InSTEDD at Phnom Penh Barcamp

Phnom Penh Barcamp was done on 3rd and 4th of October 2009. there ware approximately 600 participants.

Picture of participants

InSTEDD banner

All participants could choose topics and do the presentation. At that time InSTEDD had two topics, one is GeoChat which was done by Mann, and another one is Mesh4X which was done by Sopheap.

Mann was doing GeoChat presentation at BarCamp




Sopheap and Sergio were doing Mesh4x presentation



Participants was testing Mesh4x

I found a good picture of InSTEDD(Channe, Mann and Kakada) and ShareVision team together, but why in front of the toilet?

Survey at Koh Kong

We are doing the survey translation.

We provided the technology for Khmer CDC in order to use for outbreak detection.
During the meeting between the RRT from the 24 provinces at Koh Kong, we created questionnaire for those RRTs and also we created interview survey question for interviewing them.

Our goal of the trip to Koh Kong is to get the InSTEDD technology usage feedback from all of them.

Channe is doing the GeoChat presentation

The RRTs who joined the confference

Share Vision - Bridging gap between university/school and work

A month ago a group of IT people from InSTEDD and Yoolk started sharing their interest of finding way to use their skill and experience to help Cambodia society. They have ambition to improve the standard of IT capacity in Cambodia.

Finally they come with the conclusion to form a volunteer group name Share Vision to share their experience and skill to student at university/school based on the fact that There is big gap between university/school education and the work reality . Share Vision team goal is to welcome volunteer from any fields to share what they know that is need at work, what is a good practice so that student could have expose to those skills that they might not have in their curriculum. In that student can improve their skill and more ready with job market competition.

On August 27th, the team gave a first talk to BBU student. There are about 60 students attending, almost all of them are in 3rd and 4th year and majority coming from IT field. No one among them got job yet, most of them are actually looking for job.

The main topic talked in that day is "Version Control", the team chose that topic because they see that almost every work place nowadays using version control. And surprisingly non of the student attended have heard about Version Control before. Student have shown their interest to share vision and they have requested team to

• Arrange the talk for other field as well such "Civil Engineering", "Banking" ...etc


• Suggesting to have other topic talk on "Website design", "Database design" ...


• Suggesting to have this kind of sharing to the high school student as well, to helping them having clear goal for their future

Share Vision team is very proud with their first talk and hoping to have to have more contribution from other volunteers.

Mini barcamp at iLab on 1st August

The events at InSTEDD on that Saturday having about 24 Participants.

These are the topic that had been presented and discussed.

1. GeoChat (Mann, Channe)
2. Google App (Thomas)
3. Tweet Cambodia (John)
4. Prezi - another way of doing presentation (Makara)
5. Khmer Blooging
6. Barcamp Phnom Penh Update

A GeoChat Group bcpp was created in that sessions and have participants join the group and messaging to each other.

The same event will happen in next Saturday, same time and place.

Second mini barcamp at iLab

Phnom Penh barcamp organizers arranged second mini barcamp 2h on 25th July, 2009 and InSTEDD provide iLab office for the event. There are about 30 participants coming.

Topics in the event are:

1. Introduction about Agile methodology (Samnang)
2. Introduction to Solaris (Paul)
3. Twitter (Virak)
4. ICANN (Norbert)
5. Discussion about Mobile Application (by Mann)
6. Discussion about IT community knowledge sharing to student(Long)
7. Sharing life expereriece during study in Japan (Sopheap)
8. Overal discussion about how to improve barcamp (Chetra)

Mini Barcamp campaign at iLab

Barcamp organizers have set up a first mini barcamp campaign on July 18th, 2009 at InSTEDD iLab for 2 hours and there are about 17 participants.

First hour is go to the introduction to those who new to Barcamp to know about what barcamp is and show the last year barcamp event. After that all participants have a brief talk about the technology that they or their company/organizaton doing. the end is about general discuss about organizing barcamp event.

(below is the photos from the event)

Channe's view of America

I work with InSTEDD as the lead engineer at our Innovation Lab in Phnom Penh. I just spent one month in an IT training in the United States. My colleague, Mary Jane, asked me to share some of my observations as a Cambodian visiting the United States for the first time.

It was a great opportunity to learn about a democratic country. I had the chance to meet with many people and share experiences with them and learn from them about America culture and living.

America is a very disciplined country from my point of view. Government officers and the people obey the law. Police are everywhere to protect people and penalize the one’s who break the law.

I met with many Cambodian families there, including my colleagues’ relatives in Long Beach. They took us sightseeing and we had dinner then several times outside and at their home. Those Cambodian Americans are very friendly and they made us feel like we are one big family. One auntie we met works in US government social work. She told us that the US government oversees all the citizen employment by a citizen security number. This allows the government to know many people are unemployed all the time and help them financially during their jobless. To me, this kind of government service is excellent; it shows the government is taking care of their own people, and that the employed can pay their salary tax so the government can still keep supporting those who need help. That is the culture of sharing and generosity, I hope that in the near future Cambodia can also adopt this system.

I also noticed that when you purchase anything, from food to clothing to electronics, all are taxed and recorded in a system. That’s amazing! Your government has an very effective system in collecting tax.

As like every country, beside the amazing services and environment, there are still some areas in America which are unsecure. I hope you enjoyed my reflections on America. I hope you come to visit Cambodia and share your impressions.