An early warning that arrives as a text message

When a mining concession is granted in Cambodia, the government publishes it. The information is public. But public and reachable are not the same thing, and that gap is what this project set out to close.

Equitable Cambodia monitors mining activity in the areas where they work. Together with them we built a mining early warning system: a platform that gathers the publicly released concession information into one place, and then, and this is the part that matters, pushes it back out to the communities it affects.

Understanding how it actually works

Before designing anything, we sat with Equitable Cambodia to map the user journeys and personas for the people who would use this, both in their office and in the communities they serve. We worked with their technical team to understand how mining concessions are actually granted and how you would track them reliably. Only then did we design the website and the reporting tool around what we had learned.

The dashboard Equitable Cambodia used to track concession records across the areas they monitor.

The last mile was a text message

We built the platform on Liferay so Equitable Cambodia could track all the concessions happening in the areas they monitor. The piece that made it an early warning system, rather than one more dashboard, was the delivery. We integrated it with the telecom networks so that people in those communities could sign up for SMS alerts and get a message when something was happening with mining near them.

The full platform: records, data pulled from multiple sources, reporting forms and archives.

A community member near a mining site does not sit refreshing a website. But they carry a phone, and a text message finds them. The whole system was built around that fact. The data was already public. Our job was to carry it the last mile, from a government release to the hand of the person it was actually about.