Barcamp Yangon 2013: A Personal Experience

BY: CHANNE SUY

Last month, my colleague at the iLab Southeast Asia and I were fortunate enough to attend BarCamp Yangon.  This was my second time participating in the event focused on spreading ICT knowledge throughout the country.  As part of the international network of BarCamp conferences, or rather “unconferences” as organizers refer to it, people from a variety of different backgrounds and geographies come together to create user-generated sessions focused primarily on technology and the web.

While Myanmar is not well known for their technological capacity, they are still responsible for putting on the largest BarCamp events in history. People come from all over the world to participate and I was happy to see lots of international participants (much more than when I was last here in 2011) as well as participants from high tech companies like Google and Firefox.  Having such a diverse community allowed me to connect with local Burmese startups as well as both local and international developers and BarCampers.

The Art of Creating Useful & Usable Tools: Resource Map UX Testing

post written by iLab Southeast Asia Software Developer,  Kengsreng Tang

InSTEDD has an entire platform of free and open source technologies that help people quickly share valuable information around health, safety and development issues. Resource Map is one of the tools that we’ve developed that works either through the web or through SMS.

Resource Map is an application that allows users to geographically map their resources so that they are always aware of what they have currently and what they need more of.  Users can update, query, receive alerts from the system and more simply by sending an SMS or updating the website online.  

Click to go to the Resource Map Website: http://resourcemap.instedd.org/

Real Time Collaboration with Resource Map for Android

According to the World Bank, around  75% of the world’s population has access to a mobile phone. As you can see from the image below, this number is significantly increasing over time, especially in developing world countries, such as Cambodia.


At InSTEDD, we see the advancement of the mobile phone as a growing opportunity to improve information sharing and collaboration to improve health, safety and sustainable development.  One of the ways we’ve taken advantage of this opportunity is through our open source Resource Map tool.

The Best Way to Learn is to Teach

Thor, the character in an American movie of the same name, is a superhero who carries a hammer that holds the incredible power of thunder.  This was the only understanding I had of “Thor”.

Recently, while working on Resource Map,  I encountered another type of Thor.  This time it was not a person, but a software code library. The idea of learning a new type of code was appealing to me and I was interested in learning more about it and experimenting.  Yet as time went by, I was never able to find the time to properly start, not even on the weekends.  From week to week, it always seem to be at the bottom of my to-do list.

WORKING AT THE iLAB SOUTHEAST ASIA: A personal experience by Channe Suy

I first learned about InSTEDD around end of 2008 when I was working with a social enterprise in Cambodia called Digital Divide Data.  InSTEDD’s CTO, Eduardo Jezierski along with a consultant from the Argentina based Clarius Consulting company, named Daniel, visited DDD in search for potential candidates to subcontracted with. At that time InSTEDD had not planned to set up their own office in Cambodia. They just thought of working in Cambodia for a short while to support the Ministry of Health as part of Mekong Basin Disease Surveillance Network (MBDS) program.

Stories from the Field: Malaria Project in Laos

MALARIA IN LAOS 
Lao PDR is a country with a population of around 6 million people.  Most of these people live in hilly terrain and dense forests which makes them particularly vulnerable to Malaria carrying mosquitoes.  It is estimated that more than half of the population is at risk for contracting the disease.

image: WHO World Malaria Report 2011 - http://www.who.int/malaria/publications/country-profiles/profile_lao_en.pdf

Stories from the Field: A Local Perspective on the iLab Southeast Asia

A History of Social Service

I’ve always been drawn to work that gives me the opportunity to help people improve their lives and well being.  One of my first experiences working with a non profit was back in 1999.  I began working as a volunteer at the Khmer Youth Association (KYA) which focuses mostly on working with Cambodian youth in order to empower them to create positive social change in Cambodia.

After 3 years with KYA, I transitioned to a new role as Team Leader of Commune Election Council Investigation with the Committee for Free and Fair Election in Cambodia (COMFREL) in 2002.