Grants:TPS/Vantharith/BarcampKampongCham2013

User name: w:km:អ្នកប្រើប្រាស់:វ័ណថារិទ្ធ on Khmer Wikipedia and w:en:User:Vantharith on the English Wikipedia (Name: Vantharith Oum)

& w:km:អ្នកប្រើប្រាស់:ទេព សុវិចិត្រ (Tep Sovichet)

User location (country): South Korea / Cambodia
Event name: Barcamp Kampong Cham 2013
Event Web site: http://kc.barcampcambodia.org
Event date(s): August 24-25, 2013
Event location (city): Kampong Cham, Cambodia
Amount requested (remember to specify currency!): USD 500
Endorsements

Budget breakdown

Travel: ~USD 200 (local transport - in Phnom Penh and Kampong Cham and trips to/from Kampong Cham)
Accommodation: ~USD 50 per night x 2 nights = USD 100
Meals and incidental expenses: ~USD 200
Wikimedia/Wikipedia Merchandising: Requesting for free merchandisings, e.g. t-shirts, pins, stickers, brochures, leaflets....etc. for an estimated of around 30-40 participants, who will be part of a session that I will run and talk about Khmer Wikipedia movement in Cambodia followed by a demo and edit-a-thon on some interesting topics/themes (e.g. local points of interests in Kampong Cham, its markets, schools, Buddhist temples...etc).

Proposed Participation

Greetings from Seoul! This is Vantharith from Khmer Wikipedia. For this summer vacation, I am going to be part of many exciting events including:

Wikimania 2013 - though I failed to secure my travel scholarship from WMF, I made a personal appeal to friends and family to help fund my travel cost. And I made it with most of the funding committed by 6-7 friends and the rest from my own pocket. Registration done, visa secured, flight booked and dorm fee paid. ^^
WikiSym + OpenWiki 2013 - with the fact that this event will take place few days before Wikimania, I managed to contact one of the organizing team to volunteer in the event in exchange for registration fee waiver. So, I will arrive HK earlier on Aug 4 to be part of this and at the same time, learn new experiences and make networking with like-minded people from other similar movements of free and open knowledge.

After this HK trip, I will fly to Phnom Penh for my vacation. So during my ~3 weeks in Cambodia, I will participate in a local IT/Youth event, namely Barcamp Kampong Cham 2013 on Aug 24-25, 2013, in which I will co-run a session with another active contributor/sysop Tep Sovichet (both of us were featured in a news article on Phnom Penh Post's 7Days early this year) talking and presenting about Khmer Wikipedia movement in Cambodia and we plan to do a demo to the participants followed by an edit-a-thon on Khmer Wikipedia articles. We hope to build more awareness of Khmer Wikipedia to the local participants and hopefully manage to recruit any interested people to be part of future local team to run offline Wikimeetup in their local region.

Goal and Expected Impact

We believe our participation in this event will be another meaningful step in growing Khmer Wikipedia community in Cambodia. Below are some of our expected goals and/or outcomes:

To build more awareness of Khmer Wikipedia to a wider audiences, esp. youths, students from diverse backgrounds.
To give an overview of our Khmer Wikipedia community and our free knowledge movements in Cambodia with brief background, our achievements to date, our obstacles we are facing and our future plan for 2014.
To share my own experience and inspiration volunteering in Khmer Wikipedia including my first participating in WMF annual gathering of Wikimedians/Wikipedians around the world.
To give a hands-on demo - how to navigate Khmer Wikipedia sites, some basic edits and common tools...etc.
To engage with the participants by actually letting them being part of an edit-a-thon at the end of the session.
To build a network of interested participants who are potentially our local team members in their city to help run local Wikimeetups and other wiki events.

Overall, we would like to inspire the audience with our global vision of WMF that reads Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment. And importantly, this sum of knowledge is in our mother tongue, Khmer language!