Project Launch and Call for Applications: Visualising Women’s Rights in the Arab World

Tactical Tech's new project - Visualising Women's Rights in the Arab World - aims to strengthen the use of visual techniques for campaigning amongst women’s rights activists in the Arab World.

Tactical Tech invites applications for participation from activists and NGOs in the Arab region, working on women's rights, to join us in a three day hands-on workshop to explore how visual techniques can strengthen campaigning.

The workshop will give participants the skills to plan and strategise visual campaigns, think about how to use information effectively and gain hands-on skills to develop a campaign using information design, mapping and animation/imaging techniques. More information about the workshop agenda, venue and who should apply, as well as our project blog, highlighting inspiring and relevant examples of visualisations, can be found at http://visualrights.tacticaltech.org.

This initiative has been designed to help advocates develop their creative skills and learn how to use information more effectively. Maya Ganesh, who is leading this project at Tactical Tech, says: “The inventive and creative use of information has great potential to express women's particular experiences and realities in addition to exposing the systemic and structural barriers that prevent the full enjoyment of their human rights. This is an under-utilised technique, but has the potential to really engage audiences and present ways of addressing new and old debates.“

We invite applications for those working on women's rights issues, in particular violence against women, the impact and role of women in political and violent conflict and women’s participation and leadership in public life. We also welcome communications specialists, designers, artists, illustrators, or technologists working with mapping techniques or data who can support women's rights activists. 3 5 to 40 applicants will be selected to attend the launch workshop in Jordan in December. Participants will have to bring with them a campaign idea which will be developed over the course of three days. Of these, 10 campaigns will be provided with small-scale follow up support and mentoring to implement the visualisation element of their campaign in early 2011.

Scholarships to attend this event are available for those working on women’s rights issues in Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, and Jordan. We sincerely welcome applications from other parts of the Arab world. We are unable to provide full scholarships to applicants from these regions at present but we do have 15 subsidised places for those who can cover their own travel costs and make a contribution to the event. We urge interested NGOs and applicants to also look for their own sources of funding to attend. Should further funding be available, information will be posted on the project blog.

This project is funded by the Open Society Institute's International Women’s Program and local support for the workshop is provided by AED's Civil Society Program in Jordan.

For more information about this project and the applications for the workshop see http://visualrights.tacticaltech.org

About Tactical Tech
Tactical Tech is an international NGO working at the point where rights advocacy meets information management and technology.We are a diverse team of information specialists, technologists, designers, human rights advocates and environmental justice activists, united by a passion for social change and the potential of technology and effective information processes to contribute to it.
We believe the effective use of information and digital technologies can create more effective campaigns. Advocates need the right tools to gather and analyse information and the means to transform that information into action. This is where we come in.

Our strength is rooted in our extensive experience in:

• Organising participatory events worldwide and training international advocacy leaders 
• Helping advocates understand the potential of new information and communications technologies for their work and find the tools they need to support their work (see our toolkits and guides http://bit.ly/dnzzmL)
• Providing advocates with specialised expertise that focuses on how information and communications technologies relate to advocacy, with a particular focus on the creative use of information design. 

For more information about Tactical Tech’s work, please visit www.tacticaltech.org