Meet Bono Olgado, Senior Documentalist and member of the Development and Communications team, who combines years of experience in archiving, research and activism to enhance documentation practices in the human rights community.
Enjoy the article as a narrated audio reading by Bono.
I joined HURIDOCS in 2021 as Programme Manager for the Asia Pacific region, overseeing initiatives with partners from Fiji to Sri Lanka. In 2022, I shifted gears to become HURIDOCS’ Documentalist, focusing on research and capacity-building around documentation practices.
Prior to, or rather, in addition to my work at HURIDOCS, I’m also an archivist, scholar, and community organiser in the human rights sector. For more than a decade, I’ve been involved in documentation and organising efforts, often supporting workers’ rights and standing against police and state violence. My research as a scholar looks at the role of data and computing technologies in transitional justice, while my teaching focuses on information science and archival practice.
I bring all of these experiences into my role as Senior Documentalist at HURIDOCS. A documentalist understands how to manage, preserve, and use documentation effectively. Within the human rights space, documentation serves multiple purposes—it can be evidence in legal cases, a communication tool for advocacy, or an object of memorialisation, to name a few. Simply put, documentation is at the heart of human rights work.
At HURIDOCS, I follow in the footsteps of librarians, archivists, and documentalists who came before me and developed standards, methodologies, principles, and tools in carrying out documentation in defence of human rights. My primary responsibilities today in the Development and Communications team revolve around research and development, and capacity-building related to human rights documentation, as well as improving our own information management and archiving systems internally. Simply put, I perpetually ask and seek to answer the question: “How can we improve our documentation in response to evolving human rights challenges?”
Part of my role includes supporting the Programmes team by helping our partners with their documentation needs—whether that’s setting up digitisation workflows, developing data models, or establishing archival practices. I also collaborate with our Tech team, providing input on how the tools and technologies they develop can best serve documentation initiatives. After all, information systems are only as effective as their understanding of documents and documentation practices. Documentalists, while curious about new technologies, tend not to chase after the new shiny thing. We see things within a longer durée as we draw from and connect the past, present, and future.
One of the most memorable projects I’ve been involved in is the Rapid Response Documentation initiative. We brought together a network of fellow documentalists across 12 partner organisations in South and Southeast Asia to develop guidelines, curricula, and tools to improve the secure and ethical documentation of human rights violations during times of crisis. It was a privilege to learn from documentalists across so many partner organisations in South and Southeast Asia.
“This kind of community-driven, solidarity-based work is what I live for. Working for HURIDOCS provides me with opportunities such as this to be with and learn from human rights defenders who fight for justice with much courage and joy.”
– Bono Olgado, Senior Documentalist, HURIDOCS