MOBILE IN CAMBODIA
2010, 2011 Cambodia
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 throughout 2011 and 2012.
Please see our flickr fotos of the workshop here
Update: May2011
Butterfly Works is supporting Comfrel in Cambodia with the development of their cross media campaign for greater democracy there in the run up to the 2012 national elections. Our role is to to the visual and interaction design of the website front end and support the Cambodia team through the Butterfly Toolkit No.1 for social change campaigns.
