Endora

In the United States, the bulk of research on domestic extremism is done by grassroots organizations, operating in localized silos, with very little sharing of information between regions - or even locally across movements.   The goal of the Endora Project is to establish jurisdiction agnostic storage for grassroots human rights organizations, journalists, and activists, and use that space to create a centralized hub for researchers to organize their data, and opt in to sharing information with other researchers, based on a menu of use cases for the data.  By creating a network of trusted individuals and organizations pooling their oppositional research data, we believe we can not only build trust across movements between organizations, but also create a more comprehensive map of bad actors, predict trends to give early warning to regions with upcoming events, and provide incident reporting with significantly more context for prior related incidents.  

Our team started this work in abortion rights advocacy, and in that time, identified the need to centralize information about the hostile actors we were seeing out in the field, and tying information about their actions across several states together to help with existing court cases.  We have the capacity to do this, because we do not see any other options coming forward to provide an infrastructure to strategically work against the escalation of human rights violations in the United States.  There is no existing infrastructure keeping marginalized communities, activists, or journalists safe, much less creating a comprehensive road map to our opposition, and the only way we see that getting better is if we step up to do something about it. 

Ultimately, Endora seeks to pool community knowledge banks and gradually build trust and relationships between targeted groups by sharing critical safety information, and to scale that template beyond an individually targeted community, or area, to create a system that provides deeper knowledge by sharing security information across issues and across borders.