Session:The Human Rights Footprint of Electronics
| Description | This workshop is about building tools for detecting – and fixing – human rights violations that occur in the production of electronics products. I'll give an introductory talk on social hotspot analyses, and then we'll discuss projects and potential applications that could aid in changing the current, dire state of affairs. |
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| Website(s) | |
| Type | Workshop |
| Kids session | No |
| Keyword(s) | social, hardware |
| Tags | rights, hardware, opendata |
| Person organizing | User:Xian |
| Language | en - English |
| Other sessions... | |
| Starts at | 2017/12/29 15:00 |
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| Ends at | 2017/12/29 16:00 |
| Duration | 60 minutes |
| Location | Room:Seminar room 13 |
Electronic gadgets seem to magically appear before our eyes, shiny and clean. Like the proverbial sausage, we prefer not to think too much about how they are made. The truth is that electronic devices have a sizable raw materials footprint, consisting of dozens of metals that are extracted under often dire conditions.
Changing this state of affairs is difficult. For a maker of electronic products, it is almost impossible to find out where human rights violations occur in their supply chain because most information about the provenance of materials and components is kept secret or obscured through complex trade structures. Simply to perform their due diligence and avoid contributing to human rights violations amounts to extensive – and expensive – detective work.
Our idea is to create open tools that help electronics makers calculate a statistical risk stemming from each of their components, so that they can investigate individual suppliers, explore alternatives, or simply be more aware of the hidden depths of their supply chain.
You're welcome to join the workshop if you want to learn more about the connection between raw materials, electronic products, and human rights.
