By Taylor Poe
At 1 am on December 2nd 2013, WE FINISHED IT!
We launched Freedom Collaborative — a web application we've been working on at Chab Dai for the past three + years. It's a project designed to help bring new connectivity to the counter trafficking movement-at-large.
The launch
The feature release that held the most anticipation for me personally was the Freedom Library. I often cringe when I hear statements like this, but I'm going to say it anyway, this resource center is undeniably innovative. I'll let this page convince you of this and will use this blog space to tell you a little bit about its creation.We started designing this collaborative resource center in 2012 — spending a few months researching the latest paradigms in wiki library models. Our design process was conducted in Cambodia that summer during a two month sprint of furious white-board writing & prototyping.
As for the Library's creation, I want to say a special thanks to Rob Perrett & Joy Anchalee P. Roberts for all of the time, energy and expertise they put into crafting this feature. Rob is an IT professional from Australia who has visited nearly every country in the world; Joy is a metadata expert at the American University of Cairo. While I'm at it, I'd like to to thank our entire advisory board — who has put so much into this project over the years:
As we upload our initial data input of resources over the next few days, our counter-trafficking library system will be set to become the largest of its kind in the world. And our team is pretty excited about this.
Other updates for the launch include the addition of personal profiles and the extension of the Freedom Registry to make it a global platform. Read about these updates here or you can view this PDF format.
We're not stopping in 2014
Below is our project schedule for a few of the major tools we are working on building for the community this year.And since you've read this far, here's a reward: a premiere sneak peek at one of them. It's a human trafficking news aggregator that pulls in posts across all social media channels which use the hashtag #humantrafficking. We're working on incorporating it fully into the app before publicly announcing it, but go ahead and test it out by using the hashtag on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram & Google+.
I hope you will join us in this new and exciting collaborative platform.
