Google Fellowship - Our learnings and reflections

During my time at HURIDOCS we were lucky to become a grantee of the Google AI Impact Challenge. Of more than 2600 applicants Google.org selected 20 organizations which address social and environmental challenges with the use of artificial intelligence.

Our vision is to empower human rights defenders with machine learning to provide free access to information and to alleviate the tedious and error-prone process of manually extracting relevant information in large document collections.

Besides a grant of one million USD, HURIDOCS took part in the 6-month Launchpad Accelerator program. Experts in AI, User Research, Project Management, Software Development and Storytelling were mentoring our journey, challenged our vision, gave invaluable advice and kept us focused and on the right track.

From October 2019 till March 2020 we had another incredible support: the Google.org Fellowship. This is an opportunity for Google employees to do full-time pro bono work for up to six months with a non-profit organization.

At HURIDOCS we welcomed seven Googlers supporting our work in making text classification accessible to human rights organisations. Their expertise ranged from user research, project and product management to machine learning, software development and UX design.

During this time of collaboration our project advanced incredibly fast and at the same time we learned a lot in the process.

In two interviews these learnings and reflections are gathered:

• HURIDOCS staff
• Google fellows