Data is a Team Sport is a series of online conversations held with data literacy practitioners in mid-2017 that explores the ever evolving data literacy eco-system.

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Friedhelm Weinberg is the Executive Director of Human Rights Information and Documentation Systems (HURIDOCS), an NGO that supports organisations and individuals to gather, analyse and harness information to promote and protect human rights. 

Notes from the Conversation

We discussed at what it takes to be both a tool developer and a capacity builder. While the two disciplines inform and build upon each other, Friedhelm strongly feels that the capacity building work needs to come first and be a foundation for tool development. The starting point for human rights defenders is to have a clear understanding of what they want to do with data before they start collecting it.

Where in the past they used external developers to create tools, they have recently hired developers to be on staff and work side by side with their capacity builders. They have also recently been building their own capacity to help human right defenders utilise machine learning for processing large amounts of documents and extracting information about human rights abuses.

Specific projects within Huridocs he talked about:

• Uwazi is an open-source solution for building and sharing document collections
• The Collaboratory is their knowledge sharing network for practitioners focusing on information management and human rights documentation.

Readings/Resources that are inspiring his work:

• Reinventing Organisations 
• Information Architecture, from O’Reilly , 
• How Not to Network a Nation, The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet

View the full online conversation:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00WbqeDojP0&w=560&h=315]