can i get a witness?

Global Voices and Witness have come togethet to create the Human Rights Video Hub (working title), which has been launched as a "pilot project," with plans to launch for real sometime soon. According to Witness, the point of the Hub is to enable "anyone anywhere" to "upload human rights related footage video from handheld devices or laptops, to create communities and proposed calls to action around the abuses they witness".

Witness has outlined some very specific guidelines for contributing content to the Hub, including a list of recommended tags to better enable people to find the content (smart). They are open and transparent about the fact that they will not accept certain kinds of footage and, most importantly, this includes footage that may put someone's life at risk -- which is the topic of the most recent post from Sameer Padania.

I have been fortunate to meet the folks at Witness and I am a fan: they're smart, they're dedicated, they're good at what they do -- but they're still looking for ways to be better.

I found the site on Boing Boing (they've been good to me tonight) tonight, but it looks like they launched it back in early September. I did a blog post search on Technorati for the site's URL to see who else might be writing about it. There were 48 results and what is most notable was that the sites -- many of which are very influential, if only due to the number of in-bound links -- were from a number of countries: U.S., Germany (including Spreeblick, which is apparently the country's most popular blog), Russia, Brazil, the Netherlands, Italy, France, the UK, Japan and Spain. It definitely looks like they reached out to bloggers to ask for their help in spreading the word -- worldwide.

Give them a hand. Help Witness to expose the truth by sharing the new site with the people in your circle.