How does someone report a rights violation when even the idea of speaking up is frightening? In the Serbian cities of Preshevë and Bujanoc, the Mosaic Institute is offering a concrete answer: ValleyRights.com, a tool to report rights violations quietly, safely, and without fear. While our organization has long been a regional leader in human rights education, we are rebuilding our platform from the ground up, with a new anonymous reporting module and case-notification feature.
The “ValleyRights 2.0” project is not just a technical upgrade — it is an effort to make institutional accountability tangible for a generation that often feels uninformed and powerless in the face of complicated bureaucratic systems.
Who we are and why we did it
I am Fatlind Azizi, Director of Mosaic Institute, an organization based in Serbia’s Presevo Valley. For years we have worked at the intersection of technology and rights advocacy, encouraging youth engagement and digital literacy through projects such as our “Handbook on the Rights of Albanians in the Presevo Valley,” a digital “7-Point Plan” campaign, and a training series “Presevo Valley Youth: Learn, Act, Change.” Our experience has taught us one thing: Information without a concrete tool for action remains just information.
Albanian youth in Serbia often face everyday rights violations, from address passivization, a practice in which a person’s registered residential address is administratively made inactive, potentially affecting their access to documents, services, voting, and other rights, to difficulties accessing documents or having their language rights respected. Yet, these violations are rarely reported.
The reasons are familiar: A lack of knowledge about where and how to file a complaint, fear of personal consequences, and distrust of the very institutions meant to protect them. This silence creates a data gap: Without reports, there is no evidence, and without evidence, there is no effective advocacy.
ValleyRights 2.0 aims to close this gap by turning the existing ValleyRights.com platform from a purely educational resource into an active civic tool. At the heart of the project is the “Digital Accountability Module” — not a simple contact form, but a structured system that automatically generates formal administrative requests and complaints as PDF documents, based on templates drafted by legal experts and political scientists.
The main beneficiaries are young people aged 18–30 in Preshevë and Bujanoc — both as direct users of the platform and as part of a group of 10 to 15 “Digital Monitors,” namely, selected students and activists who are trained to use the tool ethically and safely, and who then become reference points for their peers.
Steps toward implementation
The project is structured into four phases over six months.
In Phase 1, our IT team develops the new module while legal experts draft templates for administrative requests. In Phase 2, we organize two “Digital Democracy Workshops” — one in Preshevë, one in Bujanoc — training Digital Monitors in platform use, digital security, and basic mobile journalism techniques. While the technical module is the platform’s core, the Digital Monitors are what make the project come alive on the ground — they are the bridge between an online tool and people who often don’t trust digital spaces with something so personal. By equipping these young people with concrete skills and turning them into community reference points, we ensure the platform is not just code, but a network of people keeping it alive. Activities are currently underway — the technical and training phases are in progress, and we will soon add photographs from the work on the ground.
In Phase 3, we will launch an awareness campaign with three “how-to” videos for social media and distribute QR-code stickers in high-traffic youth areas, bridging physical and digital spaces. In Phase 4, we will consolidate the collected data into the “Presevo Valley Digital Rights Snapshot” report, shared with local stakeholders and international organizations, and close with an online event.
Expected outcomes and what we learned
By the end of this project, we aim for over 1,000 unique platform visitors, 30+ formal requests/complaints generated, and 30,000–50,000+ social media views. But the most meaningful measure isn’t numerical: We will track every institutional response (or lack of one) triggered by the reports — this will be our main indicator of real accountability.
ValleyRights 2.0 doesn’t end with the conclusion of this project. The Digital Monitors network remains a permanent volunteer arm of the Institute, platform maintenance costs are covered by our core funds, and the final report will serve as “proof of concept” to attract multi-year funding from international donors, with the goal of expanding the module into more complex legal categories.
This experience is transforming Mosaic Institute from a traditional research and publishing organization into an active manager of digital democracy tools. For our team — sociologists, political scientists, IT experts — it means learning how to turn individual reports into systemic policy recommendations. The main lesson so far is that technology alone doesn’t build trust; the people who explain it, defend it, and stand behind it do.
