Protect The Human

Our latest release, Protect The Human, a social campaigning platform developed for Amnesty International’s UK division, marks an important milestone in Made by Many’s life. It’s nearing our first birthday and on the back of the private beta release of Metrotwin, we quietly released Protect The Human to the world on Tuesday.

Today is the first day that the wider world’s attention will be drawn to Protect The Human as it sees the release of tickets for Amnesty’s Secret Policeman’s Ball and the announcement from the High Court that evidence from Guantanamo prisoner Binyam Mohamed is admissible in his case to escape the death penalty. His case has been highlighted by Amnesty’s Individuals at Risk campaign for the past few years. (You can help raise awareness of his plight by taking action on Protect The Human.)

The juxtaposition of these two events is classic Amnesty: the tricky balance of important human rights issues with the lighter side of life; and Made by Many, in collaboration with our Ruby on Rails development partner New Bamboo, are very proud to have played a part in helping Amnesty get the message out to the wider population.

We worked very closely with Amnesty to define their online campaigning needs and ambitions before entering into a period of service definition to flesh out exactly what the site would do and how. The close relationship with Amnesty and New Bamboo continued throughout the project’s design and development. We’re looking forward to the future as Amnesty’s commitment to the web as an additional campaigning channel grows.

The site was built over an intensive 3-month period using Agile project, design and development methodologies (more of which we’ll reveal in a future blog post) and in true Agile style, the site will continue to be improved with iterative releases. Keep an eye on the site (and this blog) for release of more features over the coming weeks.

So what can you do on Protect The Human? Well, you can share, comment on and bookmark content from around the web to spread the word about human rights issues that matter to you.

And you can show your support by contributing the smallest action. What we’re aiming to do is to encourage more people to get involved with human rights without banging the drum and coming over all heavy-handed.

Your contribution can be as quick as a comment on a video, gallery or bookmark you’ve seen on Protect The Human. Or you could send it to a friend. For anyone who wants to spend a little more time, users can add their own bookmarks, create their gallery of images or upload a video relating to human rights.

We anticipate that the site will significantly contribute to Amnesty UK’s target to engage with 1 million people by 2011.

Stay tuned for a case study on the project with more detail on how we worked together with both Amnesty and New Bamboo.