As an indicator of how busy I've been, I'm submitting this a week late. The past three weeks have been less about map making and more about improving data storage and the datasets themselves. I finally visited a few eviction sites and communities threatened with eviction. This entry also details the second Phnom Penh Mapping Meetup, along with a couple of moto rides. Oh, and I joined the committee for Tedx Phnom Penh!

I'm into the fourth month now of my placement and it's starting to feel like I'm getting into the thick of things. We have suspended the eviction analysis mapping to review the eviction notice and eviction site datasets. Perhaps predictably, there is confusion and disagreement at the moment over what communities have been evicted and there was some uncertainty over where some of the communities under threat of eviction are located. Yesterday some of these issues were addressed in my first field trip around Phnom Penh looking at 15 sites. We visited mainly the districts of Toul Kork and Daun Penh. The former mainly to see three communities along the railway and a couple toward the north of the district. This was good to do because the report by STT last year questioning compensation rates for families evicted along the railway was what lead to their suspension. I helped edit the report before it was published, but it was good to get a look at some of the communities in real life. Sometimes I envy the members of the advocacy team as they're out of the office a lot discussing things with people, although it means they're a lot closer to the suffering as well.

The outcome of the expedition yesterday was positive. We found that all of the site locations that we were uncertain of actually were correct. The people we talked to also enabled us to correct the names of three communities in our dataset. Perhaps the biggest victory, though, happened after our tour of the villages under threat of eviction around Boeung Kak. This is a lake drained in 2008 to make way for a property development by Shukaku, a Korean firm. There were originally more than 4200 families living in 10 villages around the lake. Now there are between 700 and 750 families left, in 7 villages. We went there in order to ask how many had been evicted from each village. This involved about 3 hours of work since it is a relatively large area and we needed to search for the village leaders. In fact we only spoke with three village leaders directly. We called the rest of them, receiving help with their phone numbers from other people we met in the villages. This was really good to do. It was nice to feel as though I was doing my bit as an advocate for these families. The distribution of evictions across the villages that we discovered will be revealed in an upcoming publication :-)

As you can see in the accompanying pictures, there were some depressing sights amongst the villages around Boeung Kak. The houses of the families who had accepted compensation (in the region of $US3-8000) had been destroyed. This left gaping holes in the area where the walls had been knocked down, just leaving the jarringly domestic looking tiled floors exposed to the weather. There were sometimes whole areas knocked down like this, making the remaining houses look rather vulnerable. Amongst all the destruction there were still the usual array of street sellers offering ice creams and other snacks... convenience stores just like you see them in other parts of the city ... tailors, cafes, a bar, a mosque ... Ignoring the eviction issue the place is a warren of delights the sort that might make it into Lonely Planet. We also met a very dynamic lady running a seamstress shop. I asked the name but I think she hadn't really thought of one, all she ended up saying was 'Women's Factory'. In my submission of it in Google Maps I called it the Village 22 Boeung Kak Women's Shop (the reviewer removed 'Village 22'). There were three other ladies there making purses and handbags out of silk. She said she started the shop to provide a money making opportunity for locals and to create solidarity. The shop is right on the edge of the former lake, looking out over the mountain of sand from the Mekong River. She proudly pointed out all the newspaper pictures on the walls of her in protests over the evictions. She'd made the front page of the Phnom Penh Post! I bought three silk purses - at $2 each how could I resist - they'll go down well I think.

So this visit contributed a lot toward finishing off our review of the eviction analysis datasets. We have more work to do integrating this with a list of eviction sites from our Facts and Figures reports, but I'm seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.

The other major theme of the past three weeks at work as been data management. Now that I've been here three months and have served my probation, effectively, I have developed a proposal for centralising and standardising our data storage. We have a server now as well, for the first time at STT. So I'm devising a plan to put it to use so we can work more efficiently. It was pretty easy to develop the proposal given that I just copied the processes and structure we have at Jim's Engineering. The hard part, I have begun to find out, is going to be introducing a new system and set of procedures to staff. I think it is made hard for a number of reasons, such as their having developed habits around storing data, my not speaking Khmer, and my being new to the organisation. It can be tough to bring a new idea, especially on this scale, to an organisation as someone new with no local language skills. I realised today that a lot of what I am tasked with at STT is to change their processes for the better. Unfortunately, this implies that current processes are not optimal. Sometimes I am successful in reassuring staff that this does not indicate a personal shortcoming of theirs, other times they can be sensitive about it. This is understandable, I might be too if someone came from far away and started making grand changes in short order.

I think I can sidestep a lot of the politics, though, by having my proposal reviewed by management and accepted. I have started this already and am up to the second draft. With their endorsement, the changes may be easier to implement. During the process of developing my proposal I have also had the chance to review the common mapping tasks of the research and mapping project staff. This was so that we could develop a plan for making map templates. The second aspect of their GIS work that I reviewed was to examine their spatial data folder structure. I did this for the job specific data and reference data. The mapping team is less organised, one job having three separate GIS data folders, one of which had copies of the other two GIS folders as subfolders. The research team has a more organised approach although currently store the spatial warehouse in every job folder! Job specific data is stored in the same subfolders along with the reference data of the spatial warehouse. They said that this is so that a job folder can be copied to another computer and the maps will still work since all the data will come with them. This makes sense but such a need is infrequent. It also defeats the purpose of a spatial warehouse/reference dataset, since multiple copies of it mean that they all need to be updated if something is changed. I will be giving a presentation about use of the server, hopefully people will understand these issues better after that.

I think this is probably enough about work, but I should mention that there is now a crowdsourcing competition underway on the Urban Voice website! If you look at the public buildings category you will see there are a number of points and polygons across the city. These have been created by students at PSE, a large French NGO that runs a technical college. Students from the business school were invited to participate in the competition by a member of the PSE marketing team that saw my Nerd Night presentation. Glad to see my taking the initiative there has paid off. We're looking to set up competitions in other organisations as well, so let me know if you're interested.

This brings me to the Phnom Penh Mapping Meetup. It now has a Facebook Page and Google Group. The second one was on the 26 January at The Empire and it went really well! We had 17 attendees, including 7 Khmers! So many attended there was no space in the bar! I met many new people, only about three were there from the last meetup. We had two remote sensing people (including one from Italy!), a surveyor, four architecture students, a couple of programmers and many more besides. A few people mentioned having some presentations at the next one, so that's what we'll do. The next meetup will be Thursday 29th February.

Making Trouble in Phnom Penh

I joined the Tedx Phnom Penh organising committee! I'm on the ticketing team. There will be a lot to do as we're expecting 3-500 attendees. It seems like we'll have to do a lot of waiting around though for the other teams before we kick into action. I'm fine with that, there's plenty of other things on my plate. The meeting was interesting. I had flashes of cynicism given my exposure to stuff expat aidworkers like, wondering if this might just be rich, knowledgable foreight aidworkers doing good in a developing nation. Especially given it's a foreign import talk fest brand and all. The fact that there's only one Khmer on a committee of almost 15 also didn't help. Nevertheless, it's about ideas worth spreading after all, so if we get some, and spread them, it will be doing good.

Two motorcycle trips took place. As alluded to in the last post, we went to the Viet/Khmer border directly east. This is much larger than the one past Kep. It didn't take long to get there and we found out that only people with