This RFP is closed and online for reference only: it ran between 1 July and 15 August 2009. 

Re-engineering of WinEvsys – a database for documenting human rights violations

HURIDOCS is seeking a technology partner to re-engineer WinEvsys, a database application used by many organisations worldwide to manage data about human rights violations like torture, politically-motivated violence, human trafficking and many forms of discrimination. We invite software developers to respond to our Request for Proposals (RFP), by 15 August 2008.

Information for developers

WinEvsys has been in use for over a decade, and is currently used by prominent human rights organisations in Bangladesh, Mexico, the Philipines, Zimbabwe and others. In response to feedback from activists about their experience using WinEvsys, we have decided to re-engineer it, keeping the same data model, sets of forms and controlled vocabularies.

The technology partner will work with us to re-imagine this valuable tool. The re-engineered system will be called OpenEvsys. It will be a powerful and highly-usable web application capable of being deployed as a standalone application, over an office network or the Internet. This refreshed system will help organisations partner easily on documentation work, and strengthen collaborations that will underpin success at the United Nations Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review (UPR). For the benefit of the human rights community, and to stimulate the product’s further development, HURIDOCS intends to release its source code under a free software license.

The RFP outlines the application’s features, the services required of the developer, and how we will assess your proposal. The current WinEvsys database is annexed to the RFP, along with a set of materials about human rights documentation and a representation of our data model in Unified Modeling Language (UML). Download the full Request for Proposals (~3.1MB).

Responses should be emailed to Tom Longley, HURIDOCS Project Manager at tom [dot] longley [at] huridocs [dot] org in English, by 15 August 2008 at 3pm GMT. Late bids will not be accepted. We will contact shortlisted organisations by 25 August 2008.

Information for testers and pilot organisations

If you are also interested in tracking this project’s progress, testing or piloting early versions of the re-engineered software, join the project mailing list by sending an email to openevsys [at] huridocs [dot] org.

Files contained in the Request for Proposals bundle

[Get all the files from this link] 3.1MB

• HURIDOCS, Request for Proposals – Re-engineering of WinEvsys – a database for documenting human rights violations, 30 June 2008 (direct download)
• Dueck J., Guzman M., and Verstappen B., HURIDOCS Events Standard Formats: A Tool for Documenting Human Rights Violations, 2nd ed. 2001 (direct download, ~1MB)
• Dueck J., Guzman M., and Verstappen B. HURIDOCS Micro-Thesauri, 2001 (direct download, ~.48MB)
• Pagel, Mike, Events Logical Domain Model, version 1.0, 2008 (direct download, ~.56MB)
• WinEvsys2003 – a Microsoft Access 2003 application for documenting human rights violations (direct download, ~1.1MB)