In an alternate universe, Nigerians did not have to wait for nearly 72 hours and stay up all night waiting for elections results. The results are been collated in real time, once a person thumb prints his candidate of choice, the vote is validated and immediately sent to a central database where the whole world can watch in real time. Vote by vote until all voting is done and the winner can be seen immediately.
Elections do not get more transparent than that.
So, why can we not do this now? Well, corruption is not really the reason. The reason is that tech moves slowly.
As a Tech Overlord myself, I love moving in big quantum leaps, but in reality if you introduce a tech solution that is too far ahead of what the populace is currently used to, you would find out that you are on your own. Little incremental steps is the key to making people more open to tech solutions.
Do not storm retailers with a dozen solutions they must start using NOW. They will simply throw it all out the window, instead pick one problem they know they have and start working with them from there, little by little, get them to trust you and your tech solutions, then further progress can be made.
The biggest challenge most technologists face is not with building awesome technology (we rock at that!), the biggest challenge we face is getting people to trust our solutions and allow us to deploy them fully (we suck at that!)
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Watching The World
- I have been trying to monitor the Nigerian presidential elections results using NigeriaElections.org
