[kictanet] Has the ICT Sector Failed?

[n_macharia at yahoo.co.uk]

Listers do We recall this!?

Electronic Voting Systems in Africa
 ICT Africa Writer
February 26, 2013

With the help of Google and mobile phone companies in Kenya, the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission is implementing an electronic voting system. The commission has come up with a plan that will guarantee election transparency and quick delivery of election results. 

"Results from each of the polling stations will be transmitted to three counting centres, using the Electronic Results Transmission (ERT) platform. With rapid delivery of results, suspicion of results tempering will hopefully be put to rest."

After Kenya has pioneered this form of voting system in Africa, we hope other countries in Africa, including Zimbabwe, will follow their steps. We have always maintained that Africa should be able to by-pass some technologies and adapt the latest and most appropriate applications for our unique situations. We should not be held back from pioneering new voting technologies just because they may not be widely adapted in the developed world.


And this why we need to investigate what happened. Its no wonder the process is suspect. The objective as captured in "election transparency and quick transmissiopn of results" was guaranteed...who is fooling who?

Nancy
------Original Message------
To: Gilda Odera
To: kictanet
Cc: KICTAnet ICT Policy Discussions
Subject: Re: [kictanet] Has the ICT Sector Failed?
Sent: Mar 7, 2013 10:01 AM

This is a case of unethical behaviour! As professionals we know the key requirements of this sort of a system interms of design and deployment, hence what and how to test(reliability, security, accuracy, scalability, performance and concurrency).

 In the IEBC case, the minimum expected would have been sufficient planning for integration and testing with reliable test cases and test data. From the start,  this did not happen! What shuld we expect out of WYSIWYG) what you see is what you get)!

Lets not blame technology when defeated in harnessing its power. The BVR did not work in some polling stations, some laptops lost power and its then that staff started looking for sockets and cables.. then no sockets... If this is replicated at the tallying centres national or county levels, what has technology to do with this?

This country has stamped its mark on the world map as the centre of many technovations 

In my opinion, IEBC failed to adequately prepare.  Various tests including, stress test, performance tests,  path tests, load/traffic tests etc were not performed to a satisfactory level. The ICT staff performed simulations (black box) testng of a very rudimentary nature.

The best we could with water now under the bridge is to do a post term begining with requirements specification all the way to implementation, system conversion strategy and alignment. The process needs to be driven by user centered philosophy and participatory in approach to address key stakes. This is my reflection.

Nancy


------Original Message------
From: Gilda Odera
Sender: kictanet
To: MS Nancy Macharıa
Cc: KICTAnet ICT Policy Discussions
Subject: Re: [kictanet] Has the ICT Sector Failed?
Sent: Mar 6, 2013 3:56 PM

Listers, My view is that we cannot keep refusing to perfect what we do. No doubt that systems fail but it is a terribly lame excuse considering that the article in The Star confirms that the prior tests failed. Why did they proceed to use a problematic system? We must learn to accept where we fail if we are to improve I future. How else do other democracies vote electronically if we are excusing ourselves that systems fail? It is because they plan, plan, plan and test, test, test way beforehand to ensure all is well and all back-ups will work.  Remember we are still going to have elections in 5 years time so let us face the truth and discuss here what should or should never happen again. Regards, Gilda Odera On Mar 6, 2013, at 10:20 AM, Agosta Liko <agostal at gmail.com> wrote: Roland The governance experts are saying - lack of governance The networking experts are saying - lets get better VPNS The server experts are saying - we should have used HP or SUN or IBM The database experts are concerned Oracle was used (Open Source Guys would want MySQL) Software Developers - why use language X and not you Software Testers - want more testing Everyone is pitching their wares ... no one is sure what happened ....... ... and the job is over this week :) On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 at 10:00 AM, Roland Omoresemi <roland at tezzasolutions.com> wrote: Can we really blame ICT when the true culprit appears to be the lack of proper testing of the systems in play? IEBC could have performance tested (both load and stress) their systems to see how they would react under varying loads. The tools and human resources were right there in Kenya but it is obvious we failed to apply them to help create a different result than what we currently face. What we are witnessing is a classic case of what happens when we fail to adequately test our applications. Our non-conformance cost skyrockets...IEBC now has to worry about the cost of doing damage control on the biggest stage ever when it could have spent a fraction of the same cost to perform load or str
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