Brainstorming Workshop on the Use of Technologies for Environment

05 January 2014 - Seeking to increase the impact of development using mobile technologies, a brainstorming workshop on “Using technologies for Environment” was held at Open Institute on 5th January 2014 by the USAID-funded SPICE program. The purpose of the workshop was to explore the possibilities of using mobile technologies developed by the program in environmental protection.

Open Institute's SPICE program has developed - in partnership with private sectors, a voice-based platform called Interactive Voice Response system (IVR). This platform has successfully applied by its partners in improving democratic process through election hotline, and in health information service for mothers of newborn babies. This technology has potential to be applied in many other development sectors. The program has also developed a few other applications to enable Khmer language in Smart phones and other applications related to information collection and sharing on a web-based platform, which is possible and beneficial for civil society organization to innovate their program development.

Invited only, participants were from local and international organizations working in Cambodia related to forest conservation, information gathering and dissemination on wildlife and forest degradation to discuss their needs and sharing their experiences of using technologies in their working field. Open Development Cambodia, which has good case on similar platform, also shared their experience to those participants.

As a result of the discussion in the workshop, participants come out with some ideas of using those developed technologies for gathering information both on voice-based and web-based platforms.