OpenEvSys: screenshot of the event browser.
What is OpenEvsys?
The OpenEvSys project provides human rights NGOs with a database tool for recording and managing information on human rights violations, producing analysis of patterns and trends, and tracking the interventions made by NGOs.
It is based on the Events methodology for recording violations: an event is a story containing information on acts, victims, perpetrators, sources and intervening parties. OpenEvsys comes with over 200 fields and 48 controlled vocabularies that can be used to store information about an event, its acts, the victim of each act, the perpetrators of each act, the sources and the interventions made for a victim or about the event.
OpenEvSys: screenshot of an event summary.
What can OpenEvsys do?
The OpenEvsys database application can be used for:
- Recording, browsing and retrieving information on events violations, victims, perpetrators.
- Extracting event reports for use in submissions to special rapporteurs or thematic reports.
- Analysing data, and detecting trends and patterns of abuse.
- Managing and tracking interventions, such as medical aid, legal aid, etc.
- Digital storage of related documents: testimonies, affidavits, audiovisual files.
OpenEvSys: building a search query.
Is OpenEvsys the tool you need?
OpenEvsys is intended for use by human rights organisations that already have experience in documenting violations, and need a fine-grained tool to organise all the information they have collected, that offers a lot of detail and structure for recording all the particulars of an event. They should have increasing ICT governance and a greater capacity to access local technical support.
Not all NGOs are likely to need OpenEvsys. You may want to use Martus if you need work in a sensitive country in terms of security of human rights defenders, and need to encrypt your data on your laptop and transmit securely it to a web server. You may have specific needs and wish to design your own database system using tools like Microsoft Access or Filemaker. If you are doing litigation, you may be interested in another HURIDOCS project called Casebox. Maybe a simpler one-format database is enough to support your documentation project.
If you are not sure of your needs, the best is to contact us for a discussion of your needs and to help you identify most appropriate solution for your work.
CCHR display of OpenEvsys data on Sithi.org portal
Who already uses OpenEvsys?
A number of organisations around the world are using OpenEvsys, or gearing up to use it. The Cambodia Center for Human Rights uses it to document violations has developed a website that displays the cases it has collected. Other organisations use it for the following:
- Documenting trafficking of women across Asia and the Pacific;
- documenting the problem of acid throwing against women in South Asia and tracking medical support and advocacy interventions;
- Documenting poverty of rural women in Asia;
- Monitoring human rights violations in Ecuador.
OpenEvsys is free and open source software
OpenEvsys is made available as free and open source software, released under the APGL licence. This means that you are free to download it, use it, modify it as you wish, while keeping HURIDOCS informed of your experiences, so that other organisations can benefit from them.
Is OpenEvsys ready? Yes, OpenEvsys 1.0 is mature and ready for use.
Technology partner
Our technology partner for OpenEvsys is Respere.com, based in Sri Lanka. They developed OpenEvsys for us, and we continue to call on their excellent services for improvements, hosting and technical support.
Respere is the company behind the Sahana open source platform for humanitarian organisations, to be used to share information during a natural disaster. They were inspired to put their developer skills to a social purpose after the 2004 Tsunami devastated their coastline, and now have formed a small company that support Sahana and also our OpenEvsys.
Acknowledgements
HURIDOCS is grateful to the Danish Mission to the UN in Geneva, for providing generous financial support to this project. We commend their vision to invest in tools that benefit the wider human rights community.
We also extend a hearty thanks to our project manager Tom Longley, and the team of developers at Respere for implementing this project so successfully and on budget.
We also thank Aida Maria Noval for her painstaking translation of the controlled vocabularies and methodologies into Spanish, and for providing crucial advice at key moments, from her vast experience as a human rights documentalist.
And then thanks to the HURIDOCS interns who worked on the project: Michael Harris who came all the way from Tasmania, and who set up this very website among many other things, and Max Baurs-Krey from the USA, who did an amazing job on the user manual, at an amazing speed.
HURIDOCS documentation training in Mozambique.
Take action, next steps
- Visit the OpenEvsys website. Here you can download the software, try it out on the online demo, get the user manual.
- Contact us to discuss whether it would be suitable for your documentation project, and to plan training and support.