Author: Guillén Torres

On Monday 9th of October, I was very happy to participate in the Expert Session on Human Rights Defenders, organized by Justice and Peace Netherlands. The goal of the event was to reflect upon the role that Data (Big and Small) can play in the defense of Human Rights around the world.

The workshop was also a platform for the presentation of the Index of Human Rights Defenders, developed jointly by Justice and Peace and the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands. This new index aims to facilitate the identification of tangible actions that are needed to improve precarious situations for human rights defenders worldwide.

My intervention was centered on strategies to turn (Big) Data into policy recommendations, which is one of the interests of the DATACTIVE project. Since there is currently no general agreement on a specific methodology to achieve this goal, I decided to prepare an exploratory talk to share recent findings in academic research on the topics of evidence-informed public policy and Big Data. In addition, I proposed the participants to colonize the field of Business Analytics, which has been very productive in developing various frameworks for the production of Actionable Insights out of Big Data but focuses almost exclusively on the creation of economic value.

I was lucky enough to present next to Hisham Almirat, a research associate at Datactive, and Hyeong-sik Yoo, from HURIDOCS, who shared with the participants of the workshop thoughts and techniques on ethical data collection.