Free human rights monitoring software released

COMPUTER PROFESSIONALS UNION
P.O. Box 268, Araneta Center, Cubao, Quezon City
info@cp-union.org http://www.cp-union.org

PRESS RELEASE: 10 December 2007

Free human rights monitoring software released
karapatan-monitor toolkit to document and generate reports of violations

Reference: Rick Bahague, Research Head
Contact: 09178840096, rbahaguejr@gmail.com

All possible ways to stop extrajudicial killings and other forms of human rights violations should be available and freely accessible for those who need to use it, said the Computer Professionals Union (CPU) as they released a free and open source set of tools to help human rights organizations in documentation, monitoring and awareness campaigns.

"As part of our work as responsible Computer Professionals, we are releasing this toolkit as free software on the celebration of International Human Rights Day," said Rick Bahague of the CPU. CPU is a volunteer-based organization of programmers, developers, system administrators and other professionals in the IT industry.

CPU has prepared a repository of this toolkit at code.google.com, an online repository sponsored by Google. The project is called karapatan-monitor ( http://code.google.com/p/karapatan-monitor/). It records incidents of human rights violation and victims.

The karapatan-monitor toolkit will help organize documentation, incident reports, and generate reports for users. Human rights violations are classified based on a taxonomy or categories defined by the deploying organization and perpetrators of these violations are linked to specific incidents. This toolkit will be released in GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3 in the hope that it can be useful to many human rights and non-governmental organizations not only in the Philippines. The GNU GPL allows redistribution and modification of software in contrast to very restrictive proprietary counterpart.

"CPU is one of the leading advocate of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in the country. With the availability of karapatan-monitor, we are again showing how to lead not only in advocacy but also in FOSS development for people's organizations and non-profit institutions in the Philippines," Bahague added. CPU has been active in supporting the FOSS Bill in the Philippine Congress.

CPU has been training organizations in using and deploying Drupal Content Management System (Drupal CMS). The use of Drupal CMS helps human rights organizations create online awareness campaigns in less than a day. The launching of www.karapatan.org, an online portal of the Alliance for the Advancement of People's Rights and www.stopthekillings.org, an online campaign to stop extrajudicial killings in the Philippines, are showcases of these deployments. The online portals are collaborations between CPU volunteers and recipient organizations.

"These CPU projects prove that FOSS is a viable replacement even for very specific tools of non-governmental organizations," Bahague emphasized. "The toolkit is also our small tribute to many human rights violation victims of the current regime as reported by Prof. Philip Alston recently."


Portals

A portal of Alliance for the Advancement of People's Rights can be found at http://www.karapatan.org .

An online campaign to stop extrajudicial killings in the Philippines can be found at http://www.stopthekillings.org

Information about Computer Professionals' Union and its projects can be found at http://www.cp-union.org

Project sites:

Drupal CMS: http://www.drupal.org

karapatan-monitor: http://code.google.com/p/karapatan-monitor/ .
Videos to guide users in installations and operations are already posted here. Source codes will be uploaded on this site before the end of the year. For testing and demonstrations please contact Rick Bahague.