Another successful day of Camp wrapped up in the Angkor Archaeological Park

Following a successful opening day, the Cambodia ICT Camp 2022 (CICT Camp 2022) begin its second day on 24 June 2022 with a morning circle and reflections. The morning circle energized the participants from the early morning. A quick self-introduction gave another gentle reminder of everyone’s name at the camp. Also, the speakers gave a short highlight of their session for the day to the participants. 

Like the first day, three breakout rooms conduct different workshops by our speakers under the themes of Open Data, Digital Security, and Data Journalism. Participants can attend those sessions based on their desire and interests. The agenda in the afternoon has some twists to yesterday, the outing day, honorable guest speakers and participants get the chance to explore the beautiful Siem Reap city. Two destinations of choice are Angkor National Park and Kampong Phluck Floating Village on the Tonle Sap lake.

There are a total of five workshops and three sharing sessions that took place on Day two of the CICT Camp 2022. One workshop is conducted under the theme of Open Data, three workshops under Digital Security, one workshop under Data Journalism, and three sharing sessions from our notable guest speakers.  

The three sessions under Digital Security are “Smartphone: Data Privacy and Protection” and “Digital Hygiene Practice,” led by Mr. Chy Sophat and Mr. Dixon Siu’s “Personal Data Empowerment.” 

Approximately 30 participants, including 9 females, joined Mr. Chy Sophat’s 2 sessions on “Smartphone: Data Privacy and Protection” and “Digital Hygiene Practice.” The first workshop, “Smartphone: Data Privacy and Protection,” is self-explanatory. Participants understand various privacy and data protection tips and tricks in the digital-driven world. Our speaker has highlighted the importance of personal privacy in the digital area and illustrated various security threats to personal smartphones, including weak security passwords, free public wifi, and different type of VPNs. 

During “Digital Hygiene Practice,” Sophat has raised both pros and cons of the two most popular operating systems in Cambodia, Android and IOS. Moreover, the proper use of email accounts and using various phone numbers provide security, privacy, and a safe digital environment. During his workshop, he encouraged the audience to participate in the discussion by sharing their experiences using mobile phones and emails to protect their privacy. 

In the area of open data, Ms. Saowalak Jingjungvisut from Open Development Mekong delivered a presentation on “Open Environmental Data” to the audience. Around 35 participants, including 13 females, showed strong interest in this topic. Everyone pays close attention to her lecture. The session revolved around the challenges of accessing free and open data in environmental areas, including data on air pollution and clean water. Participants underlined the most significant challenge to open environment data: access to data. Ms. Saowalak also illustrated research methodologies and the critical research findings related to environmental data. 

On the other hand, the theme of Data Journalism’s “Interviewing and Simplifying Data” by Mr. Sam An Mardy is also a vital topic for our participants to acknowledge. Joined by 29 participants, the speaker has shared the foundation and basics of data interviewing. Mr. Mardy stated that to understand the meaningful definition of data, participants should identify and answer various questions such as problem, impact, cause, and solution. 

The key objective of interviewing data is to seek an answer from the existing dataset and identify the data source. Another critical process of data interview is to create a hypothesis. Hypothesis gave the user a clearer picture of the scope of data and could generate better answers from the dataset. Mardy also takes time to demonstrate technological tools that work well with interviewing and cleaning data, including google spreadsheet, Microsoft excel, R. Studio, and Python.

The morning sessions finished with the three sharing sessions: “Cyber norms operationalization in Cambodia and the ASEAN,” led by Mr. Andrew Coccoli, “Digital hub 101,”  presented by Mr. Sreng Saren, and “Build a website with Twitter Bootstrap 5 in 90 minutes” by Tepken Vannkorn. 

After lunch, Camp organized a bus tour for all our participants in the afternoon to freshen up and increase communication. However, one of the outing-day plans to visit Kampong Phluk floating village was canceled due to the lousy weather. All the Campers were invited to sightsee the most important archaeological sites in South-East Asia, Angkor Wat temple, grab the chance to learn more about each other, and capture beautiful photos.