datavaluepeople and Build Up are working on a new project, the Automatic Classifications for Peace group, and we would love to know if you might be interested in joining.
The Automatic Classifications for Peace group helps to further the development of open-source text classification systems for peacebuilding and mediation. Build Up has been developing classification systems for peacebuilding in collaboration with datavaluepeople: with a set of open-source social media analysis tools collectively called Phoenix: https://gitlab.com/howtobuildup/phoenix. Phoenix is also a process that guides peacebuilders and mediators in conducting relevant social media analysis. The Phoenix process and tools have already been used by 100s of local peacebuilders and helped them find valuable insight into ways they can help the communities they care about.
A key component of Phoenix is the capacity to build customizable automatic classification models that support the analysis needs of peacebuilders and mediators. We know other organisations are also interested in this particular capability. With Automatic Classifications for Peace, we hope to widen and deepen the number of organisations involved in open-source text classification systems for peacebuilding. The project will build the structures necessary so that we can collaborate to share collective knowledge and build things on top of each other rather than siloed. Our aim is to create tools and code repositories that are accessible, easy to use and can attract other technologists to work on them too, as well as to release software tools, guidance and documentation directed towards peacebuilders with different levels of tech literacy.
Ultimately, we hope to make tools reusable by any local peacebuilder that can do automatic text classification of social media discourse in the communities and languages peacebuilders think are important.
We are looking for organisations and individuals to join us. If you are working on software for text processing (NLP), language research or building open-source tools for social media analysis and are interested in being a part of the Automatic Classifications for Peace group please reach out to benjamin@datavaluepeople.com. We would really love to hear from you if you are in the global south or working on languages with currently limited support from open-source NLP tools.
