UwaziDocs: Empowering Human Rights Organizations to Build and Share Knowledge Assets
Forum on the Participation of NGOs in the 58th Ordinary Session of the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights and 32nd African Human Rights Book Fair
3-5 April, 2016
Banjul, The Gambia
Organized by HURIDOCS:Eugene Nyawara, Africa Project Manager and Product Manager for UwaziDocs, Katherin Machalek, Development Director
Does your organization work on human rights cases? Do you have large collections of case research buried in notebooks, Word and PDF documents, and sticky notes? Do you find it difficult to exchange valuable research with your staff and peers because of information bottlenecks? UwaziDocs, an open source, web-based, mobile friendly software designed for easy annotation, sharing, and publishing solves these problems by enabling organizations to:
- Index and cross-reference documents, making it possible for wider participation in building collections
- Customize taxonomies, so that information can be found by whatever way is useful— by theme, by court, by university department, by judge, by author, etc.
- Search, bookmark, read, recommend, and download documents, for optimal collaboration
Our starting model: Case Law Analyser
In 2010, HURIDOCS partner with IHRDA to develop Case Law Analyser (CLA), allowing open access to human rights case law from all African regional bodies.
Instead of repeatedly customizing CLA, we’ve tried another approach: develop a tool which empowers NGOs and organizations to create and share their own libraries without our help.
In Swahili, Uwazi means “open.” HURIDOCS designed UwaziDocs to open up collaboration on key human rights documentation and unblock the obstacles to powerful advocacy and stronger litigation. HURIDOCS will show how the tool works and walk the audience through a live demo.