10 Tactics in Cambodia

10 Tactics was screened to groups working within Cambodia as part of a three-day workshop on election monitoring and advocacy on June 2nd in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

The three-day workshop was facilitated by Butterfly Works, who use design for social change. The event was organised in partnership with COMFREL, a Cambodian organisation working for free and fair elections. Butterfly Works organised the workshop to co-develop a concept and plan for enhancing COMFREL's work through the use of social media and mobile phone technologies. Emer Beamer from Butterfly Works explains, "we wanted to inspire the group with various practices, which they may not know, in order to assist them brainstorm and develop a concept. So 10 Tactics was part of the inspiration section leading towards brainstorming on campaign ideas."

Four other organisations were represented at the workshop: the Cambodian Center for Human Rights, the Khmer Youth Association, the Cambodia Women's Participation Group and ADHOC, a leading human rights advocacy body in Cambodia. When asked what she thought of 10 Tactics, Emer Beamer said, "in one word: excellent. It’s really an inspiring collection of practices, showing people from many parts of the globe working on varying issues and giving the low-down on how they have managed to use various tactics for their issue or cause. It is helpful that some of the disadvantages of the media used are also highlighted, such as privacy within facebook, so that people can also learn about the down sides of traps of various media or campaign strategies."

During the screening, 10 Tactics was simultaneously translated into Khmer for the group. After each of the 10 individual tactics was screened, the film was stopped so that the participants could ask questions or discuss the different tactics. The participants came from diverse backgrounds including those who were less familiar with various 'new' media. Questions stemmed from examples in the film such as how does one place videos on google maps as in the Tunisian example and how do the videos in the case of Video Volunteers get seen by local people. Most questions were focused around how different media would work together with a campaign or questions around privacy issues regarding the information being shared or about the possible effectiveness of various strategies seen in the film for Cambodia's context.

Sok Pitour from COMFREL said, "this is very helpful to see other people being active like this." The participants were inspired by the examples shown in 10 Tactics, screened on the first day of the workshop. The facilitators could see traces of the campaigns that were shown in the film in some of the concepts people presented on the second day of the workshop.

Images from the Butterfly Works. Top: The workshop group with their certificates. Middle: The translator working hard to translate Khmer to English and from English to Khmer. Bottom: Kersti Wissenbach from Butterfly Works and Sopheak Srey from COMFREL in the workshop.