[kictanet] Tandaa - An Honest Analysis

Tue Nov 18 10:54:30 EAT 2008

Robert,

You are a good friend of mine and am glad at last there is a mailing list 
where you are subscribed to and brought up this issue. You did subscribe me 
to alot of your mailing lists without my consent, and I did bring this to 
your attention and it took you ages to unsubscribe me - afew of my colleagues 
have also been through this - which in one word is disheartening.

I also have a problem with the way you muzzle conversations on 'your' lists. 
Any post that does not sing your praise is silently discarded by the admin - 
and those that praise how good a job you are doing are held up in the most 
high.

I too believe that you are the last person who should talk about these other 
matters before cleaning up your house.

./Ok3ch 

On Tuesday 18 November 2008 08:22:14 am Wainaina Mungai wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> As indicated by Alex, spam & forced mailinglist subscriptions is a
> critical "local content" issue now that Alai has pointed fingers.
>
> I have been forced onto lists that do not allow for unsubscribing thus
> I have marked Alai's address and his mailinglists as spam addresses.
>
> Robert, please sort that out first so that the "traffic" and
> "subscription" numbers on your lists is a true reflection of
> subscription by choice rather than forced numbers.
>
> I bet someone else has had the same experience with Kazi africa, bidii
> africa and other lists.
>
> Wainaina
>
> On 11/18/08, Gakuru Alex <alexgakuru.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 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,
> >
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