4th
What’s lacking in African technology development?
I’m an African and a great fan of Africa. My dream is to see a technologically advanced Africa; an era where Africans have equal access to technology as their technologically-advanced counterparts and utilize them. However, there are certain things I see as limitations that will limit our ever attaining this nirvana and one of such limitations is trust.
In addition to being a great fan of Africa, I’m a web developer with a lot of keen interest for the mobile web. I’ve been thinking a lot these days about startup ideas and I keep hitting a brick wall about how successful the enterprise will become. My theory is that you cannot build a long-lasting successful online enterprise if the members constituting the enterprise don’t have a level of trust for each other.
Internet fraud has dented the image of Nigerians online so much so that business are wary of doing business with us. The have to take extra measures if at all they’ll do business with us. Even local businesses are not spared. Merchants don’t trust customers, customers don’t trust merchants. Just observe the frantic emotions customers display when they make payments online and the web site displays an error with the transaction and few moments ago, they got an alert on their mobile phones that their accounts have been debited. They cry fowl. Their thought would not be that it was some software error that would be corrected but rather that the merchant has made away with their money. They’ve been defrauded.
To honest, I find this really strange since in retrospect traders used to leave their wares on the streets and customers will buy and leave payment on the table. What happened to all that? We have a culture of trust and integrity. How did distrust and dishonestly creep into our society?
If we are going to make advancements as a people, we have got to trust one another and make ourselves trustworthy. If we keep thinking someone will steal our ideas and corner it as theirs, then we will not share what we have or know. There’s a fear amongst local software engineers that someone might steal their idea and profit from it so they hoard knowledge or resources. I’ve seen it everywhere. What’s so special about what you know or think you know? If you could make something worthwhile with it, you should have done so a long time ago.
A question I really want us to consider is this: “Is there any benefit in sharing?” It takes a paradigm shift to realise the benefits in sharing. Why do I share what I know or the resources I have? It’s simple. I can’t do everything and I don’t know everything. 99% of everything “computers” I know, I got for free: ebooks, the Internet, open source software, people… It’s only natural that I contribute whatever improvements I’ve come up with. I derive joy in sharing what I know.
Here’s an instance. I’ve been into mobile messaging (bulksms) for a long time (over four years) and recently, I got talking with a colleague about some of the challenges bulksms providers were facing in the country. Our discussions ranged from some of the technical issues to social issues. At the end of the day, I learned a lot of things from him and also shared some code I had that did some smart things with phone numbers. Basically some regular expression snippets that made extracting phone numbers from files and text fields smarter and so saved the users of the application a lot of trouble about proper formatting. We both benefitted.
My mentality is that if I share what I know that helps my work, think about the contribution it will make for others. I will appreciate some attribution but if I don’t get it at least I’ll be satisfied knowing it’s making the world a better place :) I imagine that if everyone had a similar thinking pattern, what can result from this can be anyone’s guess.
I believe: “Freely have you received, freely give ye also.” If we will see development on a massive scale, it has to start somewhere and developers are at the forefront of this revolution. We need to build a system of trust and accountability with integrity. I rest my case.
Wait a minute, I’m not through yet. I’ve heard this excuse: “What do I know? There are a lot of better guys out there than me.” My postulation is if there were “better guys” out there, they’ll be publishing their discoveries and finding ways to get the word out too. It’s work I know but your effort to get the word out will contribute to the benefit of others. Whatever new knowledge you’ve acquired even if you think its mundane, share it! Let’s say you had a problem to which you found a smart solution; and let’s say you published the solution, if someone had a better solution, he would comment and give you the solution. You get to learn a better way to solve your problem and also help others who might encounter that problem. It’s a win-win solution. That way, everybody benefits. With that said, I do hope I see lots of developer blogs. If you are an African developer and have a blog, please make a comment with a link to it. I’ll appreciate that.
