If you think you or your friends would be interested in starting your own chapter at your university or college, we would love to hear from you! To find out more about our University Chapters program and how you can become a director, please email me: lisa@thesentinelproject.org.

We are excited and proud to announce that our campus chapter at UC Berkeley has been selected to attend the 2012 Clinton Global Initiative University. Tuan and Erika, the chapter’s co-directors, will travel to George Washington University in Washington, DC at the end of March to attend this year’s conference. They will be two of only approximately 1,000 students from around the globe to attend this year’s conference and present their Commitment to Action.

President Bill Clinton hosts the inaugural meeting of the CGIU at Tulane University, New Orleans in 2008.

Former US President Bill Clinton established the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) in 2005 in order to bring together world leaders, entrepreneurs, CEOs, NGOs, and Nobel Laureates for the purpose of brainstorming and implementing innovative solutions to worldwide problems. In 2007, he expanded his initiative to include undergraduate and graduate students by launching the University component of CGI. College students from around the world make Commitments to Action, which are new, specific, and measureable projects that address issues on campus, in the community, or internationally. CGIU meetings include key speakers, working and skill sessions, as well as large plenary sessions, and a service day on which attendees give back to the local community. This year’s keynote speakers include President Clinton’s daughter, Chelsea Clinton; The Daily Show host, Jon Stewart; Secretary General of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, Bekele Geleta; and the CEO of Wello, Cynthia Koenig. The meeting will provide ample opportunities for networking with other student leaders and leaders in almost every industry worldwide. The Berkeley chapter is aiming to raise awareness of the Sentinel Project’s work and find possible partners for current and future projects.

Tuan and Erika’s Commitment to Action consists of a Genocide Education Series with a focus on genocide prevention in postwar Iraq. Students, experts, scholars, and Sentinel Project analysts will work together to educate the general public and raise awareness of the escalating sectarian violence between the Sunni and Shia in post-war Iraq, and the potential for it to develop into genocide. Tuan and Erika will apply their knowledge of the structural and psychological risk factors of genocide, as well as the Eight Stages of Genocide – from their experience facilitating the student elective course, The Politics of Genocide (part of the Democratic Education at Cal program) – to lead their team in organizing the Education Series. They will be working closely with the Sentinel Project’s San Francisco Bay Area research analyst and Berkeley Chapter mentor, Collin Sullivan.

For more information on this year’s Clinton Global Initiative University, please visit www.cgiu.org. Any questions, comments, or suggestions for the Sentinel Project Berkeley chapter can be sent to berkeley@thesentinelproject.org

If you’re interested in starting a chapter of the Sentinel Project at your own school, send us an email at contact@thesentinelproject.org and let us know what you have in mind.

This past fall, Mercyhurst College became the first international university chapter to work with the Sentinel Project. Our chapter consists of six team members who will be working together on assessing the risk of genocide against Iranian Bahá’ís. This is because, rather than being structured as an extracurricular club, the Mercyhurst chapter is structured more like an internship which gives participants credits in exchange for doing analytical work. As a bit of a “specialist” chapter, our goal is to apply intelligence analysis methodology to the risk factors and indicators formulated by the Sentinel Project for identifying populations at risk for genocide. In addition to working on the Bahá’í situation of concern, we will also be helping to make this methodology a standard part of how the Sentinel Project operates.

Mercyhurst College has a worldwide reputation for its Institute for Intelligence Studies, which offers bachelor’s and master’s degrees as well as certificate programs in the discipline. Many MC Intelligence alumni currently hold positions in the militaries and intelligence communities of the United States and other countries, Fortune 500 companies, and NGOs around the world. What makes this program unique is its hands-on teaching approach which prepares students to work in the field by providing and in-depth knowledge of basic, advanced, and theoretical analytic techniques. All of these techniques are currently being used in law enforcement intelligence, competitive business intelligence, and national security because their flexibility allows them to be applied to a wide range of topics, including genocide prevention.

Our team spent the initial weeks of the internship doing background research, familiarizing ourselves with the Eight Stages of Genocide (which are being adapted by the Sentinel Project), the persecution of Bahá’ís in Iran, and the broader situation within Iran itself. We also had a conference call with folks from Sentinel to plan our project and to discuss some innovations the team members devised. Of course, the first stage of starting any analysis project is always research!

As a group, we have split up the risk factors listed on the Sentinel Project’s website and each week we will produce short analytical reports to assess the various factors as they exist within Iran and how they affect the Bahá’í community. Breaking the risk factors down into their basic components helps analysts to see how intricately they affect the situation.

We just wrapped up our first week of hands-on work. Each intern completed a short form analytic report, or – as it’s known in the intelligence community, an “SFAR” – on their given topic. Topics this week ranged from EU sanctions on Iran, background on the Bahá’í faith, and Iran’s restrictions of freedom of speech. As each topic was presented to the group, we were able to tie together the Sentinel Project’s risk factors with what is happening to Bahá’ís in Iran.

In the coming weeks, we will try to paint a more detailed picture of the situation and establish key mechanisms that influence or could potentially trigger an outbreak of violence. We will also work to keep SP’s reading audience updated on our progress!

- The Mercyhurst Team

Thank you to everyone who donated and everyone who has otherwise supported us at the Sentinel Project. As a growing nonprofit, any contribution of any size, whether monetary or in-kind, has an impact that’s felt deeply across the entire organization. Your support is always noticed and always appreciated, and we thank you for your continued interest as our activities expand. Keep an eye on us in the coming months; 2012 will be the best year for the Sentinel Project yet.

For a future UCOSP team getting started with this project I would recommend establishing a work flow with github as soon as possible. We have found that an effective model involves using a single repository to avoid drift between team member’s work that can grow into headaches when it comes time to merge code. A live voice or text chat open across team members during planned work sessions is also valuable in addition to weekly meetings and an actively used mailing list.

Hosting on a public repository such as Github will be essential as this project matures into a proper open source endeavour. Remember that this project is designed to be adopted by anybody; it is vital that all work be maintained in one public location.

To get started should be a matter of installing Django and cloning the Gin repository. Keep in mind that we have not been publishing all essential files for a complete Django project! The most glaring omissions to resolve before running the server from the repo will be settings.py and manage.py (For a complete list view the .gitignore file.) The best way to generate these is to create a new Django project and copy over what’s missing as a template.

You will also need a database, which we do not include on github. These can be initialized from the project’s schema using django’s built-in utilities. I recommend creating a seed file to distribute among the team for the sake of testing or demonstrating features. There is a shell script in the github repo to assist with this.

Some other tools we have found useful are ArgoUML and Balsamique to share visualizations of project goals. A UML diagram for the backend API, for example, is a lifesaver. Above all, I highly recommend working through a Git and Django tutorial:

http://progit.org/book/

http://www.djangobook.com/

A solid platform on which a range of data collection and retrieval strategies remains open will continue to inspire contributors as this project matures. Following VC news aggregators is a great source of inspiration for social media analysis because many startups and social media ventures tend to encounter similar issues we have with planning ahead for scale (cf. http://www.slideshare.net/dibau_naum_h/large-scale-processing-with-django) and deciding on which database technologies are best suited for our purpose. This recent blog post discusses using Google chrome’s open source n-gram model based language detection feature, with python bindings: http://blog.mikemccandless.com/2011/10/language-detection-with-googles-compact.html and don’t forget to follow Google’s chart API (http://code.google.com/apis/chart/interactive/docs/more_charts.html) to remember what interesting visualizations can be integrated with your working Gin dataset with some careful planning.

Good luck!

A team of intelligence studies students from Mercyhurst College will soon commence research to assess the threat of ethnic-based violence against the Baha’i population in Iran, a project undertaken at the behest of the Sentinel Project for Genocide Prevention.

Earlier this month, Mercyhurst became the first international university chapter followed by the University of California, Berkeley, of the Sentinel Project, a nonprofit organization based in Canada with members in several countries worldwide. The Sentinel Project, formed in 2008, aims to prevent genocide through effective early warning initiatives.

The Mercyhurst team, headed by intelligence studies adjunct faculty Diane Chido, will research, complete a report and update the Sentinel Project’s current Threatwiki, which has identified the Baha’i population in Iran as a likely future target of ethnic-based violence.

Baha’is are members of a global religion that represents a population of 300,000 in the predominantly Muslim country of Iran, according to a Sentinel Project report. The Baha’is have a long history of persecution at the hands of Muslim extremists and successive regimes. Popular violence – with either the tacit approval or active encouragement of state authorities – has risen and cases of arson and vandalism against Baha’is have increased dramatically in recent years, the report notes.

The project update to be conducted by Mercyhurst will continue through spring term 2012. The Mercyhurst report will be posted on the Sentinel Project’s website, delivered to policymakers and NGOs to convince them of the possibility that intervention may be needed before the situation becomes more violent.

“If all goes well, this will be an ongoing effort to assist the Sentinel Project with its warning efforts, not only producing individual reports, but advising the organization on incorporating intelligence analysis techniques into their research methods,” Chido said. “This will also be an ongoing internship opportunity for intelligence students to earn internship credit while putting their skills to work for a very worthy cause.”

The program for our week in Geneva included two days of workshops intended to develop our idea in preparation for making a presentation to potential funders. Our subject was the Ground Information Network (GIN), a new project under development by the Sentinel Project’s ICT Team. GIN is an application that will help us to manage and analyze data submitted by citizens from their mobile phones when they witness events that may indicate an increasing risk of genocide. We can then also use it to disseminate warnings back out to people at risk.

Telecom World gave us a great opportunity to socialize and meet people whenever we weren't too busy. If you look closely, I think you can see us somewhere in the background.

While we were the only ones with a project that focused specifically on human rights or human security issues, Abhishek and I also got to see lots of other ways that people are using mobile technology to make the world a better place, ranging from increasing government transparency to helping aid workers in the field. For example, Ju$txt.org is focused on mapping instances of bribery in order to fight corruption first in Nigeria and then worldwide, while Ally Krupar’s survey tool would help the Infectious Diseases Institute enhance health education in Uganda. We also discovered just what a small world it can be once you get into using ICT for social good when we ran into fellow Canadian Dale Zak, who works for Ushahidi and also had his own project, QRForms, in the Digital Innovators category. I had previously heard of Dale and his work through a mutual friend who I met earlier this year at a genocide studies conference in Buenos Aires and was surprised to see him in person in Geneva. Another Geneva friend of ours, Trishan de Lanerolle, was representing Humanitarians for Free and Open Source Software, an organization that we first encountered in Toronto earlier this fall thanks to our UCOSP interns who are working on GIN.

Overall, our time at Telecom World was an adventure and a great opportunity for getting to know other young people working with technology to make the world a better place. Hopefully we can stay in contact as we all go forward with our respective projects and continue building the international community of people dedicated to ICT for development and peacebuilding. While we had a range of different focuses, each one of our projects could have multiple applications. Perhaps an application developed now to support aid workers could one day help the Sentinel Project and our own GIN will definitely be useful beyond predicting and preventing genocide. Thanks to the connections that we made in Geneva, spreading that technology to the people who need it will be much easier than it ever was before.

There is a silent war in eastern Congo that has taken the lives of hundreds of thousand of innocent children every year since 1996. It is a war where children too small to carry a gun are sent to the frontlines of war with nothing but a whistle, to serve only as a barricade and to block the first volley of bullets with their bodies. It is a war in which 1,100 women are raped every single day, a war that sees approximately 45,000 civilians die every month, and a war whose trail of blood leads directly to us. According to the International Rescue Committee, nearly 6 million innocent civilians have died as a result of this war and war-related causes, but the real tragedy we don’t realize is the fact that this war is funded by us.

The Sentinel Project has been closely following recent events in the Democratic Republic of Congo from the connection between our consumer electronics products and the raging conflict in eastern Congo to the final countdown to Congo’s elections this November, the role of the international community in this crisis, and the role of Congolese youth in the future of their country. The crisis in the Congo is very complex so the need for various approaches to confront the crisis by finding common ground and working together towards solutions through collaboration in diplomatic engagement to support credible elections; protecting civilians and dismantling rebel groups; combating conflict minerals; reforming the mining and security sector; and ending impunity.

There are many organizations doing very brave and important work on the DRC. Already we’ve seen some impressive results from organizations such as RAISE Hope for Congo, a campaign of the Enough Project, which aims to build a permanent and diverse constituency of activists who will advocate for the human rights of all Congolese citizens and work towards ending the ongoing conflict in eastern Congo. Many well-established and well-respected groups such as Falling Whistles, Friends of the Congo, Panzi Foundation, and individuals are actively engaged in so many different ways. There are human rights and humanitarian workers on the ground and there is now a global outcry and concern, as well as a growing movement to push both the electronics industry and policymakers towards the establishment of a credible international certification system for Congo’s conflict minerals. Just in time for the holidays, Greenpeace has teamed up with the Enough Project for conflict minerals standards. We wish to amplify these efforts by sharing their stories and supporting their commendable work to raise hope and help bring peace and justice to the people of the DRC. We also encourage our university chapters to join the Conflict Free Campus Initiative. Below is our statement of support:

The Sentinel Project for Genocide Prevention is aware and concerned about the ongoing crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo and recognizes the role of conflict minerals - tin, tungsten, tantalum and gold - as one of the primary drivers for this ongoing conflict. As an organization focused on using technology and electronic products that likely contain these conflict minerals, we realize our own responsibility and direct link to the situation. We therefore call on all electronics companies with whom we do business with to exercise due diligence on the source and chain of custody of these minerals and to ensure that they are ethically sourced. We will consider future policies that this organization can adopt to help combat the problem.

Earlier today I was watching a travel show on television where the hosts were visiting Cambodia. They visited an old school that was converted into a detention and torture centre for the Khmer Rouge. The stained floors, rusted relics and memorial photos of the victims made it very clear what happened here only 32 years ago.

I wondered what it would be like to live in a country where my existence and views were deemed undesirable by my government. I wondered what I would be able to do to protect my family, friends and myself. I guess I would probably be scared and hoping someone out there knew what was happening to us.

Because genocide is such an extreme act of violence on an entire population of people, it seems unreal. We think of it as something that happens so rarely and so far away, that it has little to do with us. It seems too big and evil to understand.

Genocide is an everyday crime. It’s probably happening right now in some form and some where. Just look at the news and you’ll see alarming headlines about violent conflict in Syria and massive protests in Egypt — stories about governments exercising extreme control over its people.

I joined the Sentinel Project about a month ago, and since then the reasons for volunteering have started to become more than just theoretical to me. Being part of the Sentinel Project and helping it to achieve its goals meant being that life-line to people trapped in terrible circumstances.

Genocide is a dark and depressing subject, but the Sentinel Project is about hope and taking action to defend the vulnerable. It’s about working together to identify people at risk, and applying clear and honest study of their abusers to expose their crime before it happens.

I’ve enjoyed my introduction to the Sentinel Project, its talented and compassionate volunteers, and the work at hand.

Mount Allison’s Student Chapter of the Sentinel Project has had an active semester of
fundraising and raising awareness about genocide in the Sackville community. Following a
successful stint running the coat check at the campus pub, the group set up a table at the town’s
Midnight Madness winter fair and sold out in just over two hours. They sold homemade votive
candle holders and roses made of dried leaves, both of which proved very popular. Each of these
small gifts included a story of a survivor of genocide. This was a way of reminding people of the
individual and human face of the problem and of sharing the experiences of victims in Armenia,
Cambodia, Rwanda, Srebrenica, and the Holocaust.

To counter the heaviness of these stories the group also made pamphlets explaining the Sentinel
Project’s work and emphasizing that genocide is predictable and preventable. Throughout the
evening these sparked many a discussion with passing students and residents.

To date, the Mount Allison Chapter has raised close to $250 and we have one more event before
Christmas! Many thanks to Amanda Bergmann, Philippe Blanchard, Bri Miller, Emily Lewis,
Sebastian Chiasson, and Rachel Gardner for their participation this semester.