Somaliland: An Open letter to newly elected National Elections Commission!

HARGEISA, 27 October 2009 (Somalilandpress) – With the current thorny political situation in Somaliland including tainted NEC process, you are circumspectly elected to assume the incomplete NEC election process, reassurance of public trust and creation of healthy election atmosphere. And also your experience, wisdom, timely, intrepid public communication and ingenuousness approach to election process will return the tarnished image of Somaliland during cat-fight drama.

Despite political differences between political parties, troublesome issue is about how to manage collected data and its integrity constraints including elimination of existing duplicates and its logistic aspect. It is a crucial to work as a team with identical objectives to achieve, professionalism, commitment and reliability. And also to seek assistance from expertise on unfamiliar matters that may arise during your assignments, particularly information technology sector including blurred server issue.

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Our expectations include, highly computer skills, full commitment, determination, and being modest and not to act as arrogant as your predecessor did – (Mr. Jamac Sweden) or become a problematic commission like those who earlier blew up entire process in a matter of days. In addition, your humble collaborations with colleagues and external entities or stakeholders will considerably increment the chance of succeeding this daunting task. Further, you are devout Muslims, under oath and decided to accept this position. Thus, rules of laws ought to be complied with no nepotism, corruption and any interferences presented by political parties must be made in public.

In accordance with your current curriculum vitae presented in the media, your computer skills appear to be limited and not abreast of the latest technologies and your dependency upon outside expertise will once again compromise the providence of this task. As core issue is somehow related to computers and servers, information technology expertise from Somaliland should be onboard to simplify information and also act as go-between entity. Imported information technology experts must be placed under Somaliland experts supervisions.

Demystifying server term

Server issue dominates much of the talk in Somaliland and it seems server quandary continues. In computer term, server refers to an application that runs on a specified computer which delivers services, software that make communication and data transportation possible between the main or master computer and other computers (client). There are numerous server types and each one designed to employ for specific purpose.

For instance, web server runs and transports data between your browser and computer (server) which stores web pages, printer server provides printer service and file server which also provides file services. Apparently, Somaliland needs the following components for the election and creation a permanent national database.

The most important and fundamental component is creating a national database , responsible to store citizens personal information such as last name , date of birth , finger print and facial data. It should be housed in the specific computer (server), highly secured and cooling temperature environment. Possible databases include MS access, mysql, and sql server .

Other components or top layers are software, called GUI (graphic user interface) that enables us to read these RAW data from national database and perform comparisons such as facial recognition and fingerprint software.

Finally, all stipulated components must function as one component and should be meticulously verified their compatibilities.

Good luck.

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Yours truly,
Mohammed Abdi Awciise Bahdoon, Bsc.
IT consultant @IBM, Canada
Former UNDP consultant @Hargeisa
Email: m_bahdoon@yahoo.ca