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| Following are some questions that are frequently asked about HRDAG. Please feel free to contact us in the event you have a question that does not appear in this list.
Q: What is the HRDAG mission?A: The HRDAG (Human Rights Data Analysis Group) is a team of people dedicated to assisting human rights projects around the world use information management systems and rigorous scientific and statistical tools to gather and report large-scale human rights abuses. Our mission is to help local groups gather, organize and evaluate information on human rights abuses to further historical truth, clarification and reconciliation.
Q: How is HRDAG organized?A: HRDAG is a project of the Benetech Initiative, a non-profit venture that provides social benefits by harnessing the power of technology. Benetech provides technical and management assistance allowing HRDAG to fulfill its mission.
Q: Who uses HRDAG?A: HRDAG partners with human rights groups from around the world to help build evidence-based arguments in the area of human rights. HRDAG team members have worked with seven truth commissions, various tribunals, United Nations missions, and many civil society groups on five continents. Refer to our project page for more information about some of the projects we have supported.
Q: How does the HRDAG team know what these partners need?A: Because each project is different, we work in close collaboration with our partners on each project. We work with the project's strategic leadership, listening to their debates and focusing analysis on their questions. Sometimes we offer training, such as bringing our partners' technical staff to Palo Alto to refine our shared process, practice, and technology. As a project evolves, we regularly send our consultants into the field to ensure partners are correctly applying these processes, practices, and technologies. We also verify our customers are using the most recent software versions and are correctly using the applications.
Q: How is HRDAG funded?A: Since starting in 1991, HRDAG has worked with the partners on each project to establish a budget that is scaled appropriately for that project. Each project typically has donors that assist in funding the specific project, and HRDAG works with our partners to craft a proposal to their donor. Because each project involves various initiatives (for example, consulting services during the design phase and engineering work during the development phase), fundraising activities may be required for each of these initiatives. We also invest considerable resources in ongoing technical development and research. Our current donors include the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Open Society Institute.
Q: Does HRDAG accept government funding?A: At this time, HRDAG has not accepted funding directly from any government. This could change at some point in the future. Some of our partners receive funds from U.S. and other government sources.
Q: What does HRDAG provide to its partners?A: HRDAG offers technical assistance based on many years of practical experience applying information technology and statistical reasoning to human rights questions. We start with a partner's ideas and build quantitative scientific analysis of human rights abuses to find ways to address those ideas. Even though we develop software programs, we are not a software production company. We share our knowledge to our partners so that they know more than before they started with HRDAG.
Q: What kind of human rights violations doe HRDAG document?A: While there are many different types of human rights violations, HRDAG's focus and emphasis is on violations of civil and political rights.
Q: Where does the information come from?A: HRDAG relies on information from many sources. Our previous and current projects have used individual testimonies, legal depositions, probability surveys, administrative records from morgues and cemeteries, exhumation reports, operational records from a prison, career information on military and police officers, eyewitness interviews, and official customs and immigration records. HRDAG designs specific kinds of analysis to find patterns in whatever kind of information is available.
Q: Is HRDAG an activist organization?A: No, we are non-partisan. We do not take sides in any kind of military or political dispute and we do not support the advocacy of any particular government or policy. However, we are not neutral because we are always in favor of human rights. HRDAG supports the promotion of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
Q: How do science and technology help human rights?A: Science can help make arguments about human rights events that are free of political distortion and that can be replicated by other people to verify the findings. Evidence-based arguments about human rights violations that use appropriate technology, well-understood statistical procedures, and scientific methods are able to withstand criticism from detractors.
Q: How do we know that HRDAG software is safe sourced to use?A: Every piece of software we produce is open for our partners to review and critique. We make every line of code we write available and encourage our partners to find ways to review our software. If a partner doesn't have in-house expertise, we encourage the partner to find a local programmer they trust to perform the review.
Q: What does open source/free software have to do with HRDAG?A: HRDAG creates free software, which uses open data standards, in an effort to promote freedom and in the hope that people will share other software with them. HRDAG's definition of free software is adapted from the Free Software Foundation's explanation.
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© Copyright 2002-2007 Beneficent Technology,
Inc. (The Benetech Initiative) The Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) applies information technology solutions and statistical techniques to help human rights advocates build evidence-based arguments. |
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