It is been one year of hype and wonders about Kenya open data. It was launched by none other than his Excellency himself, the Commander in Chief of All the Kenyan Arm Forces , MP for Othaya, President DR. Emilio Mwai Kibaki. Unfortunately, one year later, the domain which was registered on June 7th 2011 expired on June 7th 2012 and no one realized that until one Martin Gicheru of techweez.com pointed it out on twitter on 24th of June 2012.
Yeah..I love Government projects, be ready for a rude shock at one point or another if you plug in to them. Opedata.go.ke is registered by Kenic which is an arm of the Government. Even them could not remind ICT Board that the domain expired and went on to suspend it. Perfect. Just in case there is any developer who took the advise from the Government officials to use opedata..poleni sana… By the way if you know any app, system done using open data..please leave a comment with its url.
Open Data is not dead. We have been working hard at this project and there are many positive results thus far. This is a case of a human error in renewing the domain and as you say, no reminders were sent but this is a temporary downtime that we are working to sort out. We will be back up in no time.
Linet
Thanks Linet. Both Kenyaweb and Kenic should have sent ICT Board reminder that the domain was expiring.. I am just amazed that Kenic which is part of the Government went ahead and suspended it..
Yes this is problematic, I will be on top of this 1st thing in the morning and probably re-look at the communication channels for these kinds of reminders. Thanks for the heads up though. :)