[kictanet] Tech Spectator Syndrome ?

[Rad!]

Which in itself should raise alarm bells.

IEBC's competence is conducting elections and not developing software. That
is as peculiar as staff who run a nuclear reactor deciding they can build
one themselves.

Why did they take such a risky decision? And who approved it?

On Tuesday, March 12, 2013, Brian Munyao Longwe wrote:

> 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<javascript:_e({}, 'cvml', '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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