven Knowledge Controversy in Human Rights Fact-Finding,’ at the Knowledge of Human Rights Workshop at the LSE.

Ella McPherson spoke on the ‘Legitimizing Anonymous Reporting’ panel at King’s College Women’s and Non-Binary Day.

Ella McPherson participated in the ‘Online Manipulation Roundtable’ for the Department for Digital, Media, Culture and Sport, convened by Cambridge’s Centre for Science and Policy.

Louis Slater, Matt Mahmoudi, Ella McPherson, and Chris Veness presented about The Whistle’s work as part of the ChainReact Consortium for the European Commission in Brussels, Belgium.

Isabel Guenette Thornton attended a meeting on using technology to address sexual violence as part of a working group of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. 

Devika Ranjan presented initial findings of the End Everyday Racism campaign at the Reporting Racism event hosted by the University of Cambridge’s Equality and Diversity Committee.

Ella McPherson spoke on social media verification and power at the ‘Just Who Do You Think You Are? Identity, Anonymity and Online Behaviour’ event hosted by Cambridge Wireless.

The Varsity of Cambridge publishes an article about the necessity of End Everyday Racism at the university.

We launched the End Everyday Racism campaign at the University of Cambridge. The launch event included speakers from the University and College Union on anti-racism, a panel discussion with students and academics about the necessity of End Everyday Racism, and a demonstration of the reporting form by Louis Slater and Isabel Guenette Thornton.

On behalf of The Whistle, Matt Mahmoudi attended RightsCon, this time in Toronto, to share takeaways from the collaboration with Global Rights Nigeria team. Sharing a panel with Alix Dunn (formerly ED at the Engine Room) and Radha Friedman (World Justice Project), we discussed the outcome of the Whistle’s first launch and urged the technology for human rights community to pay greater consideration to the cases in which ‘one size does not fit all’.

Ella McPherson spoke on ‘Trust, Technology and Truth Claims,’ at the Trust and Technology Initiative Launch at the University of Cambridge.

Ella McPherson gave a plenary lecture on ‘Digital Fakery and its Consequences’ at the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education’s Interdisciplinary Summer Programme. 

Together with Amnesty International, members of The Whistle team co-organized the ‘Digital Verification Corps Summit’ at the University of Cambridge.

Ella McPherson spoke on ‘Digital Fakery and its Consequences’ at the Hay Festival.

Ella McPherson presented on ‘Risk, Pluralism, and Digital Human Rights Reporting’ as well as on ‘Seeing and Disbelieving: Boundary-Work Between Fact and Digital Fakery in the Human Rights World’ at the International Studies Association Annual Convention.

Members of The Whistle team co-organized and participated in the Post-Truth Phenomenon Conference and Teach-Out. Given The Whistle and WikiRate’s core concern with generating facts so as to make truth-claims for advocacy and other purposes, it was highly useful to explore the post-truth terrain in which these projects operate through this conference. 

Members of The Whistle team co-organized and participated in the Post-Truth Phenomenon Conference and Teach-Out. 

Matt Mahmoudi and Isabel Guenette Thornton launched the Rape Is A Crime campaign at the University of Abuja in Nigeria with our community partners, Global Rights Nigeria. It was a highly anticipated event, featuring celebrity ambassadors who endorsed the campaign.

Ella McPherson spoke on ‘Digital Fakery and its Consequences’ at the University of Cambridge’s Sociology Seminar Series.

Newspapers and media outlets like The Guardian Nigeria, Newsday Nigeria, Genius Media, and others celebrated the launch of Rape Is A Crime. 

Whistle team members attended an expert meeting on digital image verification as part of a working group at the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) at the United Nations in Geneva. the results from the meeting led to an ongoing collaboration between the OHCHR and The Whistle to develop our competitive analyses and mapping the field reports into a live wiki of tools and their uses for practitioners. 

Ella McPherson participated on a panel on, ‘Is Social Media Undermining Democracy?’ at the Cambridge Alumni Festival.

Ella McPherson spoke on ‘The Politics of Social Media Verification’ at the ‘Excavating Media: Devices, Processes, Apparatuses’ conference at the University of Cambridge.

We presented an early draft of “No Tech, Low Tech, Slow Tech” to the Human Rights Research Network (HRRN) during their conference on activist scholarship in human rights in London.

Ella McPherson spoke on ‘Seeing and Disbelieving in the Human Rights World: Policing the Boundary between Fact and Fake News’ at the Symposium on Fake News at the University of Cambridge.

Ella McPherson participated in a panel on ‘Leveraging New Sources of Data for Human Rights Protection without Harming the Individual at RightsCon in Brussels.

The Whistle was featured as a case study on the University of Cambridge’s Research Impact page, about the process of verification in digital human rights reports.

In collaboration with the University of Essex, members of The Whistle team convened and presented at the Human Rights Practice in the Digital Age Workshop ath the University of Cambridge.

Rebekah Larsen spoke to the IPF about the necessity of digital human rights reporting and the challenges associated with verification, privacy, and communication. 

Ella McPherson spoke ‘On the ‘Fordifcation’ of Human Rights Witnessing: Humans as Machines, Machines as Humans’ at the International Studies Association Annual Convention in Baltimore.

We presented an early draft of “No Tech, Low Tech, Slow Tech” to the Human Rights Research Network (HRRN) during their conference on activist scholarship in human rights in London.

The Whistle was featured on the University of Cambridge website. The article discusses why digital verification is needed in the realm of human rights fact-finding.

Ella McPherson co-convened and participated in a panel on ‘Blood Data: The Ethics of our Big Data Society’ at the Cambridge Festival of Ideas.

Ella McPherson presented on ‘Risk and Digital Human Rights Reporting’ at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting in Philadelphia.

The Whistle took part in a workshop organized by the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), Cambridge. The workshop brought together technological initiatives which could potentially help those who live on less than $2 a day. 

At RightsCon 2016 in San Francisco, California, Whistle team members  presented our product design to a diverse audience of practitioners and leaders at NGOs and technology companies. This early feedback helped refine our designs in order to develop our first prototype, and in some cases led us to our first partners. 

Ella McPherson participated in a panel on ‘Hidden Voices: Censorship Through Omission’ at the Cambridge Festival of Ideas.

Ella McPherson presented on ‘The Ethics of Social Media Verification: Barriers to Pluralism in Verification Training Guides’ at the International Association for Media and Communication Research Conference in Montreal.

Ella McPherson participated on the ‘Media and the Search for Criminal Evidence’ panel at the ‘Role of Media in Transitional Justice’ workshop at the University of Oxford.

Ella McPherson spoke on ‘Digital Human Rights Reporting by Civilian Witnesses and the Verification Problem’ at the ‘Mobilisations, Changing Protest Cultures and Web 2.0 Technologies’ seminar, part of the ‘Social Movements and Media Technologies: Present Challenges and Future Developments ESRC Seminar Series’ at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Ella McPherson participated in the Expert Meeting on ‘ICTs and the Right to Life,’ convened by the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions at the University of Cambridge.

We hosted the Cambridge Human Rights Conference, in which we brought collaborators to Cambridge in a key research moment for us. We built relationships with international human rights organizations such as UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Center and Amnesty International’s Digital Verification Corps, that have become long-lasting partners and supporters.