Aspiration was grateful for another chance to work in Cambodia at Open Cambodia 2014. We partnered with Open Institute and Fabriders to design and facilitate the event, which brought together over 100 participants from across Cambodia to share knowledge and build capacity on a range of eAdvocacy and security topics.
Staff members of 70 civil society organizations (CSOs) working in the health, trafficking, migration and human rights sectors collaborated during the week-long camp, which was organized by the Open Institute and funded by USAID through the SPICE and DEVELOPMENT INNOVATIONS programs. The agenda was designed to facilitate collaborative learning among participants on topics related to eAdvocacy and basic data and communication security for CSOs. Given the diversity of strategic and technical expertise of participants, the event was architected to ensure that each attendee finished the week with a demonstrably higher level of knowledge and applicable skills, with new knowledge focused specifically on the topics that they most wanted to learn in the areas of advocacy and security.
During the event, over one third of the participants also acted as facilitators on their topics of expertise, training others participants and learning from one another in highly interactive break-out sessions. The event also encouraged one-to-one trainings, with skills being shared individually among participants upon request.
Topics covered at the event ranged from broad discussions on advocacy strategies and the adequate use of online tools in advocacy campaigns, to more technical sessions such as using data visualization to effectively transmit ideas, use of maps, video, photography, and other media in advocacy, crowdsourcing, use of interactive voice response systems (IVR), use of the cloud and other ways to ensure security in communications, and many more.
Fabrider's Dirk Slater did a fabulous blog post about learnings and take-ways from the event.
A hearty thanks to the whole Open Institute team for the vision, leadership and hospitality that made the event a most compelling success.