[kictanet] Tandaa - An Honest Analysis

[Gakuru Alex]

Alai,

I am somewhat now tempted to start a local content blog focusing on
'opinion influencers' and opinion shapers themselves - informed by the
fact that, content is king and awaited 'future online content warfare'
arrived a long time ago.

So despite excluding my skunkworks presentation from your firing
squad, I shall nonetheless shoot back at you;)

On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 12:37 AM, Robert Alai <alai.robert at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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'.

Paul stated, "Let's realise that Internet is one. How can have 'our
Internet' so shielded away for 'outsiders Internet' to the extent that
'our content' is only accessible to us yet somehow  we expected to
make money from 'outsiders' through 'our Internet'? Maybe we should
not use downloaded [even-free] 'foreign' software, 'foreign'
computers, 'foreign' concepts, nothing 'foreign' except only localyy
made?" That was heavy!

>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.

Its what all (or at least the majority of) the people in that room
were there *actually doing* Give Mucheru a break. (You stand accused
of promoting 'foreign content' by using Google mailing lists;)

> 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.

I wish you had asked ICT Board to make a presentation to the audience
to articulate you point?

> 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

Kasarani is your website, right? The conference was not a sales pitch
for *anyone* but a conversation exploring various ways to promote
local content.

> When I started my start forum and blogging thing, jamiiforums.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.

Me, me, me again... Try a bit of our, our, our, country's local content.

> 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.

'Government' is a strange 3-legged animal Executive, Legislature, and Judiciacy.
If one makes this animal 'shake like hell,' that person ought to be in
very serious trouble...

> 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.

Why so excessive negative energy? There must be something NMG have done right?

> 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.

Had you tried http://www.tandaa.co.ke/ before the conference? BTW, I
host websites abroad many times and I have no problems with it. It can
be a business decision why host locally with painfully expensive ISP?
Host 'politically incorrect' website at a pro-conformist provider
'anti-telcos' content with one of them.... etc.. It's a matrix of
decision making procees..

> 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?

The sun waits for no King and time has never been enough.

>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.

Would you also be suggesting that new school textbooks be published every year?

>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.

You just created conveniently suitable circumstances to arrive at your
conclusion?

> 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.

Would it not have been fair to mention some of those 'ok' facts. Its
called "fair commentating"

> 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.

Dunno..

> Senior members, what do you think?

I just have. But allow me to add that *nix users have this thing about
multi-thread thought processes which lead me to advice users to format
their Windows and install *nix. It makes engagement multi-faceted
critique and criticize when necessesary but also appreciate and praise
excellent achievement.

Tandaa.08 was an excellent event and I wish the ICT board could
explain to us who were the brains behind it. They can count on me for
their next such conference.

Rider:

There is a clip one run NTV of an Edloret pharmacist who literary and
severally slapped himself on the face upon being visited by Pharmacies
and Poisons Board drug inspectors.
Let's not always take the shrtest route to slap every great
initiative, erroneously.

Also we avoid "local content spam", for example, forced mailing lists
subscriptions;)

G'day,