Human rights monitoring in virtual community

Holistic disability rights monitoring is essential in order to translate rights on paper into rights in reality for people with disabilities. At the same time, evidence-based knowledge produced through holistic monitoring has to be made accessible to a broad range of groups - researchers, representatives of disability community, people with disabilities, the media, policy makers, general public - and also has to contribute to building capacity within disability community around human rights issues. This article focuses on the design process of a complex Virtual Knowledge Network (VKN) as an operational tool to support mobilization and dissemination of evidence-based knowledge produced by the Disability Rights Promotion International Canada (DRPI-Canada) project. This tool is embedded in the more general framework of the project grounded in a human rights approach to disability and that acknowledges the importance of creating knowledgeable communities in order to make the disability rights monitoring efforts sustainable, advancing thus the decision making process in Canada in order to enhance the quality of life of people with disabilities.