[kictanet] Tech Spectator Syndrome ?

[Brian Munyao Longwe]

Hi Sam,

For the little bits and pieces of information that keep trickling out, it
appears that a company called "Next Technologies" bid and won. This is the
company that had previously provided the system that handled various
by-elections and the referendum for the new constitution. They never got
round to implementation because IEBC decided to do the RTS development
in-house and called on Next for support as an external contractor.

So in this case I guess we could (sort of) say that "they" is IEBC's IT
team. But having said that, we are not absolved from the responsibility of
being as much a part of the process so that instead of being retrospective
we can be proactive.

Best regards,

Brian

On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 7:08 PM, Sam Gichuru <gichuru at gmail.com> wrote:

> Please allow me to post this as a new thread...
>
> Added - My concern has been our reactions to the IEBC system failure, I
> applaud the doers in this country, I applaud those who bid and lost and
> those who won the contract to implement the system, I applaud them for
> their failure which means we are still alive and crawling but we will soon
> learn to talk and say baba and mama as the tech industry in Kenya, but my
> major concern is the rest of us...
>
> What I am seeing and I stand to be corrected is the spectator syndrome,
> when everything is ok and the international press highlight Kenya as a tech
> destination, Mpesa is praised, Ushahidi and startups with all our Mvitus,
> we celebrate, claim our team (#teamtech/ICT) is winning and write long blog
> posts and gazillion tweets etc
>
> This only last as long as nothing goes wrong, but when it does, suddenly
> the conversation changes from "we" to "them", they have failed, they dint
> consult, they dint test, they... not us. This is what most football
> fans/Spectators do, they love their football team only when its winning,
> which basically makes one wonder are we players or are we fans of this game?
>
> But to bring this home, we have a bigger problem, if this community
> started asking about the procurement process, the system architect and the
> companies that were selected to implement  the IEBC system only after it
> failed, we are not engaging enough, are we saying that nobody in this list
> bid for this system? nobody tried? ... doesn't that mean we are just
> talking ..... and talk is cheap.
>
> I would like to challenge the community to engage more with an aim to
> problem solve, to tender and bid for local contracts, to build more open
> source solutions, to fundraise with an aim to seed fund startups, if we
> dont... we are going to be running around in circles and then move to
> Rwanda and guess what we will all say ..... they dint do xyz...
>
>
> Let ask Ourselves ... who is they?
>
> PS: I will stick to shorter posts in the future :)
>
>
> --
> Warm Regards,
> ------------------------
> Sam Gichuru
>
>
> twitter: | @samgichuru <http://twitter.com/samgichuru>
> Blog: |  www.samgichuru.com
> Facebook: | Sam.gichuru <http://www.facebook.com/sam.gichuru>
> Skype: Sam.gichuru
> Cellphone: | +254-722-730565
>
> Co-founder/ Director /Nailab Incubation
> Location: | Nairobi
> Website: | www.nailab.co.ke
> twitter: | @thenailab
>
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