Help us build our new Forum website. We need your input.

Check out the new Forum page www.pkforum.org

This website is all about helping to increase the exchange of ideas about aid, development and civil society in Myanmar. So we want this new site to reflect the things that you want.

As you have a look at the site, please let us know if you have any suggestions of how we could make it more useful. You can send these ideas to me at pkdiscussionforum@gmail.com or post the ideas in the comments below.

In general, social media is a great platform for a discussion forum like this one. But there are a couple of nice advantages to having a Forum website.

The first thing is the organisation of blog themes (which on the computer version you can see on the home page on the right hand side - on the mobile version you can click on the black box at the start of each blog post to find the wider theme). We feel this makes things much easier to track, as opposed to trawling through Facebook pages.

The content will continue to be mostly in English but with around 20-30% Burmese language content. On one hand we realise the pragmatic issue that English language is often the medium for exchange of ideas between international/local, academic/practitioner. At the same time having an all-English forum about Myanmar seems a bit ridiculous, so we are trying to mix the two in a useful way. (If we had a million kyat to spend we would translate all of the content into two languages - and include ethnic minority languages too).

Is there anything else you would like to see related to the blog content?

The second thing is the ability to make resources much more accessible.

Valuable knowledge can be accumulated in particular areas. But due to the projectised nature of aid and the turnover of staff in local and international agencies, this knowledge can also be lost.

So we want to collect together the reports or articles on aid and civil society in Myanmar that you think are most important, whether in English or Burmese (or ethnic minority) languages. We have started uploading some articles, but we need your input too.

What are the best articles or reports you have read about aid/development/civil society? Please post the links below or email us the files and we can add them to the resources library.

Of course, we don’t want to replicate other libraries of resources (for example putting up a bunch of World Bank country overviews). Rather we want to focus on those articles or reports about aid, development and civil society that might be important but have been more under the radar, or not as accessible.

And you are the people who are most likely to know what they are.

Thanks for your help with this. We are hoping to make this new site as useful as we can to all of you.

Tamas Wells

Forum Editor