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)
(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)