and executed with support from Hivos’ now-defunct iGmena programme,2 involved collecting legislation related to the digital sphere in six Arab countries (Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Tunisia, Lebanon and Syria); the second, a report commissioned by the Doha Centre for Media Freedom, prompted a broad review of existing documentation of the legal and policy framework for online media in all 22 countries of the Arab League. The exchange between these two projects yielded the first iteration of both a methodology for collecting, categorising and analysing digital rights-related legislation, and a solid baseline of data on the emerging legal landscape for digital rights in the Arab region, which we now call the Arab Digital Rights Datasets (ADRD). A public version of the ADRD3 has resided on the online data visualisation platform Silk4 since 2015.5 It contains 142 individual laws from 20 Arab states, organised by country and keywords, many of them accompanied by translations to English or French. It is the product of the work of more than a dozen contributors, including lawyers, journalists, activists and technologists from the countries in question, who through an inductive research process6 gathered laws that they considered to affect digital rights. These included laws that: • Establish or limit freedom of expression, freedom to assemble, the right to privacy, the right to access information and press freedom. • Criminalise acts of speech, including over electronic channels. • Regulate the industries that operate electronic communications channels. • Govern content production and sharing, such as copyright and intellectual property laws. • Govern electronic commerce, such as etransaction and esignature laws. • Empower state surveillance. • Have been cited in digital rights-related cases. 2 3 4 https://www.igmena.org http://smex.silk.co As of August 2016, the Silk platform has been deprecated, meaning that despite allowing new accounts to be created, no technical support or development resources are being provided to the platform. The Silk platform is being taken offline on 15 December 2017. SMEX is currently working with the human rights information management NGO HURIDOCS (https://www.huridocs.org) to develop a new platform to host the data. Inductive research is a bottom-up approach by which a researcher begins with observations to detect patterns that can form the basis for a hypothesis that can be tested and developed into theory. It contrasts with deductive research that aims to test a hypothesis to prove a theory. 5 6 Working with a clearly delineated methodology By cataloguing national-level legislation affecting the online sphere, SMEX aimed to assist not only activists but also human rights lawyers, judges, law and policy makers, researchers and journalists to build credible, compelling narratives for the protection and promotion of human rights in the digitally networked sphere. In the information collected and the patterns it could help us identify, we saw numerous opportunities to advance a common understanding of emerging legal frameworks for the online realm. Free and open access to such data would help human rights lawyers locate relevant articles and guiding jurisprudence. Digital rights legal researchers or journalists could access essential texts or other data liberated from PDFs and available outside legal database paywalls. Advocates, faced with a deluge of assaults on digital rights, might discover trends or pressure points that would help them better allocate limited campaign resources. The data could also be used to brief public officials and representatives who are committed to rights but struggle to keep pace with technology’s implications for the societies we live in. Initially released in September 2015 at an Internet Policy Observatory research methods workshop in Istanbul, the datasets found an early following among researchers at civil society organisations that document and defend digital rights. In April 2016, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) released The Crime of Speech,7 a report by Wafa ben Hassine, who relied heavily on the dataset. Soon afterward, the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) published Digital rights advocacy in the Arab world and the Universal Periodic Review,8 also by Ben Hassine, and Digital safety in context: Perspectives on digital security training and human rights realities in the Arab world,9 by Reem al-Masri, both of which cited the dataset as a source. The ADRD was also presented as example of data journalism and research on the blog of the Research Center at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.10 7 Ben Hassine, W. (2016a). The Crime of Speech: How Arab Governments Use the Law to Silence Expression Online. Electronic Frontier Foundation. https://www.eff.org/pages/crime-speechhow-arab-governments-use-law-silence-expression-online 8 Ben Hassine, W. (2016b). Digital rights advocacy in the Arab world and the Universal Periodic Review. Association for Progressive Communications. https://www.apc.org/en/pubs/ digital-rights-advocacy-arab-world-and-universal-p 9 Al-Masri, R. (2016). Digital safety in context: Perspectives on digital security training and human rights realities in the Arab world. Association for Progressive Communications. https://www. apc.org/en/pubs/digital-safety-context-perspectives-digital-securi 10 http://researchcenter.journalism.cuny.edu/tag/tool / Methodology / 7