Butterfly Works

Thursday, June 10, 2010

We ran a social media and mobile technologies workshop with a group of NGOs in Phonm Penh during the first week of June.

The group of NGOs we worked with included as main partner COMFREL who work for free and fair elections on Cambodia, ADHOC who advocate for human rights in Cambodia, the Khmer youth association, CCHR, the center for Cambodian human rights, and CPWP the Cambodian party for women.

The main aim of the workshop was to co-create plans for facilitating election monitoring and the mapping of human rights in Cambodia though the use of social media, and mobile technologies. This is the work the organisations are already doing and very well we might add using live meetings and traditional media. We were very impressed with the work of our partners and hope that our input will be of assistance to them in taking their work a step further.

We did a series of activities and presentations with the group to look at the possibilities and the work fields of the various parties in order to find the best cross sections and added value to the work they are doing.

Social media and online activity are still very much minority activities, done in the cities and towns, however they are gaining quickly in popularity. Literacy is high and mobile penetration is wide, that being said one of the main challenges we came across was the difficult in using Khmer characters on the available mobile phones. Thus while 85% of people are literate, the phones most people have don't type Khmer characters only english ones, meaning that voice (which is more expensive and time consuming for communicating with groups) is preferred above texting.

The outcomes of the workshop included some exciting plans for promoting democracy through mobiles and cross media campaigns. We will publish more details on the workshop next week.

Please see our flickr fotos of the workshop in Phonm Penh here