By FD for APCNews VANCOUVER, Canada,
Published onPage last updated on
“Enhance the information and communication technology (ICT) skills of self-taught Burmese techies, that’s what we’re here for,” explained Cheekay Cinco, caught on the porch of a resort, on the outskirts of northern Thailand’s Chiang Mai. “There are seasoned folks in web technology here! I’m sure our hands-on training was of best use,” she said, referring to the 18 participants in attendance.
Cinco, an APC WNSP staff member, was one of very few women trainers present in Chiang Mai for the Burma technology skills training workshop that was held from August 21 – 26. The trainers team was beefed up by wiz kids and experienced techies from the organising groups Tactical Tech Collective (TTC) and the Open Society Institute (OSI).
The workshop was separated along the lines of theoretical presentations, hands-on teching and skill sharing sessions. Morning sessions were always organised so as to give participants a choice between the open publishing and the system administration option.
For the open publishing track, Cinco and Bobby Soriano from APC-member Institute for Popular Democracy took the participants through a theoretical understanding of web planning and designing (mainly about information architecture). This was complemented by experience in configuring a content management system (CMS), a blog and a wiki.
Each of the open publishing track participants were given a website, a blog and a wiki to work until the end of October. “Bobby and I will continue to provide support to the participants as they continue to play around with Joomla, Wordpress and Tikiwiki,” Cinco specified, in reference to latest web-publishing tools.
Aside from the two morning tracks, the workshop also included morning plenaries on tech planning, free and open source software (FOSS), security, the e-rider model and APC community structure, as well as troubleshooting.
From the participants, only one was a woman. The OSI Burma Project and the TTC explained that they tried to bring in more women participants. As it was (and generally is), there were very few female techies within the Burmese refugee community. Also, the ones that had sufficient technical skills could not make it to the training due to family obligations.
In order to follow up on this deficiency, later in September, OSI Burma Project staff members, TTC eRiders and APC WNSP member Cinco actually met with two leading Burmese women networks, the Women’s League of Burma and the Shan Women’s Action Network (SWAN) -mainly to discuss their ICT needs and how they can be supported.
“We met with a few members of their staff and had a discussion about how they were using ICTs for their work, how they collected data on health, education and violence against women (VAW) issues, and how they disseminated their output,” recounts Cinco, before concluding: “This is still an open thread.”
Photo: Cheekay Cinco (APC WNSP) and Bobby Soriado (IPD) giving an open pubblishing training to a Burmese audience.
Dirk Slater. Chiang Mai, August 2006.
