ICT4 Social Advocacy Meeting
Open Development Cambodia (ODC), in collaboration with the core members of the ICT4D Cambodia Network, InSTEDD and the East West Management Institute (EWMI) held a half-day ICT4 Social Advocacy Network Meeting, funded by the SPIDER – The Swedish Program for ICT in Developing Regions, on 10 February 2021 in Phnom Penh.
In this meeting, there were 16 participants coming from diverse organizations including VBNK, Children’s Surgical Centre (CSC), The Alliance for Conflict Transformation (ACT), The Affiliated Network for Social Accountability-Cambodia (ASNA), Veterans International Cambodia (VIC), Building Community Voices (BCV), Cambodian Journalists Alliance Association (CamboJa), and SILIKA as well as the Department of Information (DIT) under Ministry of Education, Youths and Sport (MoEYS).
The meeting served as a forum to update other members on recent achievements and ICT trends. Participants can share their experiences and lessons learned from employing ICT tools to improve public services, including KoboToolbox Mobile Data Collection Tool, Google My Maps, Pidor One Window for Citizens.
To introduce new ICT tool for data collection, Mr. SAM AN Mardy, Senior Web Development and IT Officer at Open Development Cambodia, made a presentation on KoboToolbox Mobile Data Collection Tool. This free and open source application is a powerful and useful ICT application that can boost the efficiency and effectiveness in the data collection process which is applicable to project implementation of the network members. He started his presentation with the general procedure of the data collection process and the role of KoboToolbox in facilitating the process. Later, he ended his presentation with a live demonstration of the application.
With the fact that data on the map is becoming more and more essential in the digital age, Mr. VONG Pisith, Senior Data Research & GIS Officer at ODC introduced Google My Maps. He presented on how digital maps improve the map using experience on top of what traditional paper-based maps can offer. With simple data as an example, Pisith also demonstrates step-by-step on how to create a simple digital map with Google My Map which is embeddable and shareable online.
Last by not least, Mr. MAO Chandy, Product Manager at InSTEDD iLab SouthEast Asia walked participants through the new innovative Facebook Chatbot and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) under the One Window for Citizens project. Pidor the Smart Villager is a Facebook chatbot who provides helpful information about services of the One Window Service Offices to Cambodian citizens. Not only focusing on the ICT tool, he also told about the story on how human-centered design has been applied to the creation phase of the two applications in order to ensure that the developed tools are highly usable in dealing with the real problems.
Output of the meeting
- Participants found all the three presentations informative and useful to them. Most of them highlighted KoboToolbox as the most relevant ICT tool to them personally and/or professionally.
- Participants requested creating a “ICT4D Cambodia Network” Telegram channel for ICT information sharing. In response to this request, ODC has created the telegram channel which can be accessed through: https://t.me/ICT4D_Cambodia_NetworkMeetUp
- Participants suggested having an in-depth training session on KoboToolbox Mobile Data Collection and Google My Maps.
- Participants proposed having more presentations on digital tools and a sharing session for each program innovation tool.
