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 .gg. The music you've heard is titled Dawn by Newer Self and is courtesy of Artlist.