[Savannah-hackers] submission of Stolen Lives Documentation System - savannah.nongnu.org

[isaac]

A package was submitted to savannah.nongnu.org
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isaac <address@hidden> described the package as follows:
License: gpl
Other License: 
Package: Stolen Lives Documentation System
System name: slpdb
Type: non-GNU

Description:
[technical description added below]

The Stolen Lives Project technical team has decided to make the source code 
that will drive the Stolen Lives Project available under the GPL. We are doing 
this for a number of reasons.

First and foremost: the situation that we face today is urgent. The number and 
rate of people killed by law enforcement agents have jumped alarmingly in this 
new political climate of increased \"homeland security\" and repressive laws, 
which give law enforcement agents a green light for their lethal actions. 
Racial profiling of Arab, Muslim and South Asian immigrants has become 
commonplace and legally acceptable, along with the continued and stepped up 
harassment of populations traditionally \"under the gun\" of police brutality. 
This issue affects all of us. People\'s ability to speak out, to get organized 
and to protest on any issue, including against the war in Iraq, will be greatly 
limited by the development of a police state terrorizing its population. 

Stolen Lives provides important and compelling exposures of the nationwide 
epidemic of police brutality and murder. People who\'ve been killed, their 
families and loved ones, and communities under the gun speak through the pages 
and tell their stories. And they get a platform to speak out even more broadly. 

The most recent edition of the Stolen Lives book documents over 2,000 cases of 
people killed by U.S. law enforcement agents (police, etc.) since 1990.

We believe that with minor customizations, the same database structure and 
web-based application behind Stolen Lives can be used by other organizations to 
document and expose all kinds of human rights abuses around the world.

We are consciously moving this project out of the grips of proprietary software 
to make it possible for the largest number of people to participate in both the 
development of the software that drives it, as well as to increase the ability 
of people who know about cases to add them to the project and to participate in 
its development.

Organizations and people working on human rights issues have a common interest 
in supporting this project. We hope that in addition to accomplishing our more 
immediate goals of releasing a new version of the book, \"Stolen Lives: Killed 
by Law Enforcement\", we can help to create a flowering of documentation of 
human rights abuses by making the tools available.

At this time, no source code is ready to show. The main work right now is 
converting the data from the old proprietary system over to a Free database.

The project will utilize PHP and MySQL (possibly other backends).

Technical Functions intended for this application:
------------------------------------------

1) entry and editing of cases--including victim information and narrative 
description of the incident

2) access control-- so that only authorized team members may edit cases or make 
them visible on the public side of the site

3) workflow on cases -- entry, verification, story editing, etc. -- before 
cases are available to the public

4) manage victim photos, including workflow on touching up photos which often 
come from bad scans

5) allow the public to browse and search the cases

6) produce statistics on cases, such as nationalities of victims, ages of 
victims, cases involving racial profiling, homophobia, number of cases by 
geographical areas, etc

7) compile the information into editions or volumes to correspond with the 
releases of the printed version of the project

8) generate PDF\'s for sending book compilations to the print house or 
customized lists for local activists to use in their city

9) manage the documentation on cases, including news sources, interviews with 
witnesses, and legal documents

You can find out more about the project and read the cases we document at 
http://stolenlives.org

Other Software Required:
PHP
MySQL (or other SQL)

Other Comments: