Bevan Rudge JavaScript and web technologist

This video is a graphic summary of what the Hub is;

It has been a real pleasure working with the Witness team at CivicActions on the Hub. I've been working on google maps and geodata integration, all of which boils down to the Hub Map. The next feature I'm currently working on is a full-screen map.

I should have blogged this 8 days ago on international Human Rights day, but I had a good excuse (I was in Australia).

As a textual summary of the Hub, I Chris at Witness summed it up best in a recent round of publicity;

Human rights groups have been reporting on police torture in Egypt for many years. But it wasn't until [three cellphone videos that document systemic police torture and brutality] videos, filmed by policemen who either participated in or directly witnessed the abuse, were distributed on the internet, followed by a national and international outcry and online mobilization of activists, bloggers and citizens, that it became impossible for the Egyptian government to deny what was happening. ... Related to this, you may have read that Abbas' YouTube account, which played a pivotal role in the dissemination of these videos, was suspended by the [YouTube] apparently due to complaints about the graphic imagery of torture and brutality in some of the videos. Although YouTube restored Abbas' account a week later, the situation shows how video of this kind can be vulnerable to take-down and provides a case study as to why the Hub is both timely and essential. (See our blog for more.)

The Hub is committed to exposing human rights issues that commercial sites (like YouTube) can't or won't publish.