Grants:TPS/Vantharith/BarcampKampongCham2013/Report

Event name:
BarCamp Kampong Cham 2013, 24-25 August, Kampong Cham, Cambodia.

Description of your participation:

BarCamp Kampong Cham was part of a series of events organized by BarCamp Cambodia Team across main cities/provinces of Cambodia to provide an open platform for people from various fields to come together to talk, discuss, participate, share and learn everything concerned their daily life - from technology, to business, to social issues...etc.
BarCamp Kampong Cham 2013 was attended by around 500 participants, mostly Cambodian youths all across the country with few local expats and international participants. We noticed there were quite a number of local participants from Kampong Cham province who attended the conference for the first time.
There were 2 sessions on Wikipedia (1-hour duration each, running back to back): first session in English on Wikipedia in general, while the 2nd session in Khmer language with focus on Khmer Wikipedia and some hands-on demo). In total, there were around 100 participants in the audience with breakdown of 60 people (20 female) in the first English session and around 40 people (20 female) in the 2nd-hour Khmer language session. Before each session started, we also handed out free Wiki buttons and stickers to the audience.

First-hour English session was helped run by John (Wikimedia Australia) and his colleague Coti in English language, on Wikipedia in general. There were few foreign participants among the audience. A brief Khmer translation was made on parts that local participants couldn't get it clearly.
The 2nd-hour session was conducted in Khmer language by myself and my colleague Sovichet. Among the audience, many were local Kampong Cham students and had heard none or very little on either Wikipedia or Khmer Wikipedia in their own language.

Our Khmer language session was divided into 3 parts:

- Part 1: Brief Intro to Khmer Wikipedia & the Global movement.
- Part 2: Demo (how to create new account, understanding the analogy/structure of an article, intro on VisualEditor )
- Part 3: We originally planned to do an Edit-a-thon, but due to time limit (many Q&A throughout the session as the audiences are relatively new to Wikipedia) and only a very few participants actually had laptop with them. So we did spend a significant amount of time on Part 2 with the Demo on the screen.

At the end of the sessions, few participants came to talk to us and express their interest in setting up a small club at their respective community. We exchanged contacts and would talk further on their plan and see how we can support them in growing their local community.

Beside our Wikipedia sessions, I happened to talk and exchange ideas, thoughts and experiences with few like-minded people on free/open knowledge, open data, crowd-sourcing and collaboration as well as access to information. Below are some of them:

Heng Huy Eng & Chan Penhleak from Open Development Cambodia on 'Open Data Opens Mind.' - We are interested to see how we can collaborate, e.g. in term of making use of their existing data, or of doing crowd-sourcing project on Cambodian legal documents on Wikisource...etc. Still more discussion needed esp. in term of license compatibility.
Melissa Cockroft from Marie Stopes Int'l Cambodia on Using social media to improve your health and your future. - We expressed our interest in their contents on health related to family planning and HIV/AIDS to put in Khmer Wikipedia, but we asked whether their licensing is compatible. They were not sure. But it was a great first contact for possible collaboration project with them in the future.

What impact did your participation have on the Wikimedia Mission goals of Increased Reach, Increased Quality, Increased Credibility, Increased and Diversified Participation? From our Wikipedia session, we have made the followings impacts:

Raising more awareness of an online, editable encyclopedia in Khmer language to potential audiences/future contributors.
Familiarizing the new users with the mission, values and norms of Wikipedia community and explaining why they should join and be part of Khmer Wikipedia community in promoting free knowledge in our mother tongue.
Introducing basic editing tools with hands-on demo to assist their first attempt to contributing to the sum of knowledge.
Building a few contact points of interested participants who can potentially become part of our local team members in their respective province/city to help run local Wikimeetups and other wiki events.
Making initial contacts with other institutions (like OpenDevCam & Marie Stopes Int'l Cambodia) for possible collaboration in future projects.

Detail of expenditures:

Travel: USD 40 (10$ * 2 ways * 2 pax)
Accommodation: USD 80 (20$ * 2 days * 2 rooms)
Meals & Incidental Expenses: USD 90 (30$ * 75% * 2 days * 2 pax)

TOTAL: USD 210.00

Amount underspent/left-over (please specify currency):
USD 50.00 (USD 260.00 approved)