OpenEvsys | About

Who is OpenEvSys for?

OpenEvsys is designed for use by organisations who need a software tool to manage information on violations. These include international and national non-governmental organisations, advocacy networks and national human rights institutions. Typically, these organisations or networks have the following characteristics:

They will have a team of information workers.
They require staff across departments, organisations or geographical locations to have direct access to information about violations.
They have increasing ICT governance and a greater capacity to access local technical support.
They are beginning to incorporate Internet-based tools into their public information and advocacy work.

What can you do with OpenEvsys?

OpenEvSys allows you to do the following tasks:

Record, browse and retrieve and information on events violations, victims, perpetrators.
Analyse your data, produce reports and detect trends and patterns of abuse.
Manage and track your interventions, such as medical aid, legal aid, etc.
Secure digital storage of related documents: testimonies, affidavits, audiovisual files.

OpenEvSys has many features, including:

Built on standards: the HURIDOCS Events Standard Formats and 48 Micro-thesauri.
Easy to customize formats, fields, and terms to your own needs.
Easy browsing of your data: events, persons, violations, documents.
Can handle hundreds of thousands of events, persons, violations.
Powerful multi-entity advanced search, to identify patterns and trends in your data
Multi-lingual and translated into English, Spanish, French, Khmer, and Indonesian. Translations into Russian, Arabic and Turkish available if needed.
Customisable user roles and permissions.
Free and Open Source Software – you can freely use and modify OpenEvSys, no licenses or vendor lock-in.

Who uses OpenEvSys?

CCHR's Sithi online violations database

A number of organisations around the world are using OpenEvsys, or gearing up to use it.

The Cambodia Center for Human Rights uses it to document violations has developed a website that displays the cases it has collected.

Other organisations use it for the following:

Documenting trafficking of women across Asia and the Pacific;
documenting the problem of acid throwing against women in South Asia and tracking medical support and advocacy interventions;
Documenting poverty of rural women in Asia;
Monitoring human rights violations in Ecuador.

Is OpenEvsys the tool you need? Also consider Martus

Screenshot of Martus software

OpenEvsys is intended for use by human rights organisations that already have experience in documenting violations, and need a fine-grained tool to organise all the information they have collected. It offers a lot of detail and structure for recording all the particulars of an event. They should have increasing ICT governance and a greater capacity to access local technical support.

Not all NGOs are likely to need OpenEvsys. You may want to use Martus if you need work in a sensitive country in terms of security of human rights defenders, and need to encrypt your data on your laptop and transmit securely it to a web server. You may have specific needs and wish to design your own database system using tools like Microsoft Access or Filemaker. If you are doing litigation, you may be interested in another HURIDOCS project called Casebox. Maybe a simpler one-format database is enough to support your documentation project.

If you are not sure of your needs, the best is to contact us for a discussion of your needs and to help you identify most appropriate solution for your work.

OpenEvsys is free and open source

OpenEvsys is made available as free and open source software, released under the APGL licence. This means that you are free to download it, use it, modify it as you wish. Please keep HURIDOCS informed of your experiences or customizations that you make to it, so that other organisations can benefit from them.

Technology

OpenEvSys is built as a PHP / MySQL web application. This offers many ways of hosting it: on a standalone computer, on your server and LAN, or on your web server, so you can share information on violations in a secure and standardized way over the Internet if needed.

Technology partner

Our technology partner for the development of OpenEvsys was Respere.com, based in Sri Lanka.

Respere is the company behind the Sahana open source platform for humanitarian organisations, to be used to share information during a natural disaster. They were inspired to put their developer skills to a social purpose after the 2004 Tsunami devastated their coastline.

Acknowledgements

HURIDOCS is grateful to the Danish Mission to the UN in Geneva, for providing generous financial support to this project. We commend their vision to invest in tools that benefit the wider human rights community.

We also extend a hearty thanks to our project manager Tom Longley, and the team of developers at Respere for implementing this project so successfully and on budget.

We also thank Aida Maria Noval for her painstaking translation of the controlled vocabularies and methodologies into Spanish, and for providing crucial advice at key moments, from her vast experience as a human rights documentalist.

Thanks as well to the HURIDOCS interns who worked on the project: Michael Harris who came all the way from Tasmania, and who set up this very website among many other things, and Max Baurs-Krey from the USA, who did an amazing job on the user manual, at an amazing speed.

WinEvSys

OpenEvSys is based on a preceeding version of this tool, called WinEvsys (for Windows Events System).

WinEvsys is built on Microsoft Access database software, meaning that you will need an Access license to use it. This was one of the reasons we moved to OpenEvSys (free and open source), and also because WinEvsys users requested a simpler interface and a web application.

However some organisations, still continue to use it, so therefore we continue to support it. Visit this page to learn more about WinEvsys and download this software.

About