Festive season

The day we remember the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ is knocking at the door.
25th December is next Sunday and i wish every believer and viewer of this blog a merry Christmas and a happy new year 2012.

it is therefore your responsibility as a person to evaluate yourself. how much have you done and achieved in this ending year? what have been the hindrances to some of your achievements? and how do you think you can improve them in the coming new year 2012.
Many people have passed away in accidents, sickness and all other sorts of death but who is you and me still leaving? There are more and more reasons to thank the Lord every day.

It is my prayer that you prepare yourself for this festive season. Luke 3:9 talks of an axe already laid at the roots of the trees such that those that do not bear good fruit will be cut down. Are your fruits good? it's high time you look at your spiritual life, renew in any case and have a wonderful festive season.
The son of God is to be born for us all lets embrace that.

wishing you a merry X-mass and a properous new year 2012 of more achievements and blessings.

Training RIC-NET Information Officers

This has yet been another benefiting training to the Information Officers and other members who attended the training on 29th Nov.2011 at RIC-NET head office in Fort Portal-Western Uganda.
This was a training aimed at use of information for action in social accountability, Use of online platforms for information access.

A number of facilitators presented and raised issues that were beneficial to the participants.
This also gave me a chance to present a D-group (Discussion group) an online platform being used by Local Governments, Civil Society Organisations (CSOs), and the Entire community in the Rwenzori region to share important issues in the region as far as Social Accountability, service delivery and access to information is concerned.

To sign up for this discussion would require you get to http://dgroups.org/iicd/kasese and follow the details. 
we are yet to design more Discussion platforms for the rest of the Districts in the Region that we are working with. 

 

Set Up of LANs

Set up of Local Area Networks is yet another field of expertise. i have maintained and set up some in the Region.
For example i have maintained the E-Society LAN for six months making sure all is well throughout.

Also maintained and monitored a number of online platforms like www.kasese.go.ug, www.ricnet.info and many more but of course through Rwenzori Information Centers Network (RIC-NET)
I have set up one at Kabarole District Local Government. these works are creating more expertise for me.

This is always good work. i enjoy this very much because doing practical work has always been my dream. Viewers of this blog, i continue urging you to to be ICT compliant People because this is where the world is moving today. we are doing all this for timely access to information, E-governance, social Accountability among others.

Training ICT users.

As RIC-NET we are  trying to improve social accountability and information sharing among the community and the leaders, so from this base we held a D-group training on the 15^th Nov.2011 at the E-Society resource center in Kasese District.

The D-group or simply Discussion group is one of the online platforms administered by RIC-NET. It allows members who have signed up with it to initiate, respond and receive messages or discussion topics. The training attracted a number of participants from Kasese and Kabarole Districts Local Governments, members of the CSOs and all RWECO focal persons.

The training started at 10:00 am being facilitated by the ICT Officer RIC-NET who introduced members to web browsing terms since these terms were to be used most often later in the practical session of the training. He explained a number of web terms to the participants.

He was later joined by the Executive Director RIC-NET who also went through the practical session of how one can sign up or join the D-group, and advantages of this discussion group. Participants signed up with the D-group and were approved as members to this group. They (participants) were challenged not to stop at that but go ahead and initiate discussion topics and respond to those that they receive. Members were also briefed that these discussion topics would automatically get to their e-mail inboxes as long they could have been approved by the administrator and that a member would be free to reply to that message just as he/she would reply to other e-mail messages.

Participants were also informed that they could initiate a discussion topic by sending it to dgroups@kasese.org which would later be approved by the administrator and then sent to the rest of the members. The administrator of the group reserves rights to reject a topic in as long as it may not be genuine.

The Executive Director later led participants through some other online platforms like the Uchaguzi platform, and informed them another platform has been designed called the huduma that is going to monitor service delivery. Blogging was yet another issue that was explained thoroughly.

He also informed members about the U-report that UNICEF is running. He told members to join this by sending join to 8500 and that every message sent is free of charge.

In a nutshell having been part of this i argue people to embrace ICT because it is currently the way to go members.

The training was successful and it was adjourned at around 2:00 pm.

IN THE NORTH

For the very first time i have travelled to the north and Eastern Uganda.
This has quite been a good trip especially as i met so many important people and trained many in ICT based platforms.
I have been to Soroti at PAC Uganda and trained PAC staff with the other staff members of Rwenzori Information Centers Network (RIC-NET) an NGO in western Uganda where i work.

Thereafter travelled to the North in Gulu and did the same work.
I completely enjoy this work because "ICT is life" now. without it then my friend you may not like it in the near future.