case studies

Below are a series of projects that bordermedia developers have undertaken in recent times - some of these prior to bordermedia being formed. If you would like to know more about any of the projects or organisations listed below, please do not hesitate to get in touch.

Borderline collective

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.

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Free Burma Rangers

The Free Burma Rangers (FBR) is a multi-ethnic humanitarian service movement bringing help, hope and love to people in the war zones of Burma. Ethnic pro-democracy groups send teams to be trained, supplied and sent into the areas under attack inside Burma to provide emergency assistance and human rights documentation.

bordermedia was asked to provide some new page designs which, once approved, were built into a set of HTML templates along with accompanying CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) files. The Free Burma Rangers' webmaster then used the files provided to 're-skin' the website himself.

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Givetoburma.org

Givetoburma.org was conceived, set up and built in 24 hours. It is a one page website intended to take 'emergency relief' donations to be sent inside Burma around the time of the Monks' protests in October 2007. The website, as intended, was sent around 'virally' by email, and to date has taken more than $16,000 in donations.

bordermedia initially received an email appealing for donations from one of the members of Youth Solidarity of Burma. We quickly replied suggesting setting up a one page appeal website that would take donations using PayPal. After a meeting an hour or two later, we set up a PayPal account for Givetoburma.org and designed and built the site, putting it live within 24 hours. Following this, we provided support and advice as well as helping with publicity and marketing the website online.

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Burma Study Website

This website provides information for students from Burma on Studying abroad. It is intended to provide information on universities, exams, and international scholarships with the aim of helping Burmese students to choose where to continue their studies.

bordermedia provided consultancy in a series of meetings, helping to organise the new website structure, before designing 2-3 page templates in Adobe Photoshop. Once approved by the client, these were built into HTML/Dreamweaver templates. Bordermedia then provided half a day's training in using Dreamweaver with which internal staff can add to and upate the website in future.

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World Education Thailand

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.

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World Education Thailand

World Education/Consortium works with Burmese refugees, migrants and internally displaced people along the border to ensure that they have access to quality education.  World Education/Consortium’s vision is one of capacity and empowerment and the belief that education is the catalyst to change.

bordermedia developed the World Education/Consortium website using open source content management system software (CMS). This enables end users the ability to add documents, images, video and other content without requiring in-depth understanding of web development techniques. This has 2 main advantages, firstly website content can be maintained in a timely manner without requiring a third party and secondly it minimises the amount of training required for staff.

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Computer training courses

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.

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Human Rights Documentation Unit [HRDU]

The Human Rights Documentation Unit is a division of the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma that is responsible for producing an annual human rights yearbook.

bordermedia was engaged to develop the documentation templates for the 2006 human rights yearbook which will be primarily distributed in html format on CD.

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Karen Human Rights Group [KHRG]

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.

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KESAN

KESAN (Karen Environmental and Social Action Network) is the first local native non-profit Karen organisation to raise environmental awareness among Karen society.

It works to create a platform for Karens' to express their concerns about the environment to the world as well as to the local and national leaderships.

The KESAN website was developed to allow the organization to provide information on their currently running projects to a wider audience as well as to provide a number of regular publications online.

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Curriculum Project

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.

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Thoo Mwe Nee School

The Thoo Mwe Nee School has been built in Karen State to address the critical shortage of education available for IDP children in this area.

The website was designed with assistance from the Thoo Mwe Nee School's founder in order to generate donations so that the school can continue to provide essential services to the local children such as education, food and medicines.

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Safe Haven Orphanage

The first Safe Haven Orphanage is located at Tha Song Yang, a couple of hours north of Mae Sot on the Thailand / Burma border. Their aim is to provide orphanages that are "safe havens" to children throughout Thailand. A Safe Haven Orphanage is a home that provides disadvantaged children with proper nurture, nutrition, shelter, clothing, medical care, and education.

bordermedia designed, built & delivered the website in 3 days, with one of these days spent at the orphanage photographing the children.

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Burmese Women's Union

BWU is an independent association aiming to organize the women of Burma, both along the Thailand, India and China borders and internationally.  Membership with BWU is open to all women of Burma regardless of ethnicity, race, religion, marital status, sexual preference, or livelihood. Part of BWU's mission is to respond to the social welfare needs of its members and provide short‑term educational and vocational training programs for women.

The Burmese Women's Union website was developed by bordermedia with the assistance of staff from BWU and international volunteers.

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