Presentation | Art Meets Radical Openness 2018
Festival dedicated to Art, Hacktivism & Open Culture.
Sea-Watch e. V. is a non-profit initiative dedicated to civil sea rescue of refugees. Sea-Watch operates a ship and an airplane, with which refugees in distress at sea are sought, found and rescued. In view of the humanitarian catastrophe, Sea-Watch provides emergency aid, at the same time demanding and accelerating rescue by the competent European institutions and publicly standing up for legal escape routes.
This presentation by the activists Alina Krobok and Nicolas Zemke will highlight the beginnings of Sea-Watch and its recent developments over the past three years.
Sociologist Alina Krobok will give an insight on the way the organization works and describe the current situation on the Mediterranean, where the strategies of criminalization of the humanitarian work enforced by the EU make sea rescue more and more dangerous.
The organisation is setting itself against the trend to rely on closed systems within many NGOs. Software developer Nicolas Zemke will describe the hurdles in implementation and use of open software in this dynamic environment. Nicolas will also describe the work of the Sea Watch IT and its recent developments in the field of drones and coordinating software.
sea-watch.org
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The student of Sociology, Politics and Economics, Alina Krobok, is working for Sea-Watch as deputy head of communications. She is reponsible among other things for press relations, all social media channels and building up an international community. She already worked for other initiatives which support refugees, did political work for a party and worked as youth ambassador for another NGO.
The freelance software developer Nicolas Zemke is activist at Sea-Watch since the end of 2015. He oversees Sea-Watch IT and has implemented several small software solutions for the NGO. As the situation in 2016 worsened and more and more NGOs became active in the Mediterranean, he and Joshua Krüger developed the concept for the search and rescue application, which gives the civilian rescuers a participatory coordination platform. In October 2016, the two joint several rescue-mission on the Sea-Watch 2 and the Sea-Watch 3 and were able to test their work under real conditions, resulting in the search and rescue application presented here.
Additionally he supports different projects like Flüchtlinge-willkommen.de and local initiatives for refugees and developes open software.
