Dear Colleagues,

New staff. We are pleased to inform you that Caroline Wamala and Katja Sarajeva have now joined the Spider team. Caroline, who is a Ugandan national, recently completed her PhD at Luleå University of Technology on the topic Does IT Count? Complexities between access to and use of information technologies among Uganda’s farmers (2010). At Spider, Caroline is filling in for Magda, now on maternity leave, and she will also manage the preparation of a new cluster of projects in East Africa. Katja is a PhD student at Stockholm University and she will assist us with a workshop on ICT4D and democracy in Stockholm in June as well as upcoming publications on results from Spider-supported projects. We welcome Caroline and Katja to the team, while congratulating Magda Berhe Johnson and her family on the recent arrival of their baby girl. Helen Belcastro, short-term e-governance expert at Spider, has now resumed her duties at Sida. We appreciate her inputs on the thematic development of democracy and look forward to future collaboration.

Web updates. We are in the process of updating our web site to keep you better informed of our ongoing activities in a more transparent manner. So far we have uploaded recent evaluations (Spider, University projects, and IPID), along with key documents guiding our work (Annual Report 2010, Activity Plan 2011, Sida application and response for 2011-2013). We have also posted new concept notes on our thematic areas in ICT4D: democracy, education, and health. There is now a Spider group in Facebook, which we encourage you to link up with.

Upcoming events. We are organizing a workshop Democrazy-ICT as a catalyst in democratic processes? in Kista Science Tower, Stockholm on 9 June 2011, together with the Swedish Development Forum (FUF). The event will be web cast to enable remote participation. For more information, see our web site. Spider will contribute to a workshop on multi-stakeholder partnerships organized at the WSIS Forum 2011 in Geneva on 16-20 May. In addition to supporting developing country participation, we will also organize an Umoja session on youth at eLearning Africa 2011 in Dar es Salaam on 25-27 May. We will also support African participation in the Workshop on Mobile and Web Technologies in Social and Economic Development organized by the World Wide Web Foundation and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in Dar es Salaam on 4-5 June.

Spider strategy. Our Board is assisting us define a strategy for our next phase 2011-2015. We will soon post a draft strategy on our web site for open consultation and hope to receive constructive feedback from you during this process. More information will follow shortly.

Paula Uimonen, Director 

Tanzanian public officials trained in ICT management

Tanzania has seen an increasing ICT investment and the public sector has introduced a number of ICT facilities and applications. Despite the government efforts to conduct various reform programs within the public sector, appropriate capacity in ICT management and technical skills in some areas is still insufficient to efficiently support the constantly increasing e-government initiatives.

Sophisticated technology and refined rigging in Uganda's 2011 presidential election

”This is the old man with a hat, THANK U for voting for me & the NRM. Let's work together for a better Uganda. Congratulations on the NRM victory.”

This SMS was sent by ”YKMuseveni” to millions of Ugandan mobile users the week after the presidential election in February 2011. The SMS more or less tells the whole story. Not only does it tell us that the long lasting President Museveni usually wears a hat; it also states that the 25-year rule is set to continue for another 5 years and the SMS also indicates that those in power have understood the value in using new technologies to campaign and reach the masses.

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