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.
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.
Karen Human Rights Group
Karen Human Rights Group (KHRG) is 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.
