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Home  News Filipinos offer open source human rights monitoring software
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Filipinos offer open source human rights monitoring software |
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21.12.2007. |
Filipino members of an organization of computer professionals have launched open source-based software designed for human rights organizations.
The set of open source tools can help human rights organizations in documentation, monitoring and awareness campaigns, said Rick Bahague, member of the Computer Professionals Union (CPU), an organization of Filipino programmers, developers and system developers.
In an interview, Bahague said this project, dubbed "Karapatan" started three years ago after the Alliance for the Advancement of People's Rights, a human rights organization, asked the group to help document human rights violations in the Philippines.
"So it was really in coordination with them. But it was designed to be generic enough so that other human rights organizations can adopt it for their use even if they are not located in the Philippines," he said.
Bahague said the free software is being offered in celebration of International Human Rights Day (December 10). The software tool will enable users to organize documentation, incident reports and generate reports.
"With this toolkit almost all regions have to follow the same documentation process, forms etc. This would enable them to store data in a common database which helps in making easier, more accurate reports," he added.
"Human rights violations are classified based on 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 said in a statement.
CPU has been an advocate of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in the country.
"These CPU projects prove that FOSS is a viable replacement even for very specific tools of non-governmental organizations," Bahague said. "The toolkit is also our small tribute to many human rights violation victims of the current regime as reported by Prof. Philip Alston recently."
The software tool is available for download in Google's online repository
Source: CPU
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