Social outreach organizations including the Women’s Media Centre of Cambodia and Better Factories Cambodia have begun using Verboice to reach communities otherwise cut off by literacy or technological barriers – lack of mobile support of local dialects, for example. It has been used to give women and children on demand health information, to increase access to reproductive and sexual health services, and to monitor working conditions in garment factories.

Transparency International has awarded grants to its chapters implementing new solutions in their anti-corruption activism – from playing a game to learn about corruption to sending a SMS to report an incident. The projects emphasize increasing public awareness and in most cases rely on individuals taking initiative. Read More

As the dry winter season interferes with hydroelectric power production in Cambodia, the capital city of Phnom Penh has been facing rolling, unpredictable blackouts.   Now, an urban mapping platform has taken up a campaign to understand when and where in the city the outages are happening, and to make the government answerable to residents who are living in the dark. 

Citizen media, spread through the Internet, are becoming increasingly important in Cambodian civil society. But as people begin to make use of the newfound ease with which they can find and spread information, activists worry that the government is preparing a strategy to reinstitute social control. Officials in Cambodia, a relatively liberal state for the region, are eager to court foreign investment. They recognize the utility of the Internet for development and international commerce. And they also appear to see the threat too-free access to information might pose to unchecked government power. Cambodia today is a case study in how government and civil society wrestle for leverage in the Internet-age developing world. Read More

After breaking ground for American corporate executives in North Korea this January (and taking his highly observant daughter along for the ride), Eric Schmidt is continuing his world tour of digitally repressive regimes this week.  Google’s executive chairman will visit Myanmar tomorrow, in the wake of the country’s first hesitant steps to Internet freedom.   Schmidt began his Southeast Asian trip with a pit stop in India yesterday, where the government has been pushing a tech agenda over the past year.

India’s government has been embracing a high-tech strategy over the past year, with new online portals and open data initiatives aiming to democratize civic life.  Last Friday, a Google Hangout with members of the Government Planning Commission was emblematic of these efforts.  But some viewers expressed skepticism that undermined the impact of the conversation, alleging that some of the “spontaneous” citizen questioners in the hangout were government plans. One commission member denounced the event live on camera.

Filipinos will be heading to the polls for midterm elections in May, with senators and representatives from districts around the country set to be selected for the Sixteenth Congress of the Philippines.  Yet even as the two major political parties campaign for rule of the legislature, it turns out that their base supporters may not be that different – raising questions of the strength of the party system. 

Bangkok residents will elect a new governor on March 3. This election cycle, more Thai voters are getting their information about candidates from social media than ever before. Could observing the chatter around the elections replace traditional polling methods, as a means of predicting the outcome of the elections? Read More