Bordermedia

WEAVE (Women’s Education for Advancement and Empowerment) was founded in 1990, with the intent to empower indigenous women and support their needs and basic human rights. The organization has evolved over the years, especially in the context of the influx of refugees from Burma.

Bordermedia was asked to design and build a new website for WEAVE, and follow this up with a day’s training in Chiang Mai. It was again decided that a modified Wordpress system - traditionally a ‘blogging’ platform - would fulfil WEAVE’s requirements for an SEO-friendly and easily maneagable content management system that would not be too challenging for the non native English speaking employees to learn and use.

Borderline is a Café, Shop & Gallery based in Mae Sot, Thailand. Borderline began with three women’s organisations seeking to establish a shared marketing space for women from Burma (living along the Thai-Burma border) to sell their hand made items. The women’s groups also hoped that by having a collectively managed market they would build their capacity for running income generation projects with the communities with which they work. In May 2004, the Borderline Women’s Collective opened.

Bordermedia was asked to design and build a new website and online shop for Borderline, in such a way that it would only require 2-4 days training for the local staff in Mae Sot to be able to update the website themselves. It was decided that Wordpress - traditionally a ‘blogging’ platform - would fulfil these requirements. Wordpress is powerful enough to act as a simple Content Management System, and yet simple enough for people with little or no web design experience to be able to use to update the website themselves with the minimum of training.

World Education/Consortium wanted to maximise the benefits of using collaborative software so that public diaries, public contact lists etc… could be utilised by all staff. To achieve this, bordermedia installed a mail server to fulfill this function. Remote access was also implemented using current security systems so that staff who are travelling have access to their email as well as all public diaries and contact lists.

By installing a server also had the added benefit of centralising all of World Education/Consortium’s data which enables much safer and easier data protection.

Web development classes were conducted for Curriculum Project comprising students from Curriculum Project and BVP over the course of 2 months. From this training, the students were then able to be actively involved in the development of their own website.

Curriculum Project work with post-high school (Post-10) schools along the Thai/Burma border and work with teachers and students to design curricula and materials, and also provides teacher training and teacher support programmes.

The purpose of the website is to provide these materials in an easily accessible online format.

Bordermedia was approached by the organisation Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) in August 2006 about facilitating a series of computer training courses for Burma-related women and youth groups based in Thailand.

The courses would take place between October and December 2006, in three locations in Thailand; Mae Sot, Mae Hong Son and Chiang Mai.

It was agreed that the first courses would be focused on Basic Computer Maintenance and Security, with a view to introducing one or two key staff members from each of the approximately 35 organisations, to the main course topics listed below.

• Implementing preventive measures on PC components
• How to keep computers safe from humidity
• Basic Hardware troubleshooting
• Backups
• Windows XP System Restore functions
• Operating system updates
• Removing unwanted programs
• Disk Management
• Viruses
• Spyware/Malware
• Firewalls
• User accounts and security
• File security
• Browser and internet security
• Advanced topics (Computer & program freezes, Blue Screens, What to do when Windows XP won’t start)

The intention would then be that these key staff members would then take responsibility for securing and maintaining their office computers. The groups were kept small - 8 people per group - and were mainly comprised of students from the following ethic groups; Karen, Kayan, Palaung, Pa-O, Arakan, Karenni, Kachin, Lahu, Shan and Mon.

Karen Human Rights Group (KHRG) are a small grass-roots organisation documenting the human rights situation of people in rural Burma.

One of our developers undertook a redesign and redevelopment of the KHRG website whilst working for KHRG, which began with an assessment of the current website - looking at its design, speed to download & visitor statistics.

A series of documentation was drawn up including sitemaps & wireframe diagrams detailing the proposed new design & functionality. This was followed by full page mock-ups in Photoshop.

The new website has been developed in HTML and PHP with a MySQL database storing report information. Search & donation functionality has been introduced to the website. A password-protected admin area allows KHRG to update sections of the website themselves, and a Dreamweaver template system has been put into place for updating static website content.

Delivery of the website was followed up with several training sessions, and a training manual containing all the information required for KHRG to update and maintain the system themselves.