We’ve whipped up a questionnaire aimed at collecting volunteer feedback for volunteer programmes and host organizations. Volunteer placements can be hard to get right; despite the obvious fact that volunteers want to contribute and projects need support, actually organizing a mutually fruitful engagement is frequently very difficult in an environment where projects are often under-administered, communication fraught with cultural differences, and work dependent on the vicissitudes of donor funding.

Kinyei is always asking how volunteers can best be utilized, and we hope that data from the survey will help us and other organizations craft placements which give volunteer and project owner alike the best possible experience. To fill out the survey, head over to the following link.

https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dFFaeUV6aHgwX2tXcF94ZnlIOEtFa3c6MQ

To request data from the survey, contact us.

Since the Shine Human Rights Festival was held in Naga Springs park on the riverside of Battambang Town on December 10th, it appears that the location is gaining traction as a public celebration space for International days of recognition…. On February 14th, a collective of young Khmers from all over the province came together to put on a concert to commemorate Valentine’s Day and address social problems among their peers. Now, SALT organisation and Coconut Water Foundation will collaborate to hold a festival commemorating International Women’s Day next Monday, March 8th. They’ll be moving in hot on the heels of another locally organized concert which is being set up right now.

It’s great to see groups getting out there and conducting activities in a location with such great exposure. For a country in which so much work being done to address the problems of communities, it is surprisingly rare to actually hear about social projects here, as they have traditionally existed as weirdly well kept secrets between NGOs, donors and beneficiaries. Bringing these sorts of events into the public sphere breaks the mold of top-down, institutionalized engagement with social projects which I can only think is a step in the right direction.

Valentine’s Day is a recent addition to the Cambodian Calendar which has attracted some dark undertones; a recent study done on Khmer youth discovered that 66% of males planned to have intercourse with their partners on Valentine’s day, regardless of consent. This supports the observation of NGO workers that Valentine’s Day is a black spot in the year for incidence of gang rape and related violence.

Kinyei supported Youth Voices, a collective of 8 self-organized youth groups in Battambang Province, Cambodia, as they coordinated a hip-hop event on Valentine’s Day to raise awareness of this and other issues which Khmer youth face such as drug abuse and STDs. The event’s program was made up of performances from local rap, hip hop and break dance groups, a theatre performance as well as a singing competition, and attracted an estimated total audience of over 2000 young Khmers who were out for fun on Feb 14.

The groups comprising Youth Voices have been active since 2008. This was their first mass collaboration, and their largest project to date. Kinyei supported the group with a social media campaign, organizational and logistical support, and helped raise the event’s budget entirely using online social networking tools.

The event came off as a huge success, has spawned plans for future awareness raising concerts and generated valuable relationships among the widely distributed youth groups which are already generating some cool new projects. We’re really proud to have been able to help out.

Youth Voices Blog: https://yvbb.blogspot.com/ (updates on preparations for Youth Voices Concert)

YVBB thank you message to donors

[this project is no longer in operation.]Connect Cambodia was a Kinyei facilitated initiative using community wireless deployments to facilitate information access in Cambodian communities. Currently in the process of setting up initial testbed deployments around Battambang, we’re always looking for additional collaboration.

Back in October, some folks got together in Phnom Penh for the city’s second ever Barcamp. We went along and shot some footage of the event which our good friend Martin Potter over at SCY kindly put together in the form of a rocking little clip of our experiences there:

The event attracted about 850 participants in the end, from over 12 countries and really showcased the region’s vibrant web and open culture community. While the event’s central focus is emerging tech and skill sharing, the sessions covered a massive range of topics from online journalism to lucid dreaming. SE Asian bloggers such as KK, 31o5 and Viirak were out in full force along with CNNGo’s Preetam Rai.

Kinyei put together a presentation on ad hoc volunteering and discovered in the process a really cool local initiative called ShareVision. Entirely volunteer based, the Share Vision team run seminars to share real world skills and expertise that students don’t get within the scope of their formal education.

Other projects up our alley included InSTEDD’s GeoChat and Mesh4x – open-source projects which enable dispersed teams to communicate with each other (a critical need for NGOs working with Cambodia’s primarily rural population) – and the Meking ICT 4 Development camp which tries to bring NGOs together to generate innovative solutions to problems using ICT.

The weekend was a huge success (here are some photos) so hats off to the organizers and their team of volunteers, and a big shout out to the generation of open collaborators, journalists, bloggers and developers in and around Cambodia who look poised to shape the future of the region.

Buddhism For Development, one of Cambodia’s largest and oldest continually operating local NGOs, has agreed to partner with Kinyei to promote and run the Shout human rights day event here in Battambang. BFD brings with it strong ties to the local community and will be an essential component to making Shout a huge event for Battambang. We’re excited.

Partnering with the Cambodian NGO, Support Children and Young People, this project will engage young citizens of Battambang in a series of workshops teaching media skills to ultimately produce small human rights documentaries. These will be a pivotal part of Shout! the Human Rights festival to be held on the banks of the river Sangke in Battambang on December 10th, 2009.

The Profile Project is an experiment in ad hoc collaboration in the international development sector. Short video profiles will showcase the human rights work being done on the ground in Battambang and screened at the Shout! Human Rights Festival on December 10th, 2009.

The Profile Project works like this:

1. International volunteer writes up an idea for a video
2. Cambodian volunteers here in Battambang gather the footage for it
3. International volunteer edits the video together and sends it over for the Human Rights Day festival in Battambang

The Profile Project is always looking for additional collaborators to produce videos. If you have the ability to edit video and the desire to engage with local reps and NGOs who are working support human rights in Cambodia, sign up and join the discussion.

To get started, check out the list of participating NGOs, then ask some questions or put your hand up in the Project Profile forum.

We’re in Phnom Penh tonight, getting some materials together for Barcamp Phnom Penh (2). At time of writing there are 1146 participants currently registered from 12 countries, which I gather is something of a record. It’s certainly floored us.

I’m amazed by the response that the event has attracted (the entire attendance of the last two barcamps I attended wouldn’t have made up bcpp2’s organization committee..) and am really excited to see what themes emerge in this intersection of collaborative, web 2.0 and free culture with South East Asian – and specifically Cambodian – perspectives.

It’ll also be great to catch up with several folks here utilizing FrontlineSMS for SMS based information systems, and finding out a bit more about what goes on down at InSTEDD.

Project Soup is a collaboration platform for community development which operates by fostering human relationships across the globe. Used as a platform for individuals and organizations around the world to share resources, stories and facilitate lasting partnerships, Project Soup fosters real personal engagement across geographic and cultural boundaries.

Catering to folks looking for a community project to contribute time or resources to, people working on a social project that could use a hand as well as those just seeking a transparent, honest view into the life of community development projects, Project Soup offers a vehicle for connection and self expression. The site will be a platform for social engagement and project tracking for volunteer projects and community development. While similar sites exist, they generally focus on either institutional volunteer staffing or formal projects which do not allow for the flexibility of real world initiative – and in almost all cases they are not built for the social media era. Project Soup aims to make self expression and storytelling easier and more accessible by making participation simpler, integrating existing social and multimedia tools to add rich storytelling capabilities, and offering features which help users understand and focus on the progress and needs of a wide variety of projects and initiatives.

Following our strong belief in the power of community developed, crowd-sourced solutions, we are developing Project Soup as an open source initiative based on Drupal (specifically OpenAtrium), and are looking for developers and designers with familiarity with Drupal, PHP and/or web design to contribute to the project. We think it can contribute huge changes to the field of international development, all we need is your help.

If you can contribute, join us on the project site.