sidtechnical/advodb

Global Advocay Database

1. What is the "Global Advocacy Database" project all about?

There are a lot of advocacy and civil society organizations around the globe, specifically those who use technology for the betterment of society and fight for our digital rights. However, unless and until a person is within those communities, it is hard to find information about such organizations. To foster the advocacy sector in general and to encourage more people to participate in "public interest (computer) science", we are collecting information about all those organizations from everywhere possible. This is to help the newcomers to know the possible opportunities in advocacy sector based on their preferences of location, type of work and opportunities to collaborate.

In short, the "Global Advocacy Database" is an online platform where one can search for information about all advocacy and civil society organizations.

P.S: This is a sub-project of our "Advocacy as a career" project. More information will be made publically available soon.

2. How does this look like?

The idea as of now is to display the information in an easily searchable and visually appealing format. It could be as simple as the map shown below, but ofcourse with much more information.

All the components of this project will be open and publically available. We believe that the openness of the project will encourage more people to contribute to the project either by remising the UI or by seeking useful insight from the data.

2.1 What are the options to search/filter?

The advocacy and civil society organizations can be filtered based on the following criterias:

• Location: Filter based on the geographic location of the organization.
• Theme: Filter based on themes (e.g. Internet Freedom, Freedom of Expression, Gender Equality).
• Research areas: Filter based on the research methodology (e.g. Building tools, policy making, campaigning, training).
• Funding: Filter based on the primary funding of the organization (e.g. funded by Ford Foundation, NSF grant, Horizon2020 grant, OTF funding)
• Opportunities to collaborate/contribute: Filter based on their current status of jobs and collaboration opportunities (this will be a Yes or No type of information).

3. What is the current status of the project?

Currently a raw architecture of the online platform for the project is being designed. Also, a research is being conducted on "what are the useful data to collect and to display".

4. What are the next steps?

Data about the advocacy and civil society organizations will be collected in a very simple manner. An online form will be circulated in within Mozilla and Ford Foundation's advocacy network. The form will be filled by the organizations themselves and passsed on to their network to do the same.

The url and QR code of the form will be first announced during MozFest 2016.

5. Who is behind this project?

This project has been initiated by Ford-Mozilla Open Web Fellow (2016-17) Siddharth Rao (Sid). It is mentored by Bastian Greshake, founder of OpenSNP. The project is also curated by the Open Leadership Training Series (OLTS)

For more details, contact Sid: [email protected]