ICTworks by Inveneo

Recently, Google put on the hyped G-Nigeria Day, which was actually a 3-day Google-fest in Lagos. Reading the impressions others had about the event was telling - most Nigerians seemed to be ambivalent about its worthiness to their efforts.

Yet Oladejo Fabolude over at Digital Crossings seems to have found the real essence of the event in his post I Went For Google’s G-Nigeria Day And All I Got Was A Lousy T-Shirt:

What Google need to take away from this experiment, get a bunch of techies into a room, provide Wi-Fi, provide them a little prodding to get them headed where you want them to go, move out of the way and watch them at work. Kind of like the Indian experiment that put a computer in a wall and just let street children do what they wanted – with amazing results.

From that event, I got to meet several Nigerian tech bloggers, exchanged a couple of phone numbers, blog addresses, followed and was followed by some more people on Twitter. I got a few answers to some tech issues from the audience and had some deficiencies about my blog pointed out. In order words, I connected with people – and that was the success of G-Nigeria Day. That was just me, I could see many other people connecting much better with the Google personnel and each other.

And that's the brilliance of Google's efforts in Africa - get ICT implementers together where they can talk about technologies and methodologies, give everyone access to them, and build relationships with people creating solutions.

Now I hope they capitalize on the Nigerian enthusiasm, before Ghana lives up to its title as the ICT hub of West Africa.