Why University-Based Startups Are a Smart Investment
As the executive director of the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley, which recently won the MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how universities can be “value added.” What can university-based centers contribute to real-world practice that no one else can?
This question has been driven, in part, by private funders, several of whom have been asking why they should continue to invest in university-based projects given what they perceive to be universities’ significant drawbacks: the heavy overhead campuses impose on foundation gifts; academics’ frequent focus on theoretical and doctrinal problems as opposed to pragmatic ones; and the obligation of universities to — in an ideal world — pay for their own administrative and staffing costs, and not punt those costs to external funders.
I’ve concluded that there are at least three reasons why funders should — why they must — continue to invest in these efforts:
- A university-based center can work with faculty and students to incubate and produce high-quality, low-cost, cutting-edge research and advocacy.
- A university-based center can mentor and train students to become the next generation of leaders in their field, providing a skilled pipeline to organizations around the world.
- A university-based center can dispatch faculty and graduate students in law, public health, computer science and other majors to support the capacity-building of other organizations.
When these three opportunities are turned into action, a university-based center can make a contribution unlike most others working in a given space. Below, I illustrate this “value added,” using as an example the recently-launched Human Rights Investigations Lab at UC Berkeley School of Law.
A university-based center can work with faculty and students to incubate and produce high-quality, low-cost, cutting-edge research and advocacy.
Some of the best human rights efforts bring together people from different fields. While a number of organizations take a single approach to addressing a human rights need — for example, using law to prosecute war criminals or public health methods to stem the outbreak of an infectious disease — a victim-centered approach to human rights does something different. It recognizes that survivors’ needs are never limited to legal issues, or health issues, and that there is a value to organizations and individuals coordinating across fields. A holistic response to an atrocity requires the resources of law, medicine, education, journalism, technology, etc., working in sync. A large campus like UC Berkeley puts disciplines in close proximity, providing the potential for exciting collaborations.
The Human Rights Center’s Investigations Lab, currently being piloted at UC Berkeley, offers one example of how a problem-centered approach can break down disciplinary silos and make a contribution greater than the sum of its parts. The lab was created to address the following challenge: over the past decade, internet-connected mobile phones and cloud-based media-sharing platforms have proliferated, allowing people to share information in new ways. While journalists and human rights researchers have long used photographs and videos to expose wrongdoing, they now face a deluge of digital information, including videos, photographs, audio files, text-based messages, and other communications. How can this flood of data be turned into actionable information and used to hold perpetrators accountable?
The first university-based effort of its kind, the lab is tackling this question by training a diverse cohort of students in open source investigations: specifically, how to comb, collate, and verify information that is publicly-available on the internet to gather evidence of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes for both journalists and courts.
Students are participating in one of two tracks. The first — the Digital Verification Corps — is being led by Amnesty International and supported by UC Berkeley, the University of Pretoria, and the University of Essex. As corps members, students are tackling the painstaking, labor-intensive work of verifying hundreds of hours of video footage and other media to make sure that what has been shared with Amnesty is what is claims to be: for example, that a video that supposedly documents events in Syria in 2016 isn’t actually footage from some other time or place, or that a photograph hasn’t been doctored to suggest events that never occurred. The second track — which is being piloted by the Human Rights Center with Amnesty’s support — is gathering evidence in support of real-world cases.
A university-based startup, like the lab, can assemble diverse, flexible staffing to do this work in ways that other organizations can’t. Which leads to my next point….
A university-based center can mentor and train students to become the next generation of leaders in their field, providing a skilled pipeline to organizations around the world.
In addition to providing verified information for news outlets, human rights organizations, and lawyers, the lab is poised to make a critical investment in the future of the field. This is because of the most exciting aspect of the project: the students themselves.
The lab’s first cohort consists of 42 undergraduate and graduate researchers. Collectively, they represent 14 majors and 16 languages. They or their families come from more than a dozen countries, many based in conflict zones — everywhere from Burma to Bangladesh, Syria to Singapore, Iran to Palestine, Colombia to Chile — providing critical social knowledge to supplement their academic training.
This project is, in many ways, a win-win-win. A win first for the students, who benefit from an experiential education. Not only are they learning skills at the cutting-edge of human rights practice (skills that are becoming increasingly important to disciplines like public health, law, and investigative journalism), students are leveraging their strengths as digital natives to secure units towards their degrees; generating real-world networks to support post-graduation success; accessing materials that can help build their publication portfolios; and gaining the satisfaction of knowing that what they are doing is making a real-world contribution.
It’s also a win for the nonprofit sector. Verification work can be expensive to staff. By drawing together students from across disciplines like computer science, language studies, sociology, and law, the lab has created a cohort that can be configured in multiple ways, bringing together the skill sets, language abilities, and disciplinary knowledge to do effective, collaborative work. It would be almost impossible for any nonprofit, even one as big as Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch, to suddenly hire this size and diversity of staff. By training students and providing a highly-visible platform for information dissemination, human rights organizations can make a critical investment in these students and their futures, while simultaneously benefitting from relatively low-cost labor.
It’s also a win for tech companies. The lab is currently piloting software that’s been developed for the space. Students can give real-time feedback on everything from user interface and design to security.
Finally, it’s a win for the human rights field. By building off the pioneering work of organizations like Storyful, First Draft News, Reported.ly, and Bellingcat, students can contribute to improving the accuracy of human rights reporting. This is critical to ensure that both advocacy and legal accountability efforts can withstand the tremendous scrutiny of some of the most powerful players in the geo-political world. As we’ve written elsewhere, witness testimony is the lifeblood of human rights work. Some of the best support we can give to witnesses — who risk their reputations and even lives to testify about the abuses they and their communities have endured — is to make sure that their voices are both heard and that they are believed. Producing verified information that corroborates their stories can go a long way towards meeting those goals.
Finally….
A university-based center can dispatch faculty and graduate students in law, public health, computer science and other majors to support the capacity-building of local organizations and courts.
By providing a diverse group of students with cutting-edge investigation skills and multiple outlets for sharing what they discover, we are helping ensure that much-needed attention is being brought to atrocities around the world. Students trained in the US, the UK, and South Africa can go on to seed organizations in other places, further disseminating these ever-more-critical skills.
This is a critical service that university-based centers can offer that most others can’t. Large human rights NGOs rarely have the capacity to train others; often, they’re working at a frantic pace to keep up with research and advocacy demands. In fact, they’re often the ones that need support. For example, several years ago, the Human Rights Center sent two graduate students to New York to teach Human Rights Watch employees how to better explain their research methods and limitations in their reports — bridging campus and practice. We’ve also trained and provided funding for almost 300 students to work with human rights organizations around the world, providing low-cost, high-quality support to those organizations, and a real-world experience to complement students’ classroom-based learning.
Amnesty’s decision to pilot its project across three campuses on three continents represents yet another opportunity for capacity-building. By linking the universities via a Slack channel, Skype sessions and in-person workshops, Amnesty has not only created a labor pool to support their own research, but has invested in skill-building in three regions of the world (Europe, Africa and the Americas). Should this pilot prove a success, this model can be extended to additional countries and continents, opening a conduit for collaboration between North and South, East and West.
A pioneer in the field of video verification recently confirmed that there’s little to no formal training for this type of work; most practitioners are learning on the fly. By seeding these skills at the university level the lab will establish a pipeline of trained investigators for non-governmental organizations, media outlets and courts around the world, reducing the training burden on those institutions. For those students who decide not to enter into human rights practice — for example, those who go into software development or urban design — this training will expose them to the problem-solving approaches used by human rights practitioners and the risks those practitioners face, helping ensure that no matter what they go on to do, they adopt a human-centered approach.
UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Investigations Lab is just one example of how university-based centers and startups can leverage their unique strengths to add value to frontline efforts. Ultimately, while not without its challenges (which I’ll detail in a later post), such a student-centered model is flexible and relatively low-cost, and can be adapted to address a range of social issues. As an investment in the future, this is a model that funders would be smart to support.
