Model | How can we better understand – and predict – which communities are most at risk for mass atrocities? The challenge: Create a predictive algorithmic model to help identify community-level risk factors that make communities more or less likely to experience acts of violence. This challenge will be launched on the TopCoder platform, a community of almost 465,000 software developers, algorithmists and digital designers from around the globe.
Communicate | During conflicts and crises, vulnerable populations are often left completely isolated, unable to communicate with neighboring communities, much less the outside world. The challenge: Create technological innovations to enable better communication with and among conflict-affected communities during a conflict. This challenge will be launched on the InnoCentive platform, a global leader in crowd-sourcing innovative solutions to important business, social, policy, scientific and technical problems. InnoCentive has over 285,000 registered solvers worldwide.
Alert | The worst atrocities often happen in remote areas, making it incredibly difficult for human rights organizations to gather and verify critical information about what has occurred. The challenge: Develop simple, affordable, trainable and scalable technologies to allow human rights organizations and others to gather and/or verify information from hard-to-access areas. This challenge will be hosted on OpenIDEO, an open innovation platform for social good that uses a unique, collaborative approach where a broad mix of people create new solutions together – all concepts are openly available, shareable and reusable by anyone.
Submissions will be evaluated by a distinguished panel of technologists, human rights experts, and government policy-makers, including Samantha Power, Ethan Zuckerman, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Alec Ross, and Patrick Meier. The Challenges are open to participants from around the world and from a breadth of disciplines, especially outside the traditional human rights space.