Weave website
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 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.
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.
Update: The Givetoburma.org website was used a second time around during an appeal for victims of Cyclone Nargis inside Burma. It again raised several thousand dollars from generous donors.
At the time of writing, Givetoburma.org is second only to Burma Campaign UK on Google for searches with the keyword phrase “Donate to Burma”. It is third on Google for the keyword phrase “Make a donation to Burma”.
Network design
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.
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.
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.
FBR - 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.
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 update the website in future.
Web development training
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.
