We raise interest!

I’m proud to announce that Amnesty International has signed a letter of intent, pledging among other things to host a development workshop in London in Q4 2014 to elicit their needs and requirements to develop and run PI; share with us their crowdsourcing expertise; help test first prototypes; identify possible pilots and assist running them; and once PI reaches operational maturity and conforms to Amnesty’s needs and requirements to make use of it in pursuit of their mandate.

The Liberia Peacebuilding Office has equally agreed to be referred to as one of PI’s partners and started preparing to host a similar workshop with their end-users  in Monrovia. This workshop which is planned for the first week of September may be postponed, however, depending on the evolution of the Ebola virus in the region.We all hope it will soon get under control and no more lives will be lost.

A third workshop will be held in Delft to elicit the needs and requirements of our partner Free Press Unlimited. We are thankful to our partner the Delft University of Technology, to be willing to host it, also sometime in Q4 2014.

Finally, we are also looking at organizing a fourth development workshop in Geneva with interested international organizations, among others the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). We remain confident that we’ll manage to bring UNOCHA, IOM and the OHCHR on board as well.

Also, we are invited to present PI at the Big Data for Peace Summer School 2014 on 20 August at the Leiden University Peace Lab Informatics and to speak at the Forum of Geographic Information for Relief and Development in Chambéri, France in September 2014. Check us out!

Project overview:

The Humanitarian Innovation Fund is funding People’s Intelligence (PI), which intends to automate the collection of relevant human rights and humanitarian information from hard-to-access areas and verify it using crowd-sourcing and “dumb” mobile phones. Once developed, PI will address many of the shortcomings of current documentation initiatives using crowd-sourcing: lack of relevant and quality information, no or limited assessment of the reliability of the sources and the credibility of the collected information, reliance on the Internet, lack of feedback loops and limited empowerment of those reporting information. To solve these problems, PI will makes use of low cost GSM technology (e.g. SMS, USSD and voice) to establish a conversation with victims and witnesses of an incident to collect and guarantee relevant and quality information.