[kictanet] Tandaa - An Honest Analysis

[Robert Alai]

Mirembe

I have a very open and honest analysis of our Tandaa conference.

The facts which we must change is that Paul Kukubo, my big brother still
sees it best to defend foreign companies and say that "eve if we want local
content we must stilldo it with foreigners'. Let me tell you a thing. We
must focus on local mpaka it becomes music. When I saw the slides of Joe
Mucheru, which apparently I have seen in every conference I have attended in
which he is the speaker. The websites listed there, non were Kenyan. The
fact that Mucheru works for a Carlifornian company and he is Kenyan should
make Mucheru sell Kenya more. If you wanted a subscription website, you
should have started with kenyalaw.org. If you wanted affiliates,
mamamikes.com has affiliates. Lets focus on local. Lets give it lots of
thought. We must give local examples and then mention the foreign ones just
as an after-thought.

We want the companies to give the local content much thought and they can
only do that when they think locally. When you make people believe that
facebook is great, we wont head anywhere. See why Tanzanians are engaging
more in bongo5.com and jamiiforums than facebook and others. They are
actively loading pics and content and these two websites are really coming
up well and considreing the age of the websites, we will see nice things
from them. We should not glorify anything western. We must start
appreciating our own facebook like Ngari has developed a good site,
www.kasarani.com

When I started my start forum and blogging thing,
jamiiforums.com<http://jamboforums.com>,
we had lots of problems. But we also had people telling us that the forum
which is being run by my great friend Maxence, was going nowhere because
Tanzanians don't speak a lot of English. See the site now. I don't think
that there is any forum in this region with that kind of killer traffic.
There is no forum in this region which makes the government shakes like hell
when issues are being analyzed there. And they are doing it most of the time
in Swahili. We must focus on being local if we want local content.

NMG bought a script from Germans and installed it on their site without a
forum nor blogs for the senior writers. Why? No creativity. NTV, EasyFm and
QFM are not online. A very good percentage of articles in Mailbox are
plagiarized from blogs and forums without acknowledgement and articles in
entertainment and lifestyle mazagines are plagiarized from magazines like
cosmopolitan and Elle sometimes word for word.

The Tandaa website was .com and not .co.ke. Even if you are not hosting
locally, you could still have had a local domain registration.

The funniest thing I got from the conference, why would 6 or 7 speakers
speak for 15 minutes each and then  the forum audience is given 10 minutes
to ask questions and suggestions? Do you know that the slides from Capital,
NMG, Google, Homeboyz, Kictanet, ICT board, Strathmore, Rich, Cisco and
others are shown to us almost in every conference we attend. They have
become so predictable that the best place to get more stories and even
slides which you have never seen is from the public. Givingg 15 minutes to
each speaker which is 105 minutes for the seven speakers then the audience
asks and get replies in 10 minutes is really not correct and shows and
attitude of escapism where te audience are feared that they might embarass
the speakers with questions.

The other facts of the conference was ok. The moderator, Al Kags, was ok but
I think that we can do alot of improvements by having power cable well
spread for bloggers and also the Wi-Fi to be abit superior. I had to rely on
my Zain unlimited since the ICT board Wi-fi kept shutting down.

We also think that we can have an active network and the best place to start
is now here in KICTANET. I see us turning KICTANET into an open vbulletin
run forum with CMS managed frontpage like www.haitiwebs.com and
www.mustangevolution.com. Vbulletin is so superior and it wont take us even
a day to have this thing up and running.

Senior members, what do you think?

Alai,
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