This piece is submitted to the Knight News Challenge 08. We have an extended version here:
http://www.icuihua.org/wiki/index.php/Knight_08_Application.
Project Title:
iCuihua – a wiki-based Chinese community for class-action lawsuits
项目名称：
爱翠花 － 一个基于维基的集体诉讼中文社区
Describe your project
The purpose of our iCuihua project is to develop a wiki-based community that helps ordinary Chinese people come together to file class-action lawsuits in China. Class-action lawsuits are particularly meaningful in China as our legal system is quite distorted, and the powerful companies and the governments have a strong influence on courts. For example, in the recent “Chinese milk power scandal”, tens of thousands babies got kidney stones due to the tainted milk powder; parents were angry and some tried to file lawsuits but the courts dismissed these cases. Our project is intended to help people like these parents with our platform, and subsequently improve the human rights conditions in China. We have three core tasks.
(1) Develop a wiki-based website: “iCuihua.org”. This site is created in September 2008. We use the mediawiki as the foundation of our website. We plan to build modules that help aggregate information from three groups of people: the victims who are willing to participate class-action lawsuits, the lawyers, and the general public who care about such lawsuits for the sake of public good. All software we develop will use GNU license.
(2) Build strong relationships with multiple non-profit legal organizations. We have been working with the Open Constitution Initiative, an influential non-profit organization that promotes the public interests and provides volunteering legal services in China. We currently focus on two cases: a class-action lawsuit against the Internet Censorship in China, and a class-action lawsuit against the companies that produced contaminant baby milk powers.
(3) Maintain an active discussion group to promote the public awareness of our project and the use of our platform. We have more than 300 members so far.
How will your project improve the way news and information are delivered to geographic communities?
Our project will facilitate the information flow among the three groups of people (victims, lawyers and the public). We focus on the class-action lawsuits and pull all kinds of relevant information together. For example, for the recent tainted milk powder problem, we have set a wiki-page, and we have been in touch with more than 100 families who are willing to share their stories and fight for their own rights. By focusing on the issues directly related to people’s welfare, our project is attracting more and more attention from the people. To encourage people to contribute information, we will improve the user interface of our website so that people could do it easily on their own.
How is your idea innovative? (new or different from what already exists)
We are probably the first group in China to propose a wiki-based approach combined with class-action lawsuits to improve the human rights conditions in China. We believe this approach has a great potential to help our fellow Chinese citizens to fight for their own rights. The experiences we gain for developing this project will be shared with all people around the world.
What experience do you or your organization have to successfully develop this project?
Mr. Dong Jin Du has been worked as project manager in SAP company for more than 5 years. He sued an ISP called China Telecom for its Internet censorship, in April 2007 [7][8]. The case was lost but he has been supporting and promoting the freedom of network in China since then. He is the creator of Cuihua Discussion group, hosted in Google Groups service, and the group has attracted more than 300 remembers so far, including top-tier bloggers, media journalists, and lawyers across China. In July 2008, he made a call to initiate a class-action case to against the two largest ISP in China for their Internet censorship.
Dr. Biao Teng is a lawyer and a lecturer at the University of Politics and Law in Beijing. He has been a vocal supporter of human rights activists such as Chen Guangcheng and Hu Jia. He is also a board member of the Open Constitution Initiative (Gongmeng.cn).
Mr. Ji Ruan is currently a PhD student in the University of Liverpool, UK. While he is doing research on artificial intelligence, he is also very interested in using the information technologies to help the people to speak for their own rights. A blog-based citizen website was created by him and his friends in early 2008, and it had been attracting many visitors from Zhuji before it was blocked from the mainland of China during the Beijing Olympic Games started. He also helped to build a website for the class-action lawsuit against Internet censorship.
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