A/HRC/29/37 commonplace.32 At the international level, the conviction by the International Criminal Court of Thomas Lubanga, which admitted video footage of interviews of child soldiers who had been impressed into his militia, proved that video recordings could be used to fill an evidentiary gap.33 Of course, it is not only witnesses or subjects of violations who are producing such information, but also perpetrators. Moreover, information does not have to be shared publicly for it to be useful to human rights investigations. 69. While information from civilian witnesses has long been a cornerstone of human rights fact-finding, it has traditionally been gathered by professionals. Either professionals or their trusted contacts would be present during the production and transmission of information from witness to fact-finder during an interview, for example. ICTs enable civilian witnesses autonomously to produce and transmit information. 70. At its most spontaneous, civilian witnessing can occur through widely available consumer tools or platforms. The ubiquity of smartphones enables the capture of visual and auditory information, which can be easily transmitted through digital channels such as social media platforms. The benefit of those production and transmission strategies is that they do not require any particular expertise; the drawback is that they may limit the metadata (such as source, place and time of production) which could be instrumental to verifying the information. Alternatively, applications such as InformaCam and EyeWitness are specifically designed to enhance the metadata supplied with photographic or video information and to maintain the chain of custody.34 71. A number of NGOs are already offering training courses to citizen witnesses and trainers on how to produce and transmit material with stronger evidentiary value. WITNESS, Amnesty International, Tactical Tech and the Open Society Justice Initiative are all conducting such activities on a global or regional scale. The training may concern both personal protection issues, such as those concerning digital security, discussed above, and practical information about the kind of detail to capture in witness videos (such as licence plates, uniform numbers or landmarks) and how to share them.35 2. Crowdsourcing information 72. Somewhere between the traditional methods of soliciting information from civilian witnesses and the spontaneous production and transmission of information by civilian witnesses are the practices of crowdsourcing and crowdseeding. Crowdsourcing involves turning over tasks to a large, unspecified group recruited through an open call but that is not necessarily representative, as such calls privilege the participation of those with resources such as technology, money and time. Crowdseeding is a form of bounded crowdsourcing whereby participants can be randomly sampled for representativeness and equipped with the technology and resources necessary for gathering information. A relationship develops 32 33 34 35 See, for example, Daoud Kuttab, “Video technology exposing Isreali violations in the West Bank”, Al-Monitor (8 July 2014), www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/07/israel-palestine-cctv-camerafootage-occupation-settlers.html. Matthew Shaer, “The media doesn’t care what happens here: can amateur journalism bring justice to Rio’s favelas?” The New York Times (18 February 2015), www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/ magazine/the-media-doesnt-care-what-happens-here.html. See information about Informacam, https://guardianproject.info/informa/; and New Perimeter, “eyeWitness to atrocities”, www.newperimeter.org/our-work/access-to-justice/eyeWitness.html. See, for example, Kelly Matheson, “Video as evidence: basic practices”, Witness blog (16 February 2015), http://blog.witness.org/2015/02/video-as-evidence-basic-practices/. 13