Hi Sam, For the little bits and pieces of information that keep trickling out, it appears that a company called "Next Technologies" bid and won. This is the company that had previously provided the system that handled various by-elections and the referendum for the new constitution. They never got round to implementation because IEBC decided to do the RTS development in-house and called on Next for support as an external contractor. So in this case I guess we could (sort of) say that "they" is IEBC's IT team. But having said that, we are not absolved from the responsibility of being as much a part of the process so that instead of being retrospective we can be proactive. Best regards, Brian On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 7:08 PM, Sam Gichuru <gichuru@gmail.com> wrote:
Please allow me to post this as a new thread...
Added - My concern has been our reactions to the IEBC system failure, I applaud the doers in this country, I applaud those who bid and lost and those who won the contract to implement the system, I applaud them for their failure which means we are still alive and crawling but we will soon learn to talk and say baba and mama as the tech industry in Kenya, but my major concern is the rest of us...
What I am seeing and I stand to be corrected is the spectator syndrome, when everything is ok and the international press highlight Kenya as a tech destination, Mpesa is praised, Ushahidi and startups with all our Mvitus, we celebrate, claim our team (#teamtech/ICT) is winning and write long blog posts and gazillion tweets etc
This only last as long as nothing goes wrong, but when it does, suddenly the conversation changes from "we" to "them", they have failed, they dint consult, they dint test, they... not us. This is what most football fans/Spectators do, they love their football team only when its winning, which basically makes one wonder are we players or are we fans of this game?
But to bring this home, we have a bigger problem, if this community started asking about the procurement process, the system architect and the companies that were selected to implement the IEBC system only after it failed, we are not engaging enough, are we saying that nobody in this list bid for this system? nobody tried? ... doesn't that mean we are just talking ..... and talk is cheap.
I would like to challenge the community to engage more with an aim to problem solve, to tender and bid for local contracts, to build more open source solutions, to fundraise with an aim to seed fund startups, if we dont... we are going to be running around in circles and then move to Rwanda and guess what we will all say ..... they dint do xyz...
Let ask Ourselves ... who is they?
PS: I will stick to shorter posts in the future :)
-- Warm Regards, ------------------------ Sam Gichuru
twitter: | @samgichuru <http://twitter.com/samgichuru> Blog: | www.samgichuru.com Facebook: | Sam.gichuru <http://www.facebook.com/sam.gichuru> Skype: Sam.gichuru Cellphone: | +254-722-730565
Co-founder/ Director /Nailab Incubation Location: | Nairobi Website: | www.nailab.co.ke twitter: | @thenailab
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