Labor incidents tracking database

The problem

Solidarity Center Cambodia documents labor incidents: rights violations, workplace exploitation, worker grievances. That evidence feeds advocacy and legal intervention, and it was scattered across teams, locations and tools. Fragmented records made it hard to see trends, hard to report, and risky to handle, because this is sensitive data about real workers.

What we built

We built the Labor Incidents Tracking Database on the Liferay platform with our DataGood dashboard as the front end. The design started from roles: different teams see and manage only the data their work requires, with single sign-on handling authentication and administrators controlling who touches what.

Incident data lives in customizable tables, so the teams can shape what they track as the work changes, and dashboards surface trends and case outcomes in real time. Notifications go out when an incident is created or updated, which sounds small but matters: it's the difference between a case moving and a case sitting unresolved because nobody knew it was there.

How we worked

The project ran in phases, inception through activation, with Solidarity Center in the room throughout: defining user personas, shaping the architecture, and running acceptance testing before anything went live. Each round of feedback changed the design. That's the only way I know to build a tool for work this specific.

The result is a single reliable source of data for reporting and advocacy, secure enough for what it holds, and workflows that let the team act on violations quickly. The database doesn't change labor conditions by itself. It makes the people doing that work faster and harder to ignore.