Surely its not the future of Maldivian ICT. I don't know why NCIT thinks that Kiosks will be or should be something very important. Even if we decide that the need for information access is urgent and important, then ministries like Min. of Information should be the party who should be taking interest in these Kiosks not NCIT. Its another story about the infrastructures which will be provided for such projects. Anyway whats the big deal about these Internet Kiosks? I have no idea at all. Most Maldivians today now have the access to internet, and soon almost everyone will have it. The GSM networks and other telecommunication infrastructures already has made this a reality. This is one area where Linux has proved itself here in the Maldives. We could today proudly say the Maldivian Internet domain is powered by Linux (Thanks to a few open minded individuals).
The e-Government project mainly talks about portals and connectivity. The questions which should be asked might include, the cost factors, being future proof, security and alike. There is so much things to be considered when it comes to building such a huge network. Laying the cables is just 2% of the work. Having a physical medium and border routers does not get anything solved. I guess very important factors will be things like storage management, application frameworks and redundancy. How will the so called portals be hosted, and what will be the platforms. Will they be outdated in 2 years after implementation? How much will they cost? How secure are they? These are all questions that pops up to ones mind. What about the hardware, the processing powers? Will we need to purchase new servers, etc every year? Is there proper planing done on them? Or just the latest trends have been followed without thinking into the future and cost factors? There is so many questions and most will be answered with experience and knowledge. Other important issues like once we setup the hardware infrastructures what about the software or the applications? Who will develop them? What will be the costs, etc. My obvious guess is an external party will be given the contract for developments. Huge amounts of money will be dumped into these developments. Anyhow it will be interesting to watch how these projects progress and the end results. My obvious guess is, we should not try and reinvent the wheel. Meaning we would not be the first country who would be implementing such a solution in the world; so there is so much to learn from. Anyhow it all comes down to policy making and how well the teams know their subjects. Just by attending a few workshops conducted by UN won't give the required skill and the expertise, but we need a lot more help and consultation. We won't even need to look too far out , countries like India and China already have gone through these stages and are key players in the technology world. I hope the foundations of our countries ICT won't be like the old Majeedhee magu, which was laid out with cement floors which took little time to crack.
I sure hope they would not be M$ .NET (dot NET) based, then it would be such a big joke but its very highly likely that this would be the case. It would be really sad to see such options being adopted while proven and OSS technologies like JBoss exist. As for database servers, Oracle might be the obvious best choice.
The e-Government project mainly talks about portals and connectivity. The questions which should be asked might include, the cost factors, being future proof, security and alike. There is so much things to be considered when it comes to building such a huge network. Laying the cables is just 2% of the work. Having a physical medium and border routers does not get anything solved. I guess very important factors will be things like storage management, application frameworks and redundancy. How will the so called portals be hosted, and what will be the platforms. Will they be outdated in 2 years after implementation? How much will they cost? How secure are they? These are all questions that pops up to ones mind. What about the hardware, the processing powers? Will we need to purchase new servers, etc every year? Is there proper planing done on them? Or just the latest trends have been followed without thinking into the future and cost factors? There is so many questions and most will be answered with experience and knowledge. Other important issues like once we setup the hardware infrastructures what about the software or the applications? Who will develop them? What will be the costs, etc. My obvious guess is an external party will be given the contract for developments. Huge amounts of money will be dumped into these developments. Anyhow it will be interesting to watch how these projects progress and the end results. My obvious guess is, we should not try and reinvent the wheel. Meaning we would not be the first country who would be implementing such a solution in the world; so there is so much to learn from. Anyhow it all comes down to policy making and how well the teams know their subjects. Just by attending a few workshops conducted by UN won't give the required skill and the expertise, but we need a lot more help and consultation. We won't even need to look too far out , countries like India and China already have gone through these stages and are key players in the technology world. I hope the foundations of our countries ICT won't be like the old Majeedhee magu, which was laid out with cement floors which took little time to crack.
I sure hope they would not be M$ .NET (dot NET) based, then it would be such a big joke but its very highly likely that this would be the case. It would be really sad to see such options being adopted while proven and OSS technologies like JBoss exist. As for database servers, Oracle might be the obvious best choice.
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