Cybersurf

Hello good morning and welcome to Cybersurf your weekly program where the web matters. I am your Cyberhost Steven Lang – having just returned from Accra in Ghana. What on earth was I doing in Ghana, and why should I be telling you about my travels in an internet program?

The reason is quite simple really – I was in Accra because that is where an Africa regional conference was held to prepare for a world summit on the information society which is due to be held in Tunis in November.

Since it was all about information technologies, I feel I can safely link to it in this program.

I went to Accra as part of the Highway Africa News Agency. Our team, with members from Zimbabwe, Uganda, Kenya, Nigeria, Mali, Senegal, the Seychelles and of course South Africa – was charged with putting together the daily conference newspaper.

The Highway Africa News Agency – or HANA for short – was formed with the specific purpose of covering large information technology events and then distributing the news articles – free of charge - to any African news organisation that would not ordinarily be able to afford such coverage.

HANA has been operating successfully as an ad-hoc, IT event, news agency – and it was on this basis that HANA was invited to produce the daily newspaper at the preparatory meeting in Accra.

Now, I will admit that I was very nervous about producing the newspaper – it was called WSIS Africa Agenda – the WSIS being an acronym for the World Summit on the Information Society.

I was worried that our journalists might not understand the somewhat complicated concepts, or that we might put out some glaring inaccuracies.

You might think my worries are little melodramatic, after all, it is only a small conference paper - regular newspapers put out hundreds of pages every day and they don’t get all nervous – but the real difference is that when you produce a conference paper you do so in a small, closed environment, where the stakes are high and egos are rampant. The delegates you write about, are the same people you bump into in the corridors of the conference centre

– they know where you are – in the newsroom

However I was not quite prepared for the only type of criticism we did get – and it had nothing to do with missing any of the issues or misrepresenting the facts.

But had everything to do with egos.

On several occasions we had minor officials come storming into the newsroom expressing their concerns because he had not paid homage to their respective bosses.

One said the matter was very urgent, while another expressed her extreme disappointment because the paper did not carry a picture of his or her boss.

Nevertheless, the conference did allow me to get a glimpse of a rather vibrant IT sector in Ghana – where private enterprise is booming, but unfortunately the officialdom is still dragging down the pace of progress.

And after that extremely interesting foray into West Africa –

Gee it’s great to be back home.

That’s it for today, thanks for listening and remember to keeeeep on surfing.