Or looking for the intersection of human rights and maps
You can read this post in Spanish here.
Some time ago, when I was part of Global Voices, a global citizens’ platform, I was invited to do remote coverage via Twitter of a human rights event. I really enjoyed the experience and above all I learned a lot about the different struggles that take place in different parts of the world to defend human (and digital) rights. That was my first contact with RightsCon.
Recently -from June 5 to 8- a new edition of RightsCon was held in San José, Costa Rica. This edition was highly anticipated, since it had been announced for 2020, being postponed due to the pandemic. With the referral of this, it could finally be done in person and online this year.
With an event of this magnitude taking place in the region, we at the Open Mapping Hub of Latin America and the Caribbean estimated that the attendance of organizations and activists from the region would be considerable, so it was important to also attend and take the pulse of the event from our own perspective.
At this point it is worth mentioning that although at first glance the relationship between maps and human rights does not seem clear, it does exist. The maps are linked to various rights such as:
- Right to life. Life happens in a territory.
- Right to a territory/nationality.
- Right to free transit.
- Right to information (for example: of the offer that exists in the territory inhabited)
- Right to representativeness (that is, to act and make decisions based on the life that happens on that map). And the most important:
- The right to be on the map.
And well, RightsCon really is a big event, hundreds of people attended from hundreds of digital and human rights organizations from all over the world. There were more than 600 face-to-face, hybrid and online events. The production was up to the mark and in general everything went very well…
…Except for the tremendous problem that there was due to the quick visas that Access Now -the organizer of RightsCon- had agreed with the Costa Rican tourism ministry to facilitate entry into the country, an agreement that the government finally ignored, thus preventing the entry of more than 300 representatives of organizations, collectives and activists. I mention it because while it may not be relevant to this post, it is an injustice that should not be repeated.
But back to what it was like to be at RightsCon, I attended as many talks as I could, which was less than half of the ones that interested me. For example, I attended “Weaving community solutions for communication needs through capacity-building”, “Community generated data, Indigenous data sovereignty, and defending Indigenous peoples’ rights”, “Free social networks: uses, scope and challenges for our organizations” to name a few.
I met people I hadn’t seen for years, from organizations I have collaborated at some point such as Global Voices, Tactical Tech or The Engine Room. I also met people from organizations in the region that do important work for digital rights such as SocialTic or Karisma, just to mention two. And I met a lot of people and organizations that weren’t on my radar.
And with the topic of maps as the agenda, it struck me that of all those 600 scheduled events, only one (yes, one) was directly related to mapping or digital cartography. I know that it was not exactly the place to find mapping projects as such, but I expected a little more projects that linked human rights with open cartography.
But what I did find was various people interested in mapping projects: organizations and people wanting to map surveillance cameras in the region, feminisms, communities made invisible on official maps, rights, territories, and above all, I found former and expert collaborators of the Central American OSM community that is eager to come together again and contribute to common projects.
Talking and exchanging ideas with all these people was very inspiring. I believe that the future of work around mapping and digital and human rights is bright and offers many opportunities for social impact. As we move towards a society that is increasingly connected and in need of geospatial information, we should include some key actions in our mapping projects to achieve that impact:
Promote collaboration and inclusive participation in the creation and use of maps.
Strengthen technical capacities and access to collaborative mapping tools.
Address ethical and privacy issues related to digital and human rights mapping.
Foster interdisciplinary collaboration and knowledge sharing among human rights experts, technologists, and mapping professionals.
Applying these guiding ideas will allow us to fully harness the potential of maps as tools to promote equity, social justice and respect for fundamental rights, and thus better serve the communities with which we work.
So the bottom line of attending RightsCon seems pretty positive to me on a number of levels. It now remains to translate into reality all those talks and ideas for the next RightsCon being able to tell, we did it!
