Anyone can post visual evidence of a war crime online. This media can form the bedrock of human rights prosecutions, award-winning journalism, and innovative historical documentation. But journalists and human rights investigators attempting to verify and catalog this media typically rely on general-purpose tools like Google Sheets to organize data and collaborate with volunteers. These tools have become a bottleneck for visual investigations. We built Atlos, a non-profit and open source platform, to enable visual investigators to collaborate safely at scale. Today, we support Bellingcat’s sprawling investigation into civilian harm in Ukraine. Atlos now hosts 105 users and well over 2,000 incidents, and Atlos users have edited 253 different incidents in the last two weeks. We’ve also contributed to industry conversations around visual investigations: We recently co-hosted a session entitled “Designing Safer Visual Investigations at Scale” at RightsCon, a global human rights conference. To reach long-term sustainability, we plan to sell self-service subscription access to our platform. The Impact Grant will provide Atlos with the runway to implement and market our subscription pricing model while continuing to explore (and potentially support) absorption by a larger organization.
Atlos
