Welcome back everyone, I just wanted to write a blog post to inform you all on some of the things that have been going on with our team! If you have not read my previous post, my name is Rahma Adnan, and I am a recent addition to the research team at the Sentinel Project, and I am currently working on the Kyrgyzstan SOC. (more on that in a later post)
As you may have read in an earlier post, Threatwiki is now live on the Sentinel Project website. During one of our recent work sessions, the Sentinel Project team was trained on how to use the platform. Along with this training, a few members of the team are creating a manual that will help make training new research analysts more efficient and ensure that they have a quick reference during their future work.
We learned how to input data from reliable sources to track the situations of concern (SOCs) with the help of a visual timeline. When I first looked at the tool, I was a bit nervous because it looked so complicated and high-tech, but once we started inputting data points, it was surprisingly quite simple!
I think this is an amazing tool to be able to track the SOCs more closely. You are able to see exactly where events such as arrests, arson, or raids have taken place. And the data is not just a vague point on the map; we are talking about cities, towns, latitude, and longitude of the area where the incident occurred.
Under the correlations tab, you can see how the incidents are related to one another according to how analysts tag them. Looking at the Iran SOC, the map, and the correlation tabs are getting very crowded, but I think that magnifies the situation, and makes it seem more real. Soon improvements to Threatwiki will make these visualizations even more interactive and informative. Iran is always in the news for one reason or another but I have never once heard about the discrimination against the Baha’i community in that country. To be honest, I didn’t really know that Baha’is live in Iran because all I see in the news is the government’s desire to obtain nuclear weapons.
I am extremely glad that I have been given an opportunity to work with the Sentinel Project, and to be able learn more about the communities at risk of genocide. Hopefully, the Threatwiki tool will bring us one step closer to preventing the heinous crime of genocide.