One Tambon One ...

Yesterday the official government news outlet at the Public Relations Department had one article titled Govt to launch 1 Tambon 1 Temple for merit making on Sunday. While this specific program - setting up a Buddhist ceremony each Sunday in one temple of each subdistrict - is not really relevant to this blog, the title of this scheme is.

Since the One Tambon One Project (OTOP) became a success, the "One Tambon One ..." meme has been adopted for many other projects. Especially when such projects are set to be adopted nation-wide on a local level, and both in urban as well as rural areas, a catchy name for the project using this meme is almost inevitable. So I have done some searching and looked for some other project with this scheme.

Of course, the first one to note is the project where I am active a little bit as well, the One Tambon One Photo blog. It is currently dormant, but I hope it will come back to life and grow into a Thai clone of the Geograph project.

The only other project I had noticed in the news before is the One Tambon One Ricemill project - or actually One Tambon One Granary One Mill aimed at making the rice processing more local to give the local areas more of the income generated from the agriculture. Another one I crossed in Google in past is the One Tambon One Search and Rescue Team, aimed to have a local disaster response. Also One Tambon One Wife as a sarcastic term for the marriage of Thai women with foreigners I had read about before.

But that's far from all, the following I have only now found, so they probably haven't made that much impression, either because they quietly worked on the local level, or even more quietly were halted again. I have not much information about them, so I just link the page where I found them...

• One Tambon, One Park
• One Tambon One Wetland
• One Tambon One Outstanding School, also translated as One Tambon One Dream School
• One Tambon One Scholarship
• One Tambon One Megawatt

And I am sure those weren't all...

Another Thai website spreading malware

Warning screen for amphoe.com last year

Since at least last Thursday, ThaiTambon.com has joined the club of high-profile Thai websites which have been hacked by using well-known security holes and have been converted into malware-spreading sites. Anyone using Firefox will now get a big red warning screen that accessing the site is not recommended, also any Google hits now have a warning line under the link, and won't lead to the infected site directly anymore.

For ThaiTambon it is really a loss, though the main focus of the site is the promotion of the OTOP (One Tambon One Product) products, it also contains information on all of the 7255 subdistricts, however of varying quality. Sometimes just the neighboring subdistricts, sometimes a full history and a list of all the villages. Though it thus can hardly be used as the sole source, it is a often a valuable tool for researching some local histories, so it'd be a loss if the webmaster won't fix the problem soon.

Other websites in this hall of shame, all being in this club for several weeks or months already, are the Thai senate, the upper house of the parliament, as well as the Royal Institute, the caretaker of Thai language. But failing to use the latest version of the content management system isn't the largest problem of the webmaster at Thaitambon, even more any attempt to contact them is doomed because they failed to keep their mailserver running. And I am sure this email is supposed to work, as on the archived version of the site in 2008 showed it.
Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

webmaster@thaitambon.com

Technical details of permanent failure:
The recipient server did not accept our requests to connect.
[mail.thaitambon.com. (5): Connection refused]

Update As of April 8 the warning in Google has disappeared, so apparently the webmaster has cleaned the site now.

Acronym mania

Like in other cultures, Thai also like to abbreviate things and use acronyms a lot, especially with the sometime long and complicate names in the administration. But what is special is the custom to abbreviate the English translations as well, or even create only an English term and abbreviate it then.

The whole thing already starts with something simple like postal address. These consist of the name of province, district, subdistrict and village, but instead of the Thai words for these administrative levels one usually sees just the first letter. And even more, the central district named "Mueang" with the province name is shortened to just "Mueang". And even the short word Muban gets shortened to just Mu. One simple example:

จ.สุราษฎร์ธานี	จังหวัดสุราษฎร์ธานี	Surat Thani province
อ.เมือง	อำเภอเมืองสุราษฎร์ธานี	Mueang Surat Thani district
ต.บางใบไม้	ตำบลบางใบไม้	Bang Bai Mai subdistrict
หมู่ที่ 1	หมู่บ้านที่ 1	Village 1

Which is the address of the Tambon (Subdistrict) administrative organization (TAO or SAO) of the subdistrict. In Thai this is abbreviated อบต., short for องค์การบริหารส่วนตำบล. It's not only abbreviated in written texts, also when talking about this office it's simply O Bo To. Sometimes in the URL of websites this is also romanized as ABT.

Very similar is the abbreviation for the higher level of local administration, the Provincial administrative organization. In English it's PAO, in Thai อบจ., short for องค์การบริหารส่วนจังหวัด. Or the term to cover all the local administrative units อปท. (องค์กรปกครองส่วนท้องถิ่น).

But the acronyms even more interesting are those which come into Thai via English. The most famous one is of course OTOP for One Tambon One Product, the project to give locally produced articles a better marketing. Since to listen is the corresponding podcast of the language guy. Here an English acronym for a Thai project kind of became a word on its own in Thai now.

Another example, much less famous, is the Small Medium Large (SML) village fund project. Once one of the populist project of form prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, it was still active last year, though somewhat remodeled in the meantime. The DOPA (Department of Provincial Administration) still has the project website online. In fact, the Thai name for this project โครงการพัฒนาศักยภาพของหมู่บ้านและชุมชน (system of development possibilities of villages and communities) does not have any small, medium or large in it anymore.

For a fun-read on acronyms there's this nice satire by Matt, formerly in Thailand and now on Timor-Leste.

OTOP fruit wine

This time basically a photo blog kind of posting. The picture shows the label of a bottle of fruit wine, bought at a road-side shop near Mae Sai at the northernmost part of Thailand. The reason why this label fits into the blog is simple - it is one of the many thousands products produced under the OTOP (One Tambon One Product) label, in which each subdistrict creates one or several locally produced products.

The fruit wine (ไวน์ผลไม้) and herb wine (ไวน์สมุนไพร) are the OTOP product of subdistrict Wiang Phang Kham (ตำบลเวียงพางคำ), located in the northeast of the district Mae Sai. As the road to the town Mae Sai and the boundary to Myanmar (Burma) passes through Wiang Phang Kham, the producers have put their sales stands along this road. Sadly I have no photo of these road-side shops, but anyone who has ever driven into rural Thailand must have seen it already.