OSA / Martus

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Martus?

What is the Martus™ mission?

Martus is a technology tool to assist the human rights and social justice sector in the collection, safeguarding, organization and dissemination of information about human rights violations. Martus brings the power of technology to the field by placing a simple yet powerful tool into the hands of human rights defenders around the globe. With the Martus system, documentation of human rights violations will be safeguarded and disseminated, accelerating response to violations and in some cases preventing additional abuses.

Who is building, marketing and implementing Martus?

The Martus Project is a major initiative of Benetech, Silicon Valley's leading high tech nonprofit. We combine the technology enterprise model with the social mission and heart of the nonprofit sector. As such, we see the grassroots organizations in the human rights sector as Martus customers and seek to build tools that address their specific needs.

Who uses Martus?

The Martus user community is made up of three distinct audiences: information producers, trusted intermediaries and information consumers.

• Information producers – grassroots organizations, larger NGOs and other reporting bodies – use Martus software tools to create and file bulletins concerning human rights abuses. AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) estimates that there are about 10,000 human rights groups throughout the world that are actively collecting information in the field.
• Trusted intermediaries are leading institutions in the field that operate Martus servers, providing secure and confidential backup services to the information producers.
• Information consumers – academics, the media and larger human rights organizations – will use Martus to research, study and report on human rights abuses.

How does the Martus team know what these customers need?

Before and during product development, the Martus team met with numerous international human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch, Lawyer's Committee for Human Rights, Open Society Institute, Open Society Archive, United Nations and AAAS, as well as grassroots organizations from more than a dozen countries. In addition, we conducted market research in Russia, Sri Lanka, Cambodia and Guatemala, incorporating the recommendations of human rights activists into the product design. After initial development, Martus entered an extended test period with field-testing in Sri Lanka, Guatemala, Russia and Eastern Europe. By working closely with grassroots and international human rights groups during the conception and development of Martus and following up with these and other human rights groups post-development, Benetech has created a tool that addresses the needs of many organizations in the field.

How much funding did Martus require?

Martus required an initial investment of approximately $650,000 for development of the software and initial outreach and training campaigns. This has been provided by major grants from Aspiration/Open Society Institute and high technology leaders, as well as significant funding from Benetech. Additional funds are required over the next two years to continue enhancing the technology and provide outreach, training and support to greater numbers of users. Consequently, Martus will be funded by revenues generated from providing customization tools for larger NGOs and from providing ASP and training services for server operations. These revenues will cover the costs of continued open source development on a limited scale.

Does Martus accept government funding?

Martus did not receive government funding for its development. We will accept funding directly or indirectly from governments to provide Martus services and improvements.

How do we know that Martus software is safe for us to use?

Our decision to make Martus open source, free software was driven by the desire to ensure transparency. If anyone wants to know exactly what our software does, s/he can review the source code and compile the program for him or herself.

What is the central product of Martus?

Most grassroots organizations focus on the development of one central asset: information about the human rights violations they are organized to combat. Like any industry sector where data is the product, human rights monitors and activists must have dependable, secure systems in place for the collection, storage and retrieval of raw data.

Once this data is available, information consumers such as activists, prosecutors, the media and academics, can analyze the data, study it and publish reports about it or take direct action through channels such as prosecutions or investigations.

To provide an end-to-end system for human rights abuse information processing and output, Martus will ultimately consist of three key software components:

• The Martus Software is the client software that provides human rights workers with a simple tool to create text-based bulletins about violations and use built-in encryption to safeguard the data;
• The Martus Server Software accepts encrypted bulletins, securely backs them up and replicates them to multiple locations, safeguarding the information from loss; and
• The Martus Amplifier provides consumers of human rights information with access to the non-confidential portions of bulletins.

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What kinds of human rights violation reports are we talking about?

Martus will be used to:

• Document torture, arbitrary execution, detainment and related political rights
• Fight violence and other abuses against women
• Build cases against the perpetrators of genocide
• Communicate instances of electoral abuses and violence
• Help families locate missing relatives
• Locate environmental abuses
• Monitor ethnic and religious abuses
• Combat the proliferation of hate crimes
• Expose public corruption
• Assist almost any grassroots social justice effort involved in monitoring or documentation

Is Martus an activist organization?

No, Martus is not itself an activist organization or an urgent action network, but rather a tool addressing the specific technological needs of the human rights community. The Martus Project is a nonpartisan initiative that acts solely to provide a technological service to help human rights information organizations. Martus is not affiliated with any government and is independent of the nongovernmental organizations that it serves.

Martus Technology and Security

How does technology help human rights?

With Martus, human rights NGOs will have access to the information technology tools they need to manage their most important asset: information about human rights abuses. By carefully making the tools usable to someone with basic experience with electronic mail, the technology currently available to more powerful entities will be made accessible to the grassroots activist community. NGOs need the ability to 1) create files using a consistent model that can be formatted to satisfy their reporting needs, 2) store and secure reports and 3) access and retrieve files efficiently and securely.

The need for secure storage and backup to counter possible attacks on saved information is a vital component of the Martus solution. During field research, we found that threats to information can vary from equipment theft to user error to environmental factors. At one human rights organization in Sri Lanka, termites ate seven years of collected violation information that was stored in paper form! As another example, Guatemalan NGOs are currently experiencing a string of computer thefts. Any solution must take these real life examples and more into consideration.

Dissemination of information, both locally and globally, is vital to human rights NGOs. Groups need to share within their own organizations, both locally and throughout the world, as well as with the media, international NGOs and other information consumers. These other consumers include emigrants, activists, foreign ministries and citizens of the country where the group is active. Martus will make all of this possible.

Is Martus easy to use?

Yes. Because potential Martus users have varied levels of technical ability, Martus tools are built on very basic platforms and systems. The software design elements of Martus technology are aimed at the user who has basic computer skills, such as the ability to use a simple email program.

What does free/open source have to do with Martus?

What is open source software, and why is it important? Open source software can be loosely defined as software building blocks that are distributed free of charge as either source code or in compiled form.

The basic idea behind open source is very simple: when programmers can read, redistribute and modify the source code for a piece of software, the software is more trustworthy and evolves more quickly than in proprietary software development.

Martus tools are designed as free/open source software programs, built on top of open source tools. Martus customers see three distinct advantages to the open source implementation:

1. Potential Martus users or designated experts working on their behalf can examine the code, promoting transparency. The Martus commitment to open source allows for this examination.
2. Through the use of open source tools, Martus is offered as free software. Many NGOs are not able to afford commercial, non-pirated software. Furthermore, these organizations cannot afford costly database development projects. The Martus commitment to open source will allow Martus client software to be disseminated throughout the human rights community free of charge and without concern for piracy.
3. Open source means that Martus users can get technical support from wherever they choose. Because the users obtain free, licensed versions of Martus client software, they are able to seek assistance whenever software problems arise.

What is encryption, and why is it important?

Encryption is a central component in the preservation of human rights violation information. Martus™ software – on the client side – will incorporate encryption capabilities to maintain the integrity and security of the bulletins created and reported by NGOs. This encryption takes place at the initial stage of bulletin creation, before it is transmitted over the Internet.

Human rights groups have occasionally employed cryptography on a limited basis, but currently available technology such as PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) has not become widely successful because of its complexity. Martus provides the simplest possible interface for encryption, while using strong technology inside its tools.

The goal of using this encryption technology is to offer the NGOs various means of protecting the information collected through best-of-breed information technology practices. The benefits Martus provides go well beyond peace of mind and include secure storage, offsite replication and information sharing technologies – all with transparent encryption technology.

Martus Implementation Plans

How is Martus being adopted?

Following its launch in January 2003, Martus is being introduced to the human rights community through outreach and training over a three-year period. We are pursuing media coverage to help ensure that Martus is introduced to and used by the widest possible range of organizations. Martus outreach, customer support and training teams represent Martus at human rights conferences internationally and engage with NGOs that express interest in Martus.

We also approach NGOs individually to help them adopt Martus as an information management application. In addition, we will collaborate with human rights information users and aggregators to demonstrate how the Martus Amplifier will assist them in researching, analyzing and distributing violation information.

How much does Martus cost?

The Martus™ software will be disseminated throughout the human rights community free of charge.

Who provides Martus training and outreach to NGOs throughout the world?

During the initial rollout stages, Martus staff has been offering training and installation services at no charge for the initial adopter groups unable to pay for these services. Martus needs to achieve critical mass to have the widest impact, and providing these direct services to beta and early users is essential to building the core user base.

Benetech leverages the expertise of highly qualified trainers through the "train-the-trainer" model. Our longer-term plan is for Martus technology to become part of the core toolkit of NGO technology staff and to phase out Benetech training efforts over time. At that point, the community of Martus users will grow rapidly each year and the reliance on professional outreach by Martus staff will decrease.

What is the current status of the project?

Martus software is complete, and we began formally introducing the software to the public on January 15, 2003. The Martus Amplifier, which will allow groups to publish the public portions of bulletins to the Internet in searchable formats, is expected to be available in prototype form by fourth calendar quarter 2003.

Updated 27 November 2003

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