Google and George Clooney Aim Satellites at Sudan, Become "Anti-Genocide Paparazzi"

Ahead of an early January referendum, the two partners, along with Harvard and the United Nations, want Sudanese rebels to know that they are being watched.

George Clooney is joining Google, the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, and the United Nations in an effort called the Satellite Sentinel Project to monitor violence and human rights violations in Sudan as the country prepares to vote on January 9 on whether or not to split into two nations—North and South Sudan.



The explicit goal of the partnership is deterrence—Clooney and his partners want to make sure that Sudan does not erupt in another civil war. Some small pockets of violence have already been reported and the employment of satellites is meant to give war-mongers on the ground the message that the world is watching and genocide will not be tolerated.

Clooney's interest in Sudan is not new—back in 2007 he was featured in the documentary film, Darfur Now, co-produced by actor Don Cheadle. And he has maintained his interest in the embattled country since then, paying a recent visit amidst preparations for the upcoming referendum.

The partnership pulls on the diverse strengths of the participating organizations—Clooney and his organization, Not On Our Watch, add star power—not to mention awareness power—and the United Nations Institute for Training and Research Operational Satellite Applications Programme (UNOSAT) will collect and analyze the satellite images. The Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, meanwhile, will provide field research and Google is setting up a web platform to provide public access to information with the goal of pressuring public officials. (We profiled an independent, Ushahidi-backed voting monitoring project just a couple of weeks ago—carried out by a Sudan-born Texan.)

UNOSAT has done this before—in fact it is their mission to snap satellite images in cases of such disaster, but in the case of Sudan they've more or less been on standby to see what happens and will start snapping satellite images as soon as they receive requests from their field staff and partner organizations to do so. "It's a good thing that we haven't yet had to take many images in Sudan," Lars Bromley of UNOSAT tells Fast Company.

So the idea is not entirely Clooney's alone (despite what a Time magazine article suggests). I had spoken to UNOSAT several weeks ago, prior to the announcement of Clooney's project, and, for them, this is essentially routine work.

But there is one difference this time around. It's Clooney who has hired the satellites. That means there is more freedom to snap away in whatever geographical areas and on whatever basis the group wants, as opposed to the U.N., which has certain rules and guidelines to work within. Specifically, Clooney will monitor the movement of troops, whereas UNOSAT's primary—and most flexible—prerogative is the monitoring of natural disasters, not man-made ones.

"We are the anti-genocide paparazzi," Clooney told Time. "We want them to enjoy the level of celebrity attention that I usually get. If you know your actions are going to be covered, you tend to behave much differently than when you operate in a vacuum."

The project as a whole is a multi-layered approach and the programming and monitoring capabilities of multiple crisis mapping tools, websites, and organizations are being pulled together. The work of the Sudan Vote Monitor—who we profiled earlier this month—will soon be incorporated and the Google mapping component was actually built off the work of two Pakistani-British entrepreneurs who built LOCAL, a monitoring site for the Pakistan floods.

"What is new and transforming is the concept of leveraging Google Map Maker into a public human rights and human security early warning system to stop a war before it starts," Jonathan Hutson of the Enough Project, another partner, tells Fast Company.

"We'd like to engage the worldwide, volunteer community of Google power mappers," adds Hutson, "and combine their efforts with on-the-ground field reports from the Enough Project and crowd-sourced, crisis response information from groups like Ushahidi, analyze it, add context and concise clear calls to action, and publish it all on a public platform to detect and deter war crimes, including potential genocide."


0 comments:

Post a Comment