[kictanet] Tandaa - An Honest Analysis

[smwngi at gmail.com]

Joe, Robert
You both have very valid points. However ask youself this. If the confrence was about prompting  local content did you get local content? No. Why? Because there is very little to none. ICT board may have looked for local organizations the have web content to showcase their goals and objectives. The objective here is to promote local infromation. You may have seen the presentation before (am not saying I haven't seen them either & wasn't surprised) but there has been very little content added by new players. 
	For the most part I saw sales pitches from the presenters which made it difficult to understand why they were given the slots to begin with.  It should have been promoting content. How to gather it, how to present it, how to keep it updated, and quench the thirst for infromation.
	Having gone through the first round I believe there are lessons learnt and we should voice our opinions so as to improve our processes and deliverables.

Cheers
Stephen Mwangi

-----Original Message-----

From:  "Joseph Manthi" <jmanthi at gmail.com>
Subj:  Re: [kictanet] Tandaa - An Honest Analysis
Date:  Tue 18 Nov 2008 12:46 am
Size:  5K
To:  Stephen Mwangi <smwngi at gmail.com>
cc:  KICTAnet ICT Policy Discussions <kictanet at lists.kictanet.or.ke>

Robert
 I did not attend but I know exactly what you are saying.
 
 Local is golden, foreign should be forgotten unless we want to remain where we are.
 
 Joe


 On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 3:37 PM, 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. 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, 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 dont speak a lot of English. See the site now. I dont 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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