Promoting Collaboration Among Human Rights Groups in Cambodia

By David Sasaki

Global Voices

Cambodia has among the highest number of NGO's per capita anywhere in the world. There are dozens of organizations throughout the country publishing information about human rights and human rights abuses, but they tend to file these reports on their individual websites or, worse, in lengthy PDF reports that are sent via email to their funders. With the goal of promoting more collaboration among human rights, organizations the Cambodian Center for Human Rights has launched Sithi.org, a map-based visualization and archive of human rights violations and related news which can be filtered by category and sub-category. Preetam Rai, our research reviewer for Southeast Asia suggests that Sithi.org make contact with Cambodian bloggers to spread more awareness about the initiative outside of just the human rights activist community. By distributing their data via Facebook and Twitter - and by presenting the project at local tech meetups - they are more likely to attract the interest of Cambodia's enthusiastic 20-something generation of techies. Lastly, Preetam recommends giving more visible attribution to the organizations that contribute reports to the map so that there is more of an incentive to do so.