About Me

My full name is KONG Sidaroth, my short nick name is Da. I was born in Phnom Penh in 1982 ad have lived there since then.

I graduated from Preasisowath highschool in 1998 and then proceeded directly to the private section of the Computer Science and Engineering at the Royal University of Phnom Penh at the Special Professional  Department. At the same year, I also studied at the National Institute of Management, NIM, and English class at the Australian Center forEducation, ACE. Due to a financial shortage, I was forced to quit my study at NIM. I also passed a state higher education entrance at the University of Fine Art in the field of art and interior design but at the that time there were not so many jobs relate to this field so I decided to drop it.

I firstly started to work in August 2001, beginning of the last year at the university, as an intern for one month at the Open Forum of Cambodia, an NGO who pioneered the E-mail connectivity in Cambodia in 1994 and whose mission is to facilitate and foster communications in society, as a User Relations and System Maintenance or simply said “Customer Support Desk” for the Electronic Mail Users; My teacher “Chamroeun” introduced this job to me after one of my senior generation rejected it, I thank him for the opportunity. At that time, there was another paid programming job offered by a company but as I’d prefer work at the non profit sector I went for it though without paid for the first month. After the first month being an intern, I was offered a three-month probation contract and then I was recruited as a staff member of the organization.

In early of September 2002, through the Open Forum of Cambodia, I got a scholarship to Germany sponsored by the International Capacity Building Germany – InWent. The scholarship goals are to establish organizational cooperation between InWent and local partners in Cambodia, in other countries in Asia and in Africa, and to build Business related IT consultancy competence for the partner organizations. My business project was “e-learning” mainly focused on Content Development. In addition to my specific project I also learn other subjects of participants’ business projects from Asia and Africa, for example: webportal, e-commerce, e-business architecture and strategies, Linux administration and security, e-learning technology, change management and international management. After graduation from this advanced training course, I returned to Cambodia at the end of August 2003 and continued my work at the Open Forum of Cambodia until June 2006. Upon the completion of the training, I supposed to implement the e-learning project for the Open Forum of Cambodia, unfornately the project has never been able to take off.

The training in Germany was a very good opportunity for my career advancement from technical to a management position. Step by step, and several years experience in the management position has encouraged me to do self-study and on going discussion with experienced leaders, friends and colleagues about how to understand people who are under my supervision, how to lead and motivate them, and how an organization can perform strategically for a well integration and leadership of vision, mission in relation to program implementation and core operations.

At the beginning of 2004, I was nominated as the 1st council member to represent the Open Forum of Cambodia in the Association for Progressive Communications together with Norbert who is the 2nd council member.  Working with the APC has given me good working experience within a diverse network of civil society organizations, and I really appreciate the given opportunity to be within this network.

In September 2006, with Norbert, Javier, Manavy and I, we started a new organization the “Open Institute”. Manavy is the Executive Director and initiator of the Women Empowerment for Social Change project, Norbert is the Associate to the Open Institute, he who is passionately committed in making life of the Mirror publication, Javier is the coordinator of the Khmer Software Initiative, he who is also the initiator of this project. I am working for an e-learning project, continuing the plan from the training in Germany and make it a possible knowledge-sharing as I had wished for.

I love my work and I want to assure a quality in all works that I do. The results will improve the program implementation of the organization and the experience will leverage my working competence, so it’s really a mutual benefit and a happy situation for both.

I want to continue a higher education and obtain some work experience in development outside of Cambodia, and improving my English will progressively lead me into this direction though I do not like learning language.

When we grow up, we learn more about life, surrounding societies, meeting different people who are truly showing their faces to us and who are not, facing more and more challenges, and there are also news appearing to keep us curiously to explore. Life is on going with endless learning.

 All the best,

Da