You're listening to a stage talk titled studio
researchers versus the misinformation machine.
This week we were joined by a professor and a
former student from the open source global justice
investigations lab at Utrecht University. We
discussed how projects like this one have been
set up to develop open source research techniques
and in turn critical thinking skill sets across
a number of disciplines. Could it be one answer
to the rise in fake news? You can find links
to all the resources mentioned in the talk in
the podcast description. This talk was hosted
by me, Charlotte Marr, on Thursday the 9th of
October 2025 in the Bellycap Discord server.
Alright, I think it's about time we start. Okay,
welcome back to the Stage Talk series and hello
if you're new. This is a series where we interview
people doing cool things in the open source research
field. Today we're speaking to those behind the
Open Source Global Justice Investigations Lab
at Utrecht University. The lab is a course students
at the university can elect to take. It consists
of being taught practical OSINT skills like geolocation
and chronolocation from leading experts. and,
unique to the lab, establishing a connection
with societal partners like newsrooms and civil
society organisations to work together towards
addressing global challenges in a hands -on manner.
Students using the newfound school's skillset
have been tackling topics of food scarcity, deforestation
and conflict, as well as much more, with larger
organisations from the Financial Times to Amnesty
International. But that's what our speakers today
are here to talk to you about, so I won't spoil
any more of their speech. Professor Dr. Breanne
McGonigal -Lye joins us. She's one of the lead
project members and specializes in human rights,
transitional justice, frictum rights, international
criminal law, and international criminal procedure.
Felix Demerce used to be a student on the course,
so can speak directly from his experience and
now acts as a student assistant for the Global
Justice Lab. As we talk, please make sure to
add your questions in the chat box via the message
bubble icon in the top right corner of your screen.
And please note within your question, if you
do not want me to read your username out, because
as I mentioned, this is being audio recorded.
Okay. Let's hear more about this academic solution
to misinformation. Over to you both. Thank you.
Thank you, Charlie. We are really excited to
be here. jumped at the opportunity to share what
we've been doing here in Utrecht and hopefully
we can inspire others if you're based at universities
but also elsewhere to try to set up these types
of labs because one of our visions, one of our
goals is to create a larger network of these
types of university labs around the world. I
will start and then I'll pass it on to Felix.
So you can tell you more specifics about some
of our projects, but I'll tell you a little bit
about how we, the history of the lab, how we
got set up and some of the choices that we made
as we've gone along. So we're about to start
year three, but the setup of the lab started
much, much earlier. As Charlie mentioned, my
research is in the documentation of serious human
rights violations and how that gets used in different
processes from the National Criminal Court to
human rights treaty bodies, but also domestically.
And I was doing research for a paper on the role
that universities play in documenting serious
international crimes. And I came across the amazing
human rights investigations lab at Berkeley,
their human rights center. And I happened to
know Alexa Koenig from earlier work that I had
done. So I had called her up to interview her
for that paper that I was writing. And a one
-hour interview turned into a much longer conversation
where I was fully convinced that what they had
set up at Berkeley with their investigations
lab is something that we absolutely needed for
our students here in Utrecht. And not just students
in law where I'm based, I'm based at the law
department, but actually for students across
all disciplines. And at that moment, I started
to set things in motion to try to emulate what
they had done here in Utrecht and to make that
work within our structures. And thankfully at
Utrecht University, at that time, funding streams
have changed. But at that time, the university
had quite a lot of money for teachers like myself
to innovate and to develop new interdisciplinary
course offerings. So I have a really good network
across the university. And I said, hey, here
are some of my ideas. Who would be interested?
And we had a group of teachers from media and
communications, from AI and sciences, from cultural
anthropology say, wow, we want to be involved
in this. This sounds fantastic. And I'm really
proud of the facts. It's been over four years,
four and a half. from our first meeting, all
of those teachers are still involved. Not one
teacher has dropped. And we've only taken on
more teachers from conflict studies, but also
from criminology and others. So that's something
I'm really proud of, that the teachers that got
involved over four years ago are still very committed
to this lab. We spent over a year setting it
up because we thought very deeply about the interdisciplinary
nature of the lab. How are we going to get students
to really work together on interdisciplinary
teams. What does that mean? We also thought very
deeply about what types of societal partners
we wanted to work with. So the trans -disciplinary
nature of the lab. Are we going to select them?
I had been doing 20 years of societal partner
work together with students. So a lot of our
partners, we drew from those partnerships. So
we had a long -standing relationship with them.
An example of that is Friends of the Earth, thinking
about how best to formulate the lab with team
-taught lectures on the basis of global justice
and ethics and framing and biases in media, et
cetera, and then the real skills training, so
the OC skills trainings. And I think we were
a little bit naive. We thought we could learn
skills and teach them ourselves. And I can tell
you, I am not good at open source investigation.
I really gave it a shot. I followed a lot of
different trainings and it just became very obvious
that I suck at this. And we got put into touch
with Giancarlo Fiorella, who I'm sure all of
you guys know, from Bellingcat. And together
with him, we hired him to advise us on the skills
trainings and he has just become an integral
part of our teaching team. So largely our trainings
are carried out by Giancarlo, but also by others
from Bellingcat, but also other professionals.
I'm thinking of Laurie Treffers and others. So
we've been really blessed with that because what
we realized was that we would be doing a disservice
to the students. if we were going to give them
amateur trainings done by someone like myself.
What I really pride myself on within this lab,
what we all do, is that the trainings are of
the highest level. And then immediately they
get to implement what they've learned by working
with societal partners on world projects that
contribute to global justice, both for human
rights violations as well as for environmental
harm. And yeah, the first year was a couple of
years ago and we had 25 students. We grew to
32 students and six partners or seven partners.
And this year, I just sent the email out to the
team. I was really thrilled. We had 74 applications
and the emails to students will be going out
shortly. We've selected around 50 students. So
we see within three years a doubling of the number
of students who will be able to participate,
which is great. And in fact, you know, the biggest
challenge right now, it's not about the student
learning or the satisfaction of our societal
partners. It's the funding. So, Alexa Koenig
and I are actually writing a piece together on
the challenges that we both face, her at Berkeley
and myself here at Utrecht on the issue of funding
and how to ensure that these labs are sustainable
and not just a year by year, but actually for
the longer term, because our universities love
these courses, but with the current budget cuts
that every university is experiencing at the
moment in the Netherlands, it's becoming more
and more of a challenge. But our colleagues in
the US are facing the same, so there's some solidarity
there, and hopefully we can tackle it together.
And Felix, I'll turn it over to you so you can
do a deep dive into more of the projects that
have been carried out. Yeah, sure. Thank you
very much, Rhian. And just a little bit about
myself. When I joined the lab, I was doing a
bachelor's in international relations here in
Utrecht. And I was always interested in conflict.
And I also do my master's in conflict studies
and human rights. So I was super excited that
this was an opportunity to do at Utrecht University
and having something practical and being able
to work with societal partners. And I really
loved it. I loved it. The skills trainings where
you learn all the basics, geolocation, chronolocation,
satellite imagery analysis. We did some flight
tracking, vessel tracking. So a lot of different
skills and we could apply that immediately in
projects with societal partners. And I want to
highlight two that were quite recent actually,
but got a little bit of attention. because they
did a great job. So this year, we had a group
of students working with Financial Times, and
there is an article on our website that shows
the research in which they contributed. And it
was on, yes, that link. And it was on arms trafficking
to Laidese Gaff. And what our students did were
they... contributed to two things. First, they
use satellite imagery and historical imagery
on Google Earth to first identify potential landstrips
where planes could fly to and smuggling them
in the arms. And then try to go through history
and see when there were claims so they could
maybe be linked to arms shipments to Haiti. And
afterwards with social media analysis of accounts
of many of these gangs and there are a lot of
these gangs in our meeting and they usually post
videos and brandish the weapons they managed
to get a hold of. And they mapped out which gangs
had which weapons so they could again be linked
to some shipments. And one other very interesting
project was with our societal partner witness.
And they did research into the end bad governance
protests in Nigeria. because there was a lot
of violence and our students using the skills
that they learned in the geolocation workshop
by John Carlin. They geolocated a lot of footage
from those protests and mapped out the violence
during these days. But they also overcame a lot
of challenges. Specifically, there wasn't a lot
of street view images in Nigeria in the locations
that they were looking at. So they were able
to use satellite imagery instead to help with
the geolocation. but also they figured out that
on YouTube you have a lot of videos in specific
towns of people just driving through their town
and showing off their town. So they could use
those images and that footage to match with satellite
imagery and the limited street imagery to kind
of triangulate where footage was taken even though
street food imagery wasn't really available.
So that was also very interesting. And we did
a lot of different projects over the years. So
if you have any other questions, please let me
know. And then I think we'll go back to you Charney.
Amazing. Thank you so much for taking us through
what it looks like at the lab. And it's really
interesting actually to hear that some of the
lab is based on what exists at Berkeley. We actually
spoke to Alexa from Berkeley recently. kind of
recently on covering gender -based violence as
well, which Merel has linked in the chat. So
please do have a listen to that because their
program there is amazing and also has incredible
learnings from it. And I'm sure many people in
this audience will be really interested to hear
your report on funding as well, Brienne, when
it comes out. So please do pinpoint that to us.
I wanted to ask to start with, and I can see
some audience questions coming in as well. Please
do keep popping them in the chat. I wanted to
ask to start with, why is open source research,
why was that the focus specifically rather than
traditional journalism methods or traditional
methods of research? Why is OSINT the answer
for developing critical thinking skills and kind
of the aims of this particular lab? Yeah, I mean,
I think that there's a there's a couple points
there to make because I was triggered when you
said why is it the answer and it's it's not necessarily
the answer and we stressed with our students
open source investigations is one umbrella method
to help us verify information that we come across
online. And that is hugely important in today's
world where we see this upsurge of disinformation,
malinformation, misinformation, however it comes
at us. What we're trying to train our students
in is to be critical thinkers. I mean, that's
the basis of almost every university strategic
plan has that you want to develop students into
critical global citizens. One way in order to
get them to be very aware of this information
overload that they're encountering online in
the digital space is to be able to verify certain
information and open source methods embrace that
verification process and have a very good methodology
for making it transparent and reproducible and
all of those ideas coincide very nicely with
our traditional research methods and approaches
within all different disciplines at the university.
So I think there was a very good match there
with what we do at university, but thinking about
it in a digital space and thinking about it for
the new tools that are available online. That's
one. In addition, I think from my fields, so
a lot of our students come from law. We were
seeing an increase in the use of digital evidence
domestically, but also internationally. And at
the same time, within the Dutch context, every
Dutch person will know about the downing of MH17
and the role that Bellingcat played in the documentation
that led to the identification of not just state
actors, but specific individuals, and then the
handing over of that information to the state.
So all of those things combined really made it
very salient here. at the university to say,
hey, this is why open source investigations is
so important. So the disinformation side coupled
with what has happened in the Netherlands really
made the university take notice. So they were
our first big financial backer. But then when
I went for national funding, the national understanding
of these things was at already quite a high level.
I didn't have to explain them because of the
MH17 incident. And that helped. So I think we
tried to explain that it's one method amongst
others, but that it's a highly, highly relevant
and important, particularly as more and more
information is available online. From someone
who has to consistently explain. open source
research to people. I know how believing it must
have been to have had that understanding already
in house. Just on that question quickly, Felix,
did it change your perspective on research following
these kinds of techniques and methods as part
of the course? Honestly, it did. I already knew
a tiny bit about open source research from a
documentary I watched about Christian Kriberg.
And I was already kind of captivated by it. And
then I saw this pop up in an email from university
and I was like, I need to do this. And honestly,
it was eye opening in the sense that I always
say that academic research is not necessarily
my thing and that I like more practical research.
And for me, open source was a way to do more
practical research to have a more tangible impact
on some of the things I studied. using theory
at university. But now I also know and notice
in my masters, I can incorporate open source
research into my academic research. And I really
like that kind of linkage now of being able to
Go out on the internet, find images, geolocate
them, chronolocate them, map them out and kind
of create an overview and alter these events
from an academic point of view. And so I'm actually,
I'm really thankful I did the course because
it's just so nice. And now I really look at research
in a different way. We're thankful you took the
course. Yeah, I think in the chat there's quite
a few people who now want to take the course.
Some were saying earlier that it's not fair that
these kinds of things didn't exist when they
were students. A lot of shouts out for Christian
as well, obviously a former Bellingcat employee
and now at the New York Times. We've got a few
interesting questions from the audience. Doggy
Dog, nice Discord username. asked, how do you
choose what to verify slash care about? I think
critical thinking and research and learning are
the cure to misinformation and bias. But if you
cared about everything and researched everything,
you would be playing a never -ending game of
whack -a -mole, right? How do you choose what
the students focus on when it comes to your research
projects? That's a really great question. We
first select our societal partners. Our aim is
to really establish lasting relationships with
those partners. Like in the past, I used to pick
a new societal partner each year for the law
clinic, for example. This is different. For this,
we really want long -standing relationships.
So we work with an organization that we think
we can work with over a number of years. And
we ask them, do you have open source investigations
that are ongoing as part of your work and your
projects that could be useful for the students
to contribute to. And also there's a learning
component for the students. So the students also
have to produce something, whether that's for
the societal partner or for our lab, in addition
to the work that they do for the societal partner.
And so the societal partner will come back. Usually
it's ongoing at the moment. So our partners come
up with whatever their current projects are that
they're working on. They put a proposal and they
send that back to us. We, as the teachers within
the program, look at that proposal. We think
about, okay, is this challenging enough? Does
it draw on skills that we cover within the lab?
Is it feasible within the timeframe? We do have
some time constraints. And if those things are
all a go, then we bring it to the students. Students
are able to make a selection, so they're able
to put their preference one, two, or three. In
the first two iterations of the lab, all the
students got their first or second choice, which
has been phenomenal. And actually, in the first
year, every student got their first choice, which
I don't know how that worked out, but it did.
And in the second year, I think two, no, even
more, three -fourths got their first choice and
the rest got their second. Then they sit with
that project description and they have to prep
for the societal partner meeting, which the students
run themselves. And there, they also think about,
well, is this challenging enough for us? They
don't really have a good understanding yet, but
they have to think about those things. They have
to learn about the projects. And we see that
some of the projects change. than in consultation
between the students and the societal partner.
Whether that was because originally it was too
big of a project and the students want to scale
it back or vice versa. Sometimes the projects
were too simple and the students are asking for
more challenges and so the societal partner has
to add additional layers. So it's that triangle
that has worked really well. It's a well thought
out process, not something that's done on the
whim when, for example, a breaking news story
comes out. It's a more thought out process, just
like any long form investigation would be as
well. A billing cap, for example. I wanted to
ask actually related to that, is it easier? Because
I know obviously you've covered kind of the local
Palestinian protests as well. I think Felix,
you did a timeline on that with our very own
John Carlo in the audience. Is it easier to work
on localized issues than work on issues, stories
like the one in Nigeria where you mentioned some
of those issues that you had just from working
far away? Is there any advantages to working
on localized issues in comparison with international
topics of which many of the open source researchers
in this particular community are very well -versed
at. Yeah, definitely. You know, that's a good
one. I think both types have their own advantages,
but also their own disadvantages. I realized
that also working with John Cardinal, because
he hadn't been to the location where the protests
happened in Utrecht University. Because actually,
just to explain, there were pro -Palestine protests
last year on the 7th and 9th of May. And I recreated
for that at the request of the UTech University
boards because they wanted to see what happened
when. And there was also a police response. So
we mapped out everything in a timeline. And I
realized that for me, and I worked on it with
another student assistant back then, Juliette.
It was really interesting too. We didn't really
have to geolocate the footage because we knew
the surroundings. We knew exactly where this
was. We didn't really have to look at that. So
we spent most of our time chronolocating. And
on projects like witness, you don't know the
environment and it's super hard sometimes when
Google street view is lacking or satellite imagery
is outdated to find the exact location. So there
are different challenges and I realized that...
Arlo told me once that when he came to the campus
again, after we did that research into the pro
-Palestine protest, that he kind of recognized
exactly where all the footage was taken. And
that it kind of looked, I think he said smaller
or bigger, but he can correct me in the chat,
which one it was, from looking on video and then
seeing it in real life. So I do think that we
had a distinct advantage researching our known
environment. And in other projects we also I
noticed that some of our students came from the
region where an investigation was based and they
had the insider knowledge that really helped
with the investigation, be it language or just
realizing that some towns use specific names
to indicate specific common areas. So that can
really help. And I think it's nice because we
have such an international and interdisciplinary
group of students. that we can kind of help each
other during those projects. It might have been
easier for him as the investigator, but it was
quite a challenge for me having to navigate the
political landscape since it was a request from
our university board. And I must say we really
had discussions amongst the teachers about whether
or not to do this. In the end, I'm really, really
happy that we did. But it really was challenging
to have those discussions with our then rector
and head of security, et cetera. So I would do
it again, but it takes, you know, we don't have
to have those types of conversations when you're
doing it or an NGO that's operating globally.
That political aspect is not part of the process,
but it definitely played a role in this one.
And I guess when the stories are further away
as well, that's where publishing partners can
come in and help, right? For example, with the
Haiti story, I'm guessing that the Financial
Times helped with that aspect of understanding
and geolocation. Is that the case? Do you often
try and pick partners as well based on the kind
of projects that have been proposed? Yeah, I
mean, at the moment, we have not a waiting list,
but we have a number of organizations that have
indicated they would like to work with the lab.
And we, at the moment, don't have the capacity.
But for Financial Times, actually, that came
from Alison Killing, who had learned about the
lab. And she kind of followed us. She first wanted
to see how the lab would operate and what was
its ethos and whether there would be a match.
And there was, and that was wonderful. So she
came to us. and really wanted to learn about
how we have structured the more pedagogical side
of things, which we really valued so that we
found that really nice. Yeah, we're big fans
of Alison as well here at Bellingcat. She's been
a contributor at the organization for a while
and is now head of visual investigations at the
Financial Tides. We actually did a stage talk
with her as well a couple of years ago. I wonder
if Murot can find it and pop it in the chat.
But do have a listen to that and check out her
work as well. It's amazing. Right. We have so
many questions in the chat now, so I want to
make sure that I address them all. John Carlo
asked earlier, you've kind of answered this a
little bit. Have you noticed any trends in the
type of students who've applied to the lab over
the years? You mentioned law students. Is there
any particular grouping that has appeared? So
I was just going through all the applications
last night, so I can tell you quite a bit about
the new group. Well, it also, you know, it depends
on where you market it. So we have to, it's an
elective. It spans 20 weeks. So it's a unique
type of elective. Most of our courses are 10
-week courses. I think we're one of the only
ones that is 20. But we did that because you
really need time to learn these skills and apply
them. But we do have mostly from Felix's master's
program, Conflict Studies and Human Rights, or
his bachelor's International Relations. And from
law, those are the three most dominant groups.
But we actually have students from five of the
seven faculties. So we have students from geosciences,
sciences, cultural anthropology, I'm trying philosophy
of science, which is from the sciences. Yeah,
so that's for us really exciting. We want to
keep it diverse. We do understand which the teachers
are coming from. Yeah, these areas that are most
dominant. So we market it amongst our own students.
So yeah, that's kind of how it will always stay
that way. What we did notice this year in the
applications in the first year I think there
was one, maybe Felix, you were the only, maybe
you and Julia were the only two who really came
in with some knowledge and experience with open
source investigations. And the year after we
had a few more, you know, who had dabbled a bit,
some thinking of Lars and others who had dabbled
a bit. And this year, so many of the applications
They noted that they do the Bellingcat game challenges
online or who they follow in this space. So that
was really remarkable to see that in these few
short years, we have students that are very clearly
interested in combining and bettering their skills
in open source investigations and to combine
that with their academic work. So there's been
a huge change in that direction. And we have
more females than males this year. Wow, that's
so cool to hear. Not just from the female perspective,
because I think that's incredible, and unusual
in our fields, but also that more and more people
are becoming well -versed in the techniques as
well. If you want to try the bell and cat challenge,
I've put the link in the chat as well if you
haven't heard me shouting about it already in
here. I'll also link it in the description of
the podcast. It's a really good way to test your
geolocation and coronal location skills as well
as ship tracking this month, which is quite fun.
Going back to the questions, we've had a lot
of people ask about whether they can get involved
as a non -student or remotely. Ropestone said,
is there any way to get involved with the learning
journey remotely? Is there a network that we
could join to get involved in the discussion?
And Sarah asked, how can people who are not associated
with the university get involved? As much as
they would love to get an advanced degree, it's
not financially feasible to stop working and
go back to school. Do you have any moments where
general public or independent researchers can
get involved with the project? Or is it more
something that might inspire a similar model
closer to hope? So we started discussions last
year on how, yeah, how to reach people outside
university spaces, or like for people who can't
necessarily follow our lab through the university.
We're still experimenting with this. I think
we had some talks about potentially doing, setting
up a hackathon. also together with another university.
We still want to try to do that. That would be
a very small way, but also together with our
societal partners so that we would open it up,
so maybe open up some of the challenges that
our students are tackling to a larger audience.
But we don't have anything concrete yet. We really
liked the idea and the discussions, but I think
Amsterdam went with it and we weren't able to
make it work. And so that's one way. Another
way is Felix actually set up for our alumni now,
a Discord server. So those are individuals who
are working out in the field and they've graduated,
but they want to continue their skills. But again,
I think that's only open to our alumni of the
program. We haven't yet opened it up for everyone,
though I think in the Netherlands you can follow
If you are based in the Netherlands, you can,
I think, apply and follow just one module. But
I'm not sure how that works. But yeah, for now,
it's a bit limited. Amazing to hear. I'll have
to brainstorm with Giancarlo, what we can do.
Giancarlo, get on it. It's amazing to hear that
it's a thought though. And obviously there's
buy -in for it with the amount of people in the
chat asking for it. We've had a question through
about Tools, basically, as your team utilizes
financial analysis tools or databases within
your projects. I'm not aware if you have done
any financial -based investigations, but Felix,
maybe you could take us through a few of the
tools and techniques that the students are learning
on the course. You mentioned geolocation and
coronal location, but which ones are really emphasized
and why to the students? Yeah, sure. And regarding
financial investigations, last year we had a
guest lecture of a researcher at SOMO with his
corporate investigations, which was super interesting.
And as Brienne already said, we would love to
work with all societal harkens on all different
types of projects, but we can't accept all of
them. But maybe in a way our alumni collective
can maybe also start. working with partners like
this and then we are very open to do financial
analysis but we haven't done it yet. And regarding
the other skills, we have a few workshops or
skills workshops we call them that Giancarlo
gives as well. And most importantly we do geolocation,
chroma location in which we also learn how to
interpret shadows. So we do shadow calc and other
tools. We, of course, teach the students how
to do reverse image search and everything that
is related to geolocation in that sense. We do
vessel and flight tracking with different sites
like Flight Radar and or vesselfinder .com if
I remember correctly. And on top of that, we
also work a lot with satellite imagery. In that
sense, we also teach them how to use these different
bandwidths that you see on satellite imagery
and apply them in their research. So there are
a lot of different tools and we also look at
the Bellingcat toolkit for inspiration because
you guys have a lot of different, very useful
tools. And for social media analysis as well,
we use a lot of different tools that also come
from you. It sounds like a good solid grounding
in a lot of different open source research techniques,
many of which we explore in the server, and I'm
sure someone can drop their toolkit link in the
chat as well. From the course, have you had a
lot of appetite for people going into open source
fields afterwards, like changing their mind about
their career path after doing the particular
course? Yes, and much to the chagrin of some
of the thesis supervisors, because they also
not only do they want to go in that field, but
many of them want to change their thesis topic
to focus on some link with open source investigations.
And I have received some emails from other supervisors
saying, not cool. We've been working on the topic
and now they want to change. But yeah, I mean,
at least in the student reflections received
and actually analyzed and published on a number
I would say really It's anecdotal now. I should
actually probably try to track this, but really
a number of our graduates have indicated that
they want to go somewhere in the direction that
uses open source investigation. So either leaning
towards more journalistic endeavors or more government
intelligence endeavors, but where these skills
are actually sought after. It's too attractive
of a skill set, obviously. People just want to
change their thesis at the last minute because
of it. That's really cool. I love it. I can imagine
you're not the favorite though after that. Molly,
Erica, actually, just going back to the funding
issue that you mentioned, asked a question earlier,
you mentioned funding as a kind of primary concern
and as I understood it, point of constraint for
the growth of the program. What are some of the
ethical considerations underpinning your program's
decisions on what streams of funding to pursue?
I'm particularly curious about the overlap of
capitalism for profit businesses and academia
research nonprofits. How do you balance need
for funding, the shortcomings of public funds
and the encroach of enterprise? That's a fantastic
question. So we have one exception and that's
Financial Times London. But the way that their
structure is that their investigation side isn't
their for -profit side. So they still count as
non -profit in our view. And then all of our
others are NGOs. And our societal partners do
not have money. So they're not in any way contributing
financially. They contribute to the learning
of our students. They take the time. out of their
schedules to really mentor and work with our
students. So we don't receive any money from
any of our societal partners. And I don't want
that because, again, that disrupts our decision
-making and our relationship. And I think that's
alluded to a bit in that question. What I argue,
and I find myself having to do it a lot lately
because I'm fundraising at the moment, internally,
is that these labs, whether they're Berkeley
or here or in the UK, we work closely with the
lab in Belfast. These labs epitomize the strategic
plans of the universities. It's about interdisciplinary
collaboration with societal partners contributing
to making a better world. And if we're meeting
all of these goals that the universities have
set in innovative ways, and really well thought
out ways, then I feel they should be structurally
supported. It's a hard case to make at the moment.
But when we go for then external funding, so
I'm fighting internally for funding. And so far,
we've been very successful. So this is the fourth
year that we've had predominantly internal funding.
So I am very grateful, actually, to the support
we've received from Utrecht University. But each
year you have to get more funding internally,
and it's a lot of time and effort. Externally,
we've predominantly looked at national education
funding that's available in the Netherlands.
So we received a large amount from the National
Comenius Network, which was wonderful. And I'll
continue to look for those types of national
funding. And that's for education innovation
projects. I'm also working with a business developer
here at the university to look for foundation
funding. Or if any of you online have a very,
you know, wealthy aunt or uncle who, you know,
wants to contribute to a good project, let me
know. I'm happy to speak with them. But we're
looking at foundation funding, international
and nationally. So, yeah, that's kind of who
we go for in terms of funding. I won't accept
from our societal partners because I think that
changes the relationship too much. Yeah. Joan
Caller says, wealthy uncles to the front. Or
aunts, wealthy aunts. Soto Knife says, I'll be
in touch when I win the lottery. Please do shout
out any good funding sources. You mentioned Belfast.
Is that Queen Mary, the university there? Queen's
University. Is it easier to apply for funding
as a trio of labs? Have you found that bunching
up as kind of a larger mission, let's call it,
is easier when it comes to outside external funding?
Well, funny that you say that. We are exploring
that at the moment. We had a really wonderful
conference that we organized here in June. where
we try to bring different labs together to really
think about, because all the labs, by the way,
you know, Earthly, first of all, has the gold
standard of labs, and they struggle with funding.
But the same is true at UCLA, at Queens, at the
Heritage School in Berlin, Nottingham, all of
them. Everywhere, there's this struggle because
we're seen as extra. even when we're integrated
in certain minor, like we're integrated in a
minor, even then the study point, the way the
structures are set up is that the study points
you receive are for one teacher and 25 students.
And we don't have that structure because if you're
doing transdisciplinary work, you need smaller
class sizes or smaller student to teacher ratios.
So these types of labs are expensive. But we
are now at the exploratory stages with other
labs around the world trying to think about how
we can leverage our networks and, like you said,
apply for different funding together. We do hope
to create a network of these types of labs also
so that we can share projects and materials and
learn from one another. So we're exploring that
at the moment. That sounds amazing. Molly Erica
just replied saying, thank you so much for the
thoughtful answer. I appreciate you detailing
the sources of funding and the line you and your
organization have drawn to maintain your institutional
integrity. Fingers crossed you're able to secure
what funding you need to continue expanding.
We've got about 15 minutes left, so please keep
your questions coming. On that point then, let's
say, I don't know, a rich uncle or auntie comes
along. And money is no object. What would you
both like to see in the lab? What would you add
or change about the lab as it is now, if money
was no object? That is a really good question.
I have to be careful here because the lab is
already so great. No, the lab is honestly amazing,
but maybe we've been working with some satellite
imagery. But the top, top tier imagery would
be great to use. But I think many of you know
that can also be quite expensive. So maybe those
very elaborate and very specialized tools would
be great to get. But otherwise, I think we're
doing very well with what we got. What about
you, Prienne? Immediately, I thought... I would
expand in size because we receive 74 applications.
I would love to accept all of those students
and we can't. So I would absolutely want to have,
you know, more interested teachers be able to
supervise more students. So I would expand in
size. I would also look to, right now we have
this interdisciplinary transdisciplinary team,
but what I'd love to see is that we also have
disciplinary groupings that then feed into our
work. So I'll give you an example. We have a
media and communications department of scholars
and students. Imagine if they had a group, a
media lab that does the visualization work. I
would love that. We would have our open source
lab, we'd have a more disciplinary visualization
lab that would help us and our partners. Same
would be for law. So we would have our lab, the
open source lab, working with partners, but we
could have a law clinic that carries it a step
further and does legal analysis connected to
all of the projects. So I would use the money
to pay for... space and teacher supervision so
that we can grow this lab and make it even more
relevant to our students and our communities.
I love that, building on the expertise of the
other disciplines as well and bringing that in.
I would love to apply for a Bellingcat Visualizations
team, by the way. John -Kala, if you're listening,
if you want to fund that, that would be great.
Yeah, that sounds amazing. And obviously, yes,
satellite tools are super expensive. That is
a pain that many of the independent researchers
in here struggle with every day. But other tools
are available, as you can find in the Bell and
Cap toolkit. Oh, and I didn't even add, we have
a professor of AI in our lab. be able to run
a group of students that further develops AI
-based tools, again, to help our societal partners
and to help our students in the projects that
they're working on. Yeah. If there's a... That's
a win the lottery. Let's get this. Funding aside,
if there's any other academics listening to this,
do you think other universities could adopt this
model? And what would be your advice to them?
if they're listening and thinking about it. Yeah,
so there's absolutely we have a larger we modeled
ourselves on Berkeley. So we went for we thought
go for the best and try to even make it even
better. But that you can absolutely run these
on a smaller scale. There's there's no doubt
about that. So I've I've spoken the last few
years with teachers from around the world who
are looking to start it on a much smaller scale.
And that's no problem. So It just depends on
what your goals are and the learning, the goals
of the lab and the learning objectives for the
students. So you can do more disciplinary teams.
I think about Queen's University, Belfast, for
example, theirs is really, it's predominantly
run by a PhD candidate there who is phenomenal.
And so Lydia Miller, she is really phenomenal.
She does it with a group of students. I think
it's around 10 to 15 students and herself, and
they work with organizations like GLAN. So it's
not 50 students. It's not necessarily aimed to
be interdisciplinary. They work with I think
one or two societal partners at the most. So
it absolutely can be done on a much smaller scale.
It doesn't need to be as big as we're aiming
for. I will try and find that link to Lydia's
lab as well, if there is one, and pop that in
the chat in a second. Thanks for mentioning that.
Somebody put in the chat, as someone in the cyber
security space, I feel there is a huge need for
more of this type of training in degree slash
university programs. It's obviously something
that Bellingcat also approached in high schools
as well, with the student view project as well.
is something that we felt was also needed in
the educational, academia space. Yeah. Yeah.
And if I can add, not only in terms of the security,
which is huge, I mean, my learning curve, it's
just exponential when it comes to that, but also
something we haven't touched on yet. And that's
the training that we give on trauma and resilience
to the students. And it actually came out of
conversations with Alexa originally, but also
with all of our societal partners. Every single
one of them emphasized that this is also an important
aspect that we would need to cover in the course.
So we were able to work with some trainers, all
of our teachers and all of our students receive
trauma and resilience training. And this made
me as a the educator very aware of this gap at
the university. So not just for open source investigations,
but actually we have other courses that cover
genocide studies, or we have other courses that
train medical doctors that are trained to operate,
you know, life and death situations on children.
they do not receive trauma and resilience training.
So I'm now working with a colleague from the
medical center and we are taking what we've built
up here in the lab and we're going to try to
expand it across the university because this
is really, we feel that we really need to train
our students who may or may not go into the open
source investigations field. But in any case,
this type of training, if they're being exposed,
to material that has potentially triggering material,
whether written or visual, they need to have
these best practices in mind and tips for how
to recognize it and then how to address it. If
I can add to that, for me, this was really useful,
especially during the project. The first project
I did was with amnesty on violence against journalists
by police during protests. And sometimes the
images were really hazy. And afterwards, after
the lab, I've also continued with open source
research on the site, verifying footage from
the West Bank and from Lebanon. And then having
these practical tips that I got through the trauma
and resilience skills, like blurring the images
initially, so you can first check out what it
kind of is, never listening to the audio initially,
only if you need it. And working together and
not working at night, these practical tips I
use on a day basis now. And I saw that there's
also a very good article written again by John
Garland, also about trauma and resilience that
everyone should read, I think. So this was really
valuable to me in a practical sense, and it just
helps keep the work sustainable and not be renounced
because you're only looking at sometimes horrifying
images. Yes, I was just about to mention that
article. I think it's probably one of our most
quoted ones, one of our guides. If one of the
mods could drop it in to the chat, that would
be really useful. But I will include it in the
podcast description as well. It's such an important
part of research that often gets overlooked and
I'm really glad that you mentioned it. We've
only got a few minutes left and I now have quite
a few... Lots of people coming in with late questions.
Keys asked us quickly on the trauma training.
Do you have any resources for that online based
on the source, what was taught to the students?
Do any of those resources exist online that the
public can view, for example? Yeah, actually
Berkeley's website has amazing resources available
online. So I would point to their investigations
lab. They have a whole page dedicated specifically
to this with links to tips and articles and resources.
I point people in that direction, but it's a
really good idea. We can actually think about
putting our materials, I'm looking at Felix because
he's our assistant, but we can maybe think about
putting some of our materials online for this
coming year. I think that's a great thing. And
I usually recommend the DART Center, which is
great. And the Global Investigative Journalism
Network also has quite a few articles that can
be useful for this. And there are lots of leads
now in the chat that everyone should check out.
Yeah. Thank you for adding those there, everybody,
including those links to the Darts Center that
you just mentioned and Berkeley. And as I mentioned
earlier, Alexa in her stage talk actually on
gender -based violence, which you can find on
our podcast platforms under Stage Talks for Bill
and Kat. She also addressed quite a lot of their
trauma work, which is really useful. We've got
a really simple question that might be a great
end, actually, if that's okay with everybody.
What is a societal partner? What is one? And
perhaps we could address, for example, if somebody's
listening who is from an organization or from
a publication that may want to work with you.
You mentioned there's a big waiting list, so
I'll just remind people of that. But what are
you specifically looking for now? Where's the
need in case somebody like that is listening
and wants to get added to that beautiful waiting
list that you already have? Yeah. So, I mean,
I must say, I sometimes catch myself because
for years working in the law clinic, we talk
about clients in law, but outside of law, that
sounds very odd. So I have... training myself
to use the term societal partner, which I think
is a much better term to use because there is
no client relationship as such. We are partners
in that triangle I talked about earlier. So our
starting point is that our societal partners
are non -profit organizations that normatively
aim to contribute to the improvement of human
rights or the environment. So that's our baseline.
And then we specifically are looking, because
our course is framed around global justice, we're
looking at organizations, they could be based
in the Netherlands, but also globally, that are
working on global justice issues. So either trying
to address serious human rights violations or
environmental harm. And those are kind of our
key indicators. That's the baseline. And then,
like I said, we were looking for long standing
relationships. So some of these organizations
we had worked with previously, like Friends of
the Earth, we've worked with PACS both previously
and last year. Witness, we had just started working
with last year, but I knew them through my work
with victims from previously. So a lot of these
organizations, it's Yeah, I just know them through
past work. And then we would say, Hey, is this
a good fit? Amazing. And then I guess the next
natural question before we wrap is how do people
get in contact with you if they have been listening
and are interested in getting involved in any
sort of way? Check out our website, but you can
also email Welcome to email me. I might say I'm
going on vacation soon, so it might take a little
bit for me to reply, but free to reach out to
Felix or myself. Really happy to answer any more
questions. I will definitely be following up
with Giancarlo about a hackathon. I didn't realize
the interest would be there, but I think that
would be a really nice way to include people
who aren't necessarily following the lab itself.
Watch this space for a potential hackathon coming
up soon. Thank you so much Felix and Brianne
for your time today. It's been amazing to hear
about your fantastic work. I'm sorry my camera's
been off this whole time. I had quite a significant
lag at the beginning and I didn't want it to
ruin our talk. But thank you so much for taking
us through all the ins and outs and It's really
inspirational, the lab, what you're doing at
Utrecht and hopefully it's served as inspiration
for some people listening as well. And we see
more of these types of labs popping up everywhere,
tackling misinformation and building media literacy
and critical thinking skills throughout. That's
my hope anyway. Thank you so much for listening
everybody. And yeah, we'll be back in two weeks
time with another Stage Talk. But until then,
thank you for listening. Thank you for having
us. Thank you for listening to the Stage Talk.
If you'd like to catch a Stage Talk live where
you can ask the guest questions, join the Bell
and Cat Discord server by visiting www .discord
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