I don’t know the judging criteria for the Vodacom App Star competition, myself I don’t like to
call it competition I prefer calling it a challenge. If I was supposed to
submit my App for the challenge then this would have been my App “The Katiba App”.
If I were to be the judge, my judging criteria would have
been how the App impact the community directly, problem solving, platform independent,
easy to use and applicability. Actually our government has three major
activities on their plan sheet now, the national constitutional amendment, the
national ID card registration and the national censorship Programme.
In all these activities, the information gathering has been
the major challenge to them, especially the so called “The Katiba Team”. They are moving here and there to
collect people’s suggestions and opinions on how our national constitutional should
be. Although it inevitable for them to travel and reach some of these people
but the app could have been so useful.
Am suggesting this idea
to you guys, if the developer would be successful to develop and app and interact the app with USSD
SMS applications it means the problem of the platform dependency could have
been solved since every phone have the ability to send an SMS. These SMS could
be organized in a centralized database and later on filtered out according to
the required proposed topic.
For example: People
who send suggestions about “Presidency Power wither to be reduced or not” they
could have been given a certain code and through these codes the familiar
comments about a topic could have been selected from this centralized database
and put in use in the preparation of the new constitutional of our country and
the ICT sector could have played the major role in it. Putting in mind now
Tanzania have around 25 million mobile phone users this could have been so useful.
For people with smart phone, with a lot of features and
interactivity, they could upload their research and documentations to help the
Katiba Team in their project by putting these docs in the centralized database.
That is just a “Hypothesis” someone can decide to work on it and bring
something useful. Coders out there that is the challenge I provide to you.
Really we need an App for information gathering.