Notes from the do no harm workshop

THEMES FOR DISCUSSION

Self Representation

SECTIONS

WHAT ARE THE ISSUES?
- Informed consent – try to get some sort of consensus (cultural relativity)
- Safety Euro/NA versus Global South
- Sales Licensing
- Ethical issues of dignity and revictimization
- Re-use and Remixing i.e. VJing
- pornographic aspects of graphic footage i.e. thatsfuckedup.com

HOW DO WE MAKE PEOPLE AWARE OF THE ISSUES?

- educating our constituencies
-

WHAT CAN WE DO TO ADDRESS THE ISSUES?

- a set of guidelines for working with sensitive footage in a participatory media setting
- filtering (community and organizational)

CONCLUSION

- to what extent are we responsible for the content we collect/aggregate
- if it's all going to happen anyway why do we care?

TRANSCRIPT OF THE DISCUSSION

First - do no HARM workshop,

led by Brian from Witness and Zoe from IFIwatch.tv

about our responsibility as organisations and as individual activists, what content are we collecting and how do we ensure we're protecting people.....

outside of the technological side of things here...

useful to think about our experiences where use and abuse of video has occurred in worrying ways ... a lot of the agenda here is about freeing information, letting it go, which is good, but we also need to think about what happens when we have footage of abuse, what can happen with it, where can it go without revictimising the subjects of abuse...or traumatising the audience. video can travel without contextualisation, and there are ways that are appropriate to spread some material, and ways that are not.

people featured in the footage don't always have a handle on where it's going to go, so especially when you are dealing with issues of human rights, situations of extreme violence, politics, where people are risking their lives, losing their lives...

in this free exchange culture people often give their footage to each other without demanding licenses or restrictions on who can then take that footage and spread it in the public domain, use it in another film that maybe has another agenda, and especially now that we are starting to put material on the internet at high, screening quality, what can we do do help make sure that we are protecting people featured in the footage as well as people who produced the material often at great expense and risk to themselves.

a lot of projects have technical guidelines for shooting, editing, encoding, uploading material. I wonder if any also have guidelines on what is good - or not good - to shoot and share in what context, times that you should blur out faces, or keep certain footage behind password protected firewalls of some sort...

so let's throw it out to the group...

an experience, after genoa, 2001-2, a lot of video material collected into a bologna social centre, all the activists were editing to help activists who had been abused. but in 2002 the cops raided the centre and took the archive and made a dvd of their own edit of people destroying property etc. so the material was used against the activists in the trials. then the activists had a copy from the lawyers and tried to dismantle the cops' edit, they searched for the material around the sections used in the cops' edit. so they did all this work, and finally things turned out good. what indymedia learned from this is h you shouldn't give unedited footage to the common archive, everyone should be sure there are no faces of people who could be endangered. it is the responsibility of each camera person to make sure that they do not endanger people. and the public archive will not accept any tape which is not copied, and already watched. and video archive shouldn't be centralised, it's a risk to have all the material in one place.

was there an issue of identifying people in the tape?

yes, the cops used the tapes for that. so indymedia said we cannot keep this material together, the shooters have to ensure that people can;t be identified before they hand over the tape to an archive. also as film makers, we try not to film people doing risky actions.

do you have a list of good practice?

yes on indymedia italy there is a page on genoa outcomes, there is something there on what are the ways to act in future

would it be possible to get it in english on the wiki or list?

maybe there is an english version, i can put it on
http://italy.indymedia.org/news/2004/06/566833.php (only italian)

ACTION

to go back in history, we had a burn site??? v political, latin america groups had no web access, so many radical groups eg sendero luminoso, farc even two competing groups from same country using same server.. also offered mail host for them ... aimed to be v transparent because knew that main viewer of the site was US military, so.. one of the things posted on the site was archives of site viewers, the logs... the host servers. made a graph and top 25 were .mil. .gov., .virginia langley.... so tried to make people aware that this was the top usage of the site. so that people putting something on the web should know if they're doing something risky

maybe it needs to be made very plain to people because I wouldn't think to look at the logs to know who the users are... to be reminded of the risk.. and most people don;t have our level of experience, maybe it needs to be really brought home to people that this material is very useful to the military

ACTION

everyone who puts a video on the internet has certain goals, what they don;t often think about it what other outcomes there might be from that, negative outcomes

previous discussion related to text, not video

\but issues are similar

you should know who is looking at your stuff

decentralisation important, at one point in some farc negotiations in sweden, someone realised that farc was communicating through UCSD and they got the chancellor to get someone to take the server off. so farc had no communication for their negotiations in sweden, because all their stuff on one server. so decentralise, decentralise, decentralise....

footage of people being battered is really stressful to see, can be disempowering.. depends on context, can make people feel very small and stuck. could be good to work towards more empowering stuff...

for example one really violent film coming out of genova was not contextualised, just violence images, really shocked people and left some not wanting to be on the streets. could have been good to have a warning, or to show it only in some contexts eg meeting in european parliament about what the italian police were doing, then there might have been more of a point in seeing this horrible stuff. so maybe we could have warnings on what purposes a video is best used for.

work on domestic violence and child abuse, some people might take the film and use it for sexual pleasure. how to get the right tone... have to be careful and not satisfy the wrong audience.

that is the issue, almost pornographic aspect the graphic imagery, jerry was joking round with it but point was, people used it as porn, serious violation of woman's rights .. ultimately some actions were taken against these tyopes of acts, but it had to enter this universe a s a piece of pornography, a difficult idea for people trying to be an advocate for victims...

general rule, what's illegal offline, is illegal online. with protest coverage, try to shoot from back of victims, see the brutalisers rather than the brutalised, faces of police etc. show injuries, and keep it at that. recent priotest, police began beating people, cracked skulls and all, total mainstream media blackout, just a tinny mention of some unrest, but 247 ran full video and the bar council took it as evidence and sued the police. everyone who was beaten up could come forward and go to bar council., all the top lawyers came together. similar thing with naked video, one showed here was uncut to shock us, online version was cut. created another round of complaints from ground, so setting up independent commission to look at police brutality. in malaysia there are many cases where people die in detention, they don't come out alive, especially if they are rape suspects. when they go out, they cannot be shown n video. but if you can show the world the abuse as it happens, then it can help.
....
some of our bloggers were reported to police for what they did online, but actually someone else left seditious complaints on their blog, it was taken off after 5 mins, but still caught, someone was waiting....have to be v careful in malaysia... if not, get into more trouble...

do you find that as a small institutions, your needs are more strict, do you find yourself subcensoring?

i'd rather call it being sensitive to the matter at hand. we try not to censor, for eg the palestinian hamas foreign minister came to malaysia.. we interviewed him and put it online, no one else would give him airspace, it's one of the top downloads from outside now. the malaysian government decided... that the old plo minister should still be in place... but he's elected leader, should respect that. is it because the americans don;t want to see hamas in place? we put the story out in our way.... otherwise, solution is... don't show faces!

don't show your faces... this is common approach for reporting direct action etc in europe, when i first sent on direct actions, could get stickers saying 'please don't film me'

in malaysia, we rarely have demonstrations, last time, it backfired, police planted people to start chanting, then went away and the riot police came in and beat everyone, so we took pictures of the police and warned people about the people who would do them harm.

question, showed pics from china, would that put person in jeopardy?

asked, said ok..if we knew it would cause trouble, would try not to shoot... v famous dissident in china. some people want to provoke the authorities to see where is the limit, and if we can be some of the people who can help them achieve their objective, we're happy...

we thought that this subject is related to the protection of the people, issue of archive too. legal protection....
As regard protection of people, a lot of struggles in korea, you saw the videos. questions, do we have to show the faces of people who struggle, and the people who oppress at the same time?
the police or people hired by the company to oppress the workers may file a suit, so sometimes we make mosaic on these faces, the same happens with the people on our side, so sometimes for eg chamseasan make a mosaic, or sometimes they show videos then get phone calls from people, saying please, make mosaic.
...
another one of the problem comes from the relationship between the people who show. if you have a close relationship before you edit something, you know what kind of peoples' face you can show. What kind of relationship the producer can have with those people. for eg it also happens not just in online video but another organisation i'm in, we make videos with trade unions. we always discuss with them what is ok to show. natural way to decide what is right.
...
When we show some struggle videos there is always concern, as uk indymedia already noted, people like shocking videos. so one of the most successful videos for us was police violence against teo?? workers. teo is now owned by gm. there was a big struggle a view years ago.
....
successful stories for us, a workers video collective shot the video, after their video was exposed the server was down because many people just came in and streamed and after that mainstream news covered the story and police chief was fired. but at same time this kind of exposure, limits the context of the struggle into the violence, not the political context. so that's another concern, not just protection of people but contextualise struggle in history...
Sometimes the content of the story is limited to violence

i wonder if it's possible to have guidelines for people before they go to put footage online, saying 'if you've got footage that is very violent or otherwise might attract people to watch it for reasons other than knowing the bigger story, maybe it would be good to make sure that it can't be watched without people coming across the background story, explanation of the bigger context...'

it's more of an ideal than a reality...

yes but something to think about.... aim for... you know what ben was talking about with the helicopter footage, it's been distributed loose from it's context, could do with attached information on why someone's put it there... it should be easy to make someone come to a page first that forces people to read a few lines ..

in Brasil we were doing participatory video training, helping people to use cameras to make video and telling the stories themselves.. a big company was planting eucalyptus monoculture and - it turned out - threatening people who stood against them.... we haven't distributed it due to threats against the local activists that were involved. i went in fairly naive, i don't think the activists either were quite sure what they might get into....a shame we could not have predicted that, nor warned the participants in our trainings of the risks they might run, nor could they warn us. i still think it was a good project, and was empowering as planned, but...

is there need to show face and name...? no.... as media makers we are probably more aware of issues .. getting more videos from people who are maybe not so aware of the dangers... can we keep some anonymity as a strategy for protection... yes, trick is getting people aware of the need to, whether for selves or people they are filming.

there maybe in some parts of video activist community, levels of awareness of this, but as you open up the tools, people get involved who don't have that kind of experience and concern. so maybe at the same time as we are offering help with encoding etc, could be offering help with thinking about all these kind of issues too. what kind of material is good to be encoding, what kind of material is only good with faces blurred out, what kind of material should only be uploaded in low res format so that it can't be taken and used by someone else for some other purpose in some other environment..

an important point is to make workshops and have people learning as much as possible so everyone should feel they have a handle on issues in their own communities, apart from with cops etc there is also aspects of ethics, there are cultures who don't like to be filmed etc... so as much people and communities shoul get in touch on how to film and relate to each other... was wondering about brasil project, was it possible to leave the technical stuff? we've been doing a lot with kids, jails... is important that the technical stuff stays with people... is this something... you don't harm if everyone is responsible for themselves and their communities...

in direct response, no we didn't leave cameras there on this project, I heard of a witness project in brasil where the cameras were stolen, maybe in some ways would be exposing people to another risk by giving them equipment when they don't necessarily have the capacity to look after it etc...

teo workers video group put their video online using their website and server, then cops put another cut version of the video online saying the workers' version was very partial and theirs was the real truth, so then the workers edited again and put out another longer version out with more context, chronology. so when we talk about protection, sometimes we should not show something, sometimes we should show more things. there is a responsibility of the camera person, how much should they cover in an event. usually there is a tendency in mainstream to have strict tradition of video just for news, whereas activists usually just focus on the struggle, not the whole story. one of the problems for activist video makers is sometimes they don;t have attention to the fact that their videos can be seen by people who don;t know much about the issue. they think of the audience as kind of friends, or colleagues, who come to their side, have a similar political perspective and understand the background to the video. but when the video becomes very popular, people who don;t have any context about the struggle see it, and they without background or chronology it is not very persuasive. so issue is how people shooting info when they shoot, strategic issue. need people onside, professional activist organisations should do that, also people in the community. for example teo workers, they were not activist film makers, just trained by them, so it was possible they could shoot. another problem is people in communities don't have that strategic perspective. so part of the training should be to say that the video can be shown to you community, but at the same time it can also be shown to the popular mass who don;t know much about the struggle. so it affects tactics of shooting, and protection of the people. i think it's important.

so we are trying to get at a culture ... adding to activist social change culture, need to carve out a space for media awareness... is that it?

kind of awareness of media strategy and possible process of how the video is used. that should be clear..

what about about writing guides for video activist producers?

there are a few around,

if anyone comes on any good resources like this, can they put them on the wiki?

on thing I'd would put on the wiki is a good issue of the visual anthropology which has dealt with these issues, this one issue has a very very good articles, one disaster of a story where a brasilian indigenous group were given a camera and they had such a tradition of non hierarchy and all of a sudden the person with a camera was imbued with a certain importance and also as a physical thing it was valued as a lot of money and the kind of problems that this made.. good to have people refer to that

after the demo happened, some bloggers went with cameras and shot, and because they did their traffic went up. these people came out of nowhere, and because everyone has a camera and they can shoot, they thought it was fun, the human rights group encouraged them to come saying it's a sunny morning with a picnic, in the end the police were there waiting for them.... i was sharing with our korean friends that this was when i got worried. i put a ten pointer on my blog about what and how to shoot. i kept telling them it's dangerous, it's not so easy, but the response was they could take care of themselves. but the second time they couldn't. so that prompted me to quickly run a small workshop in our place, to shoot and be more organised, get ready in a higher position to be able to shoot the police, some go beneath but with a longer lens to be able to shoot from afar so the third time we did the video was well done, organised. but still there are people we cannot reach . if they contact us we can reach them, but there are people who just shoot, so i think that awareness part of teaching people to protect themselves is important issue. we run workshops all round malaysia,, we go to Penang, all kinds of place, as much as we can to show people how its done, public safety, but there's only so much we can do.

about genoa, a plan was there to do a docu fiction, thinking why go directly to the clashes with police, so our idea was to go round and talk to people, what do they think about the g8, so change the attention from the clashes more to opinionised interviews where you don't have that problem, what to film activists. also doing workshops, all situations are different so you have to be sensitive to situations and think about the camera.. in another case we did a workshop for rome people to integrate inside the schools, and we gave the cameras to children to the people who were treated worst by other people, and them having a camera in their hands, it changed the way they were treated when they had a camera in their hand, people were nicer so the group dynamic changed.

a specific concern about making footage online in high quality is that people could take and re-edit it

time code it!

another concern is about, less serious in terms of immediate danger. but there can be a kind of pornographic interest in footage of violence. I've had phone calls from people in recent years saying 'have you got any footage of war? of violent demonstrations? i want it for my art project, VJing work or whatever. sometimes I trust the person to deal with it tastefully, but it would be good to have guidance or a community to turn to. because i've been in nightclubs or whatever and people are projecting footage of people in situations of... absolute destruction or horror. or footage of riots, quite often Korean footage, we have that in the UK, completely decontextualised. we have no idea of what the issues are, who the people are, who was hurt, why .. nothing like that. so I'm wondering if we should have some thinking about how our material is used by artists, musicians, vjs etc... people who often have very good will, they want to spread awareness, but nobody's helping them to think about using this material more sensitively, I don't know if this is something we can begin to think about helping with...

so the context is important, sometimes if you shoot a lot and put more in the video that protect more the people.

very important strategy issue

one of the important point of the training for the people in the community is to know that the video is not only shown in the communitiy but also outside it.

maybe the possibility of a kind of creative commons type licensing, with respect to intent, so there is some sort of metadata attached to the videos as they are produced and unloaded, about some way of contextualising, some very basic information so if you want to reuse it you have to know that these issues are very important to the movie maker...

this issue in fact is kind if guidance for restriction of usage of certain material, which is structurally very similar to copyright. so what could be done is introduce an extra kind of metadata information which would be very similar to copyright, which would say in what condition is possible to screen this footage. of course this would have no legal or technical restriction, but it would be a way to educate people, and also if this meta information would be requested by programmes, by (unclear)???.. and so on, and then with the categories, then people at least would know that there is such a problem. and this RDF of ethical awareness would spread together with the files that contain this kind of information. so what we have to do is to find a suitable name for this kind of info, and also to make up some categories, i don't know, maybe 'show to the communities', 'general distribution', 'only for specific reason' and so on, and maybe add it to some sites that accept video ..

i think we should propose that it be the first frame of any video that goes online, you know like the 'FBI - do not copy this' thing, our own ethical use procedure,
it's a very good idea, if we could get a lot of people to include this in the first image of their video I think it would be good.

it's very delicate because people don't really.. if they are already ethical, they take care of the ethical aspects.. if they are not ethical, they don't care.....

but some people are ethical they just don't know which way, where to read.

I think it is a good idea... but with VJing with images of riots, everyone's a vj, but i think it's really boring to see this kind of thing. so how .. a very natural process.. some things like riots, and violence, maybe they don;t touch a very big public. so it depends on who is going to watch what, where. i also have to say that things that have been filmed in palestine, very delicate eye, sometimes been using it also in VJjing, I think that specific things happen, and you should see them also when you are enjoying. i don;t think that giving it too much, or having too much of riots, that makes it flat and useless. and you cannot really stop that, you can do your best around your group, but.. for example there is a movie that is 20 days after, it's a kind of catastrophic movie in london, and there are shots from genoa, in the riots, and also in a zombie movie, there are shots from genoa, riots in genoa that was supposed to be cops fighting zombies. but it was real footage. maybe they did it on their own, they didn't take it from any activist, maybe they just go and used the kind of situation as a stage for their own production. and maybe what we can do it to use this situation as a stage for our vision that we want to have instead of just documenting riots and riots....

to go back to idea of fiction, for me, one of most effective films that's been made on the whole imf world bank struggle is Crowd Bites Wolf, which sets up this fake story of the zapatistas directing the protest, nice film, it's online at www.ifiwatch.tv

yes, though some people had some ethical problems with that film, there's a bit where it plays with the idea of video games, slows down the footage and beeps then focuses in on one czech riot cop who is then hit by a stone when the footage speeds up again... this caused a stink in a mainstream media outlet in uk, one well known activist/writer called it a 'pornography of pain.'

what was problem?

glamourising black bloc, making real world violence look like a video game, but it was playing with culture, compared to what real video games - and real war! - are like, it was really just playing, but it's still a bit macho .. but it's just one film....

shall we review where we've got to so far? solution section is looking good...

issues we have:

cops and government

safety of archival footage

audience, we can't control who views footage but it is still an issue

traumatisation of viewers via graphic imagery,
who is your audience,

protection of people and of the organisations, these are two related issues, because as we try and solicit material from our communities that has impact on us as organisations as well.

cultural relativity is also important because these structure were are trying to wrestle with and put in place are different from culture to culture, issue of representation between cultures that are different, east and west, north and south...
and then finally the re-appropriation or reuse of material we have, there's no real good way to control that but some good ideas as starting point.

one key question - how do we raise awareness in our communities about these issues, and some things that came up are transparency, making your consituency, media creators, aware of who is looking at the video, not just being able to say that lots of people watched it but maybe military, govt, police checking out the videos...

there are various guidelines are out there developed by fvarious groups, eg imc italy, pleas post it on the list or wiki.

proposal for making it hard to watch a video until someone went through some process of education about the context. maybe not controllable.

also keep in mind that other audiences maybe watching media we create. original intent may be to inform our communities, there may be additional benefits to reaching out to audiences less familiar with the causes.

solutions we suggested:

achival footage safety, decentralisation, for footage and servers, don't store them all in one place.

what's illegal offline is illegal online a guideline for some organisations

(there could be issues of unjust laws... in malaysia hoping to get uncensorable status soon)

shoot from behind the victim, get the faces of the perpetrators

make sure people understand what they are looking at, contextualise

blur faces, labour intensive process... useful technicque for video makers, should try to have additional thinking in group about other solutions for accidental, casual video activists.
fictionalised retelling of stories allow more control of situation represented.

relationship between producer and subject, when you know each other well it's easier to know what's appropriate and what's not appropriate...

this becomes a bigger issue when dealing with people you don't know personally.

there's a phrase not yet come up, 'prior informed consent', when you're showing somebody speaking about something or doing something and then you're going to make that footage freely available round the world, are they aware that that's what going to happen, have the given their permission? the mainstream media tends to use release forms, get someone to sign a form saying they permit you to use your words and image, but when you're working in a demonstration, a crazy situation, you don't begin to have the opportunity, or when you're working with a very disadvantaged community, maybe with a different language and culture to you... it's hard to sometimes explain the risks they might be running before they can make a reasoned choice, do you even know the risks you might be putting them in, do they know the risks you might find yourself with because of their ongoing politics... there's a lot in there... if you at least have a good and close relationship and can communicate well then i think you are in a good position to come to understanding but there's no final answer or way of working, you just have to feel your way...

for all these solutions, how do we figure out a way to do this online, with people we don't know?

how do you help people who maybe just shot some footage and want to share it, to think about that?

we also have a suggestion to do more workshops and knowledge shares about media, safety and ethics, all these issues will come up... how to do it in an online setting?

would add media strategy to that. visual anthropology review citation, changing power dynamics, in online video as well as shooting, to prevent tampering with footage and decontextualisation by police for example,, time code the footage ... could also do so to edited footage, and explain to people why that code is there, so that any future mixes of the footage would also show the break in code and be obvious.

not secure because easy to resize image to remove timecode,

can add a big timecode to v sensitive stuff that can't be cut off..

many tv stations do that, as long as it doesn't obscure the action.... can do two timecodes, original at the bottom, another into the frame,

the takeaway from the session, introduction of some sort of guidance for restriction of use, or intent of use maybe, like copyright in the sense that it's almost like an ethical license for media, which is another set of metadata which gives some sort of context and intention of the media maker for the video in question, again impossible to enforce but a step in the direction of trying to make people aware of what you or your organisation were trying to do when you shot the video in the first place. and then out some of that language in the first frame of every video that you upload....

any suggestions for practical moving ahead? omissions? complaints? great... thanks everybody.
...

conclusions:

be good to propagate principles of ethical practice among emerging generation of online video contributors and publishers... if only by asking questions, rather than telling people what to do or not to do.

along with 'how to encode, upload etc, can offer guidance on how to avoid hurting the people who shot and are featured in the film.

everybody can add to the wiki some guidelines they know of, for example as developed by italia indymedia after the genoa g8, or the uk national union of journalists' guidance.
then we can think if there are specific questions that relate especially to emerging practices of online social justice video projects with open posting etc. and develop that is
we can add information about the type of screening that a film is appropriate for to the metadata of a film, and note this 'license' in the first frame of an online video file.

DOCUMENTATION:
http://italy.indymedia.org/news/2004/06/566833.php
(in italian)