June 22nd through the 24th Ushahidi Liberia and Google co-hosted New Tech at Work: Planning for Liberia’s Election and Beyond, a workshop focusing on how Google and other freely available technologies could be used in and around the planning, execution, and monitoring of the 2011 Liberian Elections. Though to be clear, we did not talk about electronic voting. That’s a whole other can of worms. Google brought in a couple Googlers and hired the Ushahidi Liberia staff and myself to speak at the workshop. The workshop was split into two separate events.
The first two days of the workshop targeted IT officers from major elections organizations such as the Liberian Elections Commission, IFES, and the Elections Coordinating Committee. Given the limited number of attendees, we were able to have candid discussions on the technical issues that these organizations deal with. But more interestingly, one non-technical issue was also discussed. We talked about the lack of up to date content on many Liberian websites. This is an issue I’ve dealt with a lot. The participants of the workshop told us they had noticed this issue as well and the problems were political and not technical. That was reassuring for me to hear. It’s good to know that my fellow IT professionals are seeking to make information public and aren’t the bottle neck.
These two days were hosted at iLab Liberia, Liberia’s premier computer lab. Some of the things we discussed were Skype, Google Sites, Google Forms, and Google groups. One of the biggest hits was Dropbox. It seems we had the privilege of being the first to inform our participants about the data accessibility and back up that Dropbox provides. People were very excited to learn about this.
The second workshop was aimed at the general public and was hosted at PA’s Rib House, Liberia’s premier bar-b-q restaurant. Here we wanted to highlight the various ways that the Internet can help citizens make a voice for themselves, something we feel is important during an election. We also covered various Google and open source technologies such as Map Maker and Ubuntu.
A year ago I was part of Google’s first public workshop in Liberia, and I can say that things have since improved. The kinds of questions we were getting from the audience showed a deeper understanding of the online world. We even had break out sessions on setting up your own webserver, Google App Engine, and Virtualization. Things I wouldn’t have dreamed of covering a year ago.
I look forward to continued growth in Liberia’s young IT community, and I hope I can continue to be a small part of it.
For a more detailed list of the technologies covered in these workshops please see the iLabLiberia post about them.
-John.
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