Friday, 15 February 2008

Advancing Global Advocacy on Sex Worker Health and Human Rights meeting in Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Tactical Technology Collective

Tactical Technology Collective was invited to contribute to a three day meeting called "Advancing Global Advocacy on Sex Workers' Health and Human Rights"in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, as part of a larger project aimed at increasing the ability of sex worker advocates to utilize information and communications technologies. This project is part of Tactical Tech's Movement Building Program, providing longer-term needs-based mentoring and capacity building for specific issue areas and networks.

Tactical designed a training track specifically geared to the participants of the meeting that included sessions called "Taming the ICT Beast,""ICT Tools That You Can Use in Your Advocacy Work NOW!," & "Using ICT for Successful Advocacy Strategies." We presented these trainings in partnership with Melissa Gira, a well-respected blogger and sex worker advocate from San Francisco, CA.

Tactical Tech is currently compiling a thorough information technology needs assessment of grantees of SHARP (Sexual Health and Rights Project), which is part of OSI's Public Health Network. We will be releasing the final report of our findings in June, 2007.
Preliminary findings include:

-Mobiles are used for outreach to sex workers, this is a key technology when considering how to organize and increase participation from constituents.

-Web and email is used predominantly for advocacy work and to a limited extent for cross-country solidarity networking.

-As most organizations have reliable access to the Internet, the biggest likely barrier to international networking will be language and content creation (i.e. posting resources as opposed to asking questions on email lists).

-There is a general flair and tendency towards innovative and creative uses of technology, such as photographs, PowerPoint, videos, karaoke, audio, etc.; this could be partly due to cross-cultural and literacy barriers, but also partly due to the creative nature of the community.

-Privacy is a concern for a number of groups; some groups reported knowledge of surveillance, however none are using digital security technologies, though many are using informal ways of protecting themselves.

-The biggest barrier cited by respondents to accessing technology is cost.

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