Media and Networking Tools

By popular demand (that means two people asked for it …), I am blogging the presentation I gave in Toronto, cleaned up and filled out (I don’t actually write a whole script when I make a slide show, I swear.) You have to at least skim down if you want the goods.

The presentation was given to a group of human rights activists who were in Toronto for the 2006 International AIDS conference. I could try to sum up their work and the relationship between AIDS and Human Rights, but I’ll get it wrong. The short version is, roughly that public health doesn’t get very far withought human rights. All the universal drug access won’t get you anywhere if universal access doesn’t include gay men or men who have sex with men or sex workers or drug users. If women need their husband’s permission to see a doctor and don’t have the right to decline sex, then you don’t really have universal access. Don’t ask me to do better than that in an nutshell, but if you are genuinely interested, these folks have a very good analysis and have aggregated some thoughtful writings:
AIDS Law, South Africa
STELLA (Toronto, ON)
OSI Law and Health Program

Here is my presentation (PPT, 4Megs). I used OpenOffce.org Presentation to create it, but I’ve saved it as a power point document because I know that OpenOffice users will understand, while MS Office users can be so touchy.

You’ll notice that there are a few missing slides: after my presentation, I sat down to write out a publishable version of the slide show and to assess what I could have done better. I didn’t do enough of a job of distinguishing between media tools /uses which help you get your message out and network tools/uses which aid in information sharing and communication within a new or existing network. I could use a few more good blogs where non-technical users are collaboratively contributing content or building a network or coalition using a blog.

I also should have talked a bit about Martus, though it was somewhat off topic: Martus is an encrypted human rights reporting system. As it turns out a lot of the groups gathered for the meeting were genuinely interested in privacy issues around storing reports of human rights violations. Martus is a good place to start if that is what you need.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.