How Can Drones Help Civil Society?
CMDS and Atlatszo.hu co-organized a two-day conference on May 9-10, 2016 entitled “Open Skies, Open Societies: How Civil Society Can Use New Technology for Social Change”, hosted by CMDS and supported by the Visegrad Fund, with the aim to introduce drones to civil society organizations, independent media outlets, journalists and bloggers; to raise awareness to the various ethical, legal and practical implications of the technology; and to establish best practices for its use. As an outcome of the conference, Atlatszo.hu has created a comprehensive collection of all the presentations and guidelines related to the themes discussed at the conference, which is available here.
After the introduction by Eva Bognar, CMDS’s acting executive director, speakers including non-resident CMDS fellow Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, former SPP alumni Tautvydas Juskauskas, David Goldberg (Southwestern Law School, USA), Tamás Bodoky from Atlatszo.hu, Dorota Glowacka and Zuzanna Warso (Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, Poland) and many more addressed the privacy and data protection implications of the civil use of drones, discussed whether drone technology can bring us more transparency and accountability, and how drones are used by civil society organizations to gather data and communicate for impact.
The intensive and highly interactive two-day conference included panel discussions and a practical small-group workshop on using drones for investigative journalism, environmental monitoring, and other humanitarian purposes, in order to increase transparency. Participating international experts, activists, journalists and policy makers addressed opportunities for commercial drone use, questions around regulation and the legal framework, and privacy and data protection implications of drone use in various countries. Atlatszo also interviewed the participants of the conference for their video showing how civil society can employ drones to their benefit, promoting social change, and what kind of challenges it poses including regulation, legal standing and state intervention. As it has been pointed out at the conference, and can also be heard in the video, the legal status of drone use is still unclear and legislative steps do not point in a direction that they would in fact promote transparency.
The second day of the conference focused on building practical skills and demonstrations of drone use. Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick and Tautvydas Juskauskas from the Good Drones Lab demonstrated how drones can be employed in providing better estimations for the actual headcount at protests and demonstrations, combining drone images with mathematical calculations. In the afternoon, Akos Baranya (atlatszo.hu, Hungary) held a workshop on drone video editing tricks and tips for advocates/civil society actors, while Nick Noordam (Birds.ai, Dutch UAS) showed participants how to geotag images (coupling GPS location to images using geo setter software) and create image mosaics (photographic maps with pix4d software).
The conference was funded by the Visegrad Fund. Atlatszo's article on the conference can be found here.