 This is the Debian Coding for Human Rights talk. Rafael Rivas will be presenting. The co-presenter, Astrid Valencia, couldn't make it. The talk is probably going to be a half an hour instead of 45 minutes. But yeah, welcome. And I'm going to turn it over to Rafael. OK, thank you. Hi. This is our presentation. I tried to make sure to do another nature reasons. But basically, it's a presentation of our research that I make about the knowledge of the people working at the project and how they can help or if they are aware. OK, sorry. So if they are aware of the work that they do, it's helping in human rights fight. Well, you know a lot of coding. But how is the connection between human rights and free software? Which part is it taking in the political struggle around the world? OK, I'm not starting with free software concept because we already know it. But about human rights, human rights are political norms they link with mainly with how people should be treated by their governments and institutions. We have many examples about governments who treat, let's say, not the best way to the citizens and how they stop them to have the access to the information is a problem in some places. Let's have an example. A minute ago, somebody told me that there was maybe an idea to import the package to Devian that might help the people in China to cross the fire while they have to access the information that could make that Devian will be banned from China. I think the last talk was about Freedombox. We have an example with Freedombox that is a project that is helping the institution NGOs that could help people to not be pursued by doing his work in trying to defend their human rights to access to information. Well, this is a part I think I already said that how does it relates to Devian. Many older people have a right from education access to information, freedom of speech. And lately, the human rights is talking about the freedom of knowledge that we already enjoy that liberty. Basically, what we want to do is to let the developers know what are they doing with this effort and doing it in a way of the, sorry, for the people, for the majority of lawyers, they actually claim that the people have the power to use, claim, demand for it, or enjoy it, the freedom that they have. But in some places, like here we can say it's like a bunch of pretty words put in paper. Well, we have another couple of words that can help the social change that some citizens want. The social struggle that some countries are in the middle of, let's take an example of China again. The political change they need and the legal change they need for all the information they have access and they can say what they think about their governments. The situation and what they need to live as free as they want. And where goes David? It's quite hard to understand that information has to do with something about human rights. But actually, they do. Like I said a moment ago, we have the Freedom Box Project. We have Tor Project. There is another project I just missed the name that helps to ONGs, people who are arrested or they are being followed by the way they express about the governments, help them to know what they are doing. We have an, I don't know if it's a good example for Merosei. But Twitter, what we saw in Egypt that they even use phone lines to get connected and say, well, this is the situation. We are being treated like that. Please, somebody do that. Somebody do something, please. That's our examples that we can take about the technology helping to human rights. That's the other part that if you are aware of it, if you are helping to build some information society, society of freedom, and what can you do in terms of your work to help these people? I don't know if many of the developers know that what they do is actually helping. And if that is a moral to them to say, OK, I'm doing something right, I want to make it better. I want to make something else. What can I do? What we want to do? We want to try to, well, not try. We want to make an essay about the knowledge of the people by interview developers, by talking with a project leader, and with all the people that do something that can help to or research. We actually will start to stalk them by emails, maybe phone calls, I don't know, around DevConf. But we want to know if the volunteers want to help us with that, because we have to do something besides what we are doing now. This is our main goal with this investigation. We are trying to make the better we can. And we expect that all the guys and the men's and women's are involved in this project. And another project, if that's possible, could help us to reach that, to help the people who is not aware of the big work they are doing with free software. They know that. They know already. We want to make this, to promote that discussion inside the project, to see, systemize the impact of the work in the human field, the human rights field. And I don't know. I don't know if the sentence would be OK, but make Devian more human, more close to the fights of the humans, and a better project. Well, I already said that. I'll forget to put, stalk them. But basically, it's that. I think that's the best moment for questions. I try to answer the best, because I'm not the original speaker, but I'll try to answer in the way you want. You deserve it. If you're making a paper or a presentation, where do you plan to present it? Or is it to be presented within Devian? The research will be sent to the DPL for him to send about Devian Press or Devian Announce to all the people in the project know it. Maybe we can show the results also in Devcom 12, just in case it will take longer. Because we have to think to send it by October, I think. But if we have a lot of support of the community, it could take longer. But no questions? No? OK. Other questions? You are mentioning all the tools and how we can actually help human rights, but it's not quite clear to me which tools and what you want to do with them. Do you want us to make like a Debian blend for human rights organizations? Do you want us to make TOR easier to use? Do you want us to send encrypted phone software to China? There is so many different things we could do. Basically, we want to know, actually, if the people in the project are aware of that, that they are doing software that is actually helping people. It's not exactly that we need that you do something, make some change in your work. It's if to make you know that your work is doing this. I don't know if that answers your question. I have a couple examples more or less related to this. One is, for instance, in France, we have set up some internet access to the Egyptian people when they had troubles with their revolution. And for this, you need tools that can actually provide the good old RTC internet connection. So the other example is, so I run the accessibility team with Mario Long. And we don't realize when we're not faced with the problem. But for instance, deaf people, people who cannot hear, make a huge use of IOC. Because on IOC, they are not deaf anymore. It's a small detail, but that tool helps them a lot to integrate into the society, et cetera. And for blind people, the same idea is with a Debian installer CD, you can reinstall your machine from scratch. You don't have to ask somebody to install windows or whatever for you, et cetera. So it's just a few examples. Yeah. Hi. You want to see whether Debian developers are aware that their software can help human rights. After meeting so many people here at Debconf, I may believe that it's the other way around. I've met many interesting individuals who work for human rights groups or NGOs or are otherwise involved to make the world a better place, not only by helping Debian. And because they think like that, they are also involved in Debian. And I would be very interested to see interviews with those people or to have research. What's the middle political view of Debian or something like that, because in other communities I've read, well, we are software developers, and we have all kinds. But this may not be true for Debian, or Debian may tend to one direction. Yeah, that's part of the investigation. Usually, people whose human rights are not respected are the ones who do not have access to a computer. How do you think we can help them? That's part of the research, because we want to see if we can find some project that could help that. Because there is another project that helps with Windows tools to encrypt, to maintain secure communication. But it would be a nice result that we can get a project to help them to install free software with security, all the tools they might need to cover them by the persecution they have in using free software. I was talking about people who can't access a computer either because there are two or more. I don't know if we can be able to reach that point. Actually, I came up with an answer of my own. Probably by helping NGOs and writing software for people who are not technical, but spend the time helping define human rights. Yes, maybe we can. Can I answer to this? I think if you change the society, if you change the mind and the way of thinking, if you change the politics, you help every people. Doesn't matter they use computers or not, because it's important that governments or people have to decide whether something they use computers. So if you change that people care more about freedom, you help everywhere. Yeah, but I think we should try to help them with another front maybe on places that they don't have that liberty yet. That's for example. One thought that occurred to me was one project that Mako, Benjamin Mako Hill has been working on. And have you heard about the Behind Bars project, which is basically a website and a set of volunteers accepting letters on paper from people in the prisons in the United States and publishing their work and also getting it transcribed to make it visible on search engines. I suspect you could do similar things for those behind bars for whatever they find out to put them behind bars in countries violating human rights and making their voices heard as well, providing the tools to publish things on the web, making those kind of sites and using OCR on handwritten notes or whatever. I'm sure there is some tools we can make to make it easier to make that kind of sites work all over the world. You presentation was very optimistic that providing software is a good thing and will help people. I will give one example from my own experience where I decided I don't want to do this anymore. I've been working on packaging the Apache Hadoop project. And this is a solution to work on very big databases. And it's used by social networking sites, by search engines, but also by a project from the European Union called INDECT, which tries to combine many, many sources of surveillance of citizens of the European Union and to analyze the stator and to learn to know more about the behavior of citizens. And I feel bad when I see that the software where I invest my time can be misused in these ways. And this is a conflict where I don't know what to do. For example, there is this license from Crockford who says in his license header, this software should be used for good, not for evil. But we also already know that this is a non-free license and we couldn't include it in Deviant. It's stupid to do so. But we can't solve this problem, I think. But contributing to software is not always a good thing. I don't know. Yeah, I think that would be the bad part if you want to say it, or making free software. But because they can use for everything, like the example that you put on your program. But we're trying to see if we can do something about that. I mean, that's the only thing we can do. It's risky to go down that path. But I try just a little bit of saying human rights, as I understand it at least, is not about opposing something on others. It's about demanding something for each individual. So free software is about having the rights to do things. It's not about saying to others that they don't have rights. So actually, as I see it, I find it very good that Deviant is allowed to be used for nuclear power plants and for nuclear weapons. I don't want nuclear weapons. I don't want nuclear power plants. But that is outside the scope of human rights, of freedoms. That is a completely different political project than preserving, protecting, fighting for human rights, as I see it. You know, human rights, there are many of them. There is a right to enough income to survive, blah, blah, and you can frame nuclear power plants in this kind of direction. So I wouldn't quite declare them completely independent. But that's just a side remark. Hi. I think it would be good to make an effort and connect with the NGOs. Because in Bosnia, I have many friends who are part of NGOs. And then we have people who are donating their computers to the troubled minorities. And these computers come, of course, with a copy of Windows of them. And if we had a group of volunteers that would make an effort and install Debian for these computers, I think that would be great. And each of us can make a contribution in their local communities. Yes, that would be a nice idea. Because the fact that they give computers doesn't mean they can use them, or for the purpose they want. But if the local communities can do that, that would be really nice. Yes, because most of these kids, I mean, yeah, it's actually teenagers, mostly. They don't even know what Debian is. They don't know what a choice is. Yeah, that's the part of the local communities that can help the effort to help these people. Other questions or comments? No, yeah. OK. Thank you, Rafael. OK, thanks for coming. Thank you. Thank you.