The Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley is announcing the Human Rights Center Mobile Challenge. The deadline for submission of applications is March 13, 2009. Winners will receive cash awards of $15,000 (first place), $10,000 (second place), and $5,000 (third place) to implement their ideas.
While there have been few implementations of mobile technoogy so far in human rights work, recent innovations have the potential to be used to expose war crimes and other serious violations of human rights, and disseminate this information in real time throughout the world. Mobile phones, combined with GPS, cameras, video, audio, and SMS are transforming the way the world understands and responds to emerging crises. Handheld data collection devices, such as PDAs, provide researchers with new ways of documenting mass violence and attitudes toward peace, justice, and social reconstruction in conflict zones.
In response to this opportunity, the Human Rights Center is sponsoring a challenge to encourage innovations for applying mobile technologies for human rights investigations and advocacy. together with Netsquared, 10 finalists will be chosen by community vote. All 10 finalists will be invited to present their ideas at an international conference, “The Soul of the New Machine: Human Rights, Technology, and New Media,” at UC Berkeley, May 4 and 5, 2009. A panel of judges will choose three winners, to be announced at the conference.
MobileActive.org is a judge for this Challenge. The submission site can be found here.
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