IEC website riles OSS users, CIO has a plan
This weekend South Africa’s Independent Electoral Commission will host its first voter registration drive ahead of next year’s national elections. Despite this the IEC’s website is still unavailable to non-Internet Explorer users and the organisation is expected to respond today to a Human Rights Commission complaint filed against it for exactly this problem.
Libisi Maphanga, chief information officer at the IEC, says, however, that the organisation is “well aware” of the problems with the website and the complaints from users and has in place a project team to rectify the situation.
Maphanga told Tectonic this morning that a “project team” had be set up to fix the problem and it was expected to have the first phase of the all-access website up and running by January 2009. A second phase was expected to add more content by April 2009, just in time for the national elections.
The project to make the website available to all users will cost around R3 million, says Maphanga. He says that because of a growing “campaign” from disgruntled citizens complaining about the website and the “disruption to our regular work” this was causing, other projects have been put on hold so that budget could be allocated to fixing the website. The IEC also applied for supplemental funding from government for the website but this was denied.
Disruptions
Maphanga says that the IEC is aware of a “growing campaign” around the organisation’s website which had made it an important issue. He says that he receives around “20 emails a day” complaining about the website, “many of which are very rude”.
The problem with the website, he says, is that it was originally developed using consultants in 1998. At the time the site was developed on Microsoft-specific technologies and now needs to be completely revamped before it can be made available to all users. He says that the current website when viewed in a non-Internet Explorer browser is “very broken” and that is “not good for the image of the organisation”.
Users with non-IE browsers such as Firefox can, however, set their browser to identify itself as IE and gain access to the IEC website that way.
Asked whether it wasn’t preferable to simply allow all users access to the website’s content even if it didn’t look perfect, Maphanga said that the “risk is that users might get the wrong information”. He said that much of the content relies on old VBScripts and even, in some more advanced sections, on users having Microsoft Windows to access the site.
Despite this reliance on Microsoft-based products to access the website, Maphanga said that there was no intentional attempt to promote Microsoft. “We have noting to gain from Microsoft. We have no brief from Microsoft,” he said.
Human rights
Maphanga said that the IEC would comply with the Human Rights Commission’s deadline of November 4 to reply to a complaint filed against it. He said that the IEC would not go into technical details in the response but would commit its project team to the January and April 2009 targets for making the website accessible to all.
Maphanga denies, however, that users have been excluded from receiving information because of the website. The website, he says, “is but one channel of communication”. Users can get all the information they need by calling the IEC’s call centre, says Maphanga. The call centre is not, however, listed on the page that greets non-IE users.
He says that he is aware that the organisation is at odds with national government which has an open source strategy as well as a set of minimum interoperability standards. He says, however, that these are still relatively new and the IEC is working to bring its website in line.
[POLL=12]
Related stories:
- Election website campaign grows
- OSS advocate file human rights complaint
- SA launches elections, locks out OSS users
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18 Responses to “IEC website riles OSS users, CIO has a plan”
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November 4th, 2008 @ 12:13 pm
3 million? Rands, not Zim dollars? To make the website standards compliant? Woohoo, the dot com boom must be back! Sadly it looks like the IEC is being taken for a ride again, and it’s yet another gravy train project…
Also, setting the browser to identify itself as IE gives only superficial access to the site, but not to most of the information, which really is broken in anything but IE.
November 4th, 2008 @ 12:54 pm
I guess the lesson to learn is that if you don’t follow standards you end up spending more money then you intended to spend in the long run. VBScript, for real?
The site actually works fine on Firefox just some rendering anomalies that disappear if you fake as IE, but only if you get past the blocking page. R3 million. I think we mustn’t confuse complete website revamp with making it standards compliant.
Glad to see that our efforts have actually worked. If the intention is to use technology to inform the electorate then this is a critical problem. One that has been raised before, its not new news to the IEC.
November 4th, 2008 @ 2:10 pm
How is someone so incompetent allowed to keep his job? In any serious democracy this joker would have been fired on the spot for wasting taxpayers’ money. How did Libisi Maphanga get his job? How is he keeping his job? Is he actually doing anything day to day to earn his salary? This is ridiculous. There are many people out there that could actually do this job properly. Give me R1.5 mil and I’ll have the site ready before the end of November. There, that’s an official quote, take it or leave it. But now someone at the IEC’s brother or daughter is going to get the contract and make another mess of it.
If Lekota promises to get rid of these jokers he’s got my vote in the next election.
November 4th, 2008 @ 3:21 pm
THE POLL ON THIS PAGE DOESN’T WORK!!!!
November 4th, 2008 @ 3:28 pm
@Pule R. Mohapi:
If you mean by “doesn’t work” that it doesn’t allow you to vote but shows the results only then it is probably because you have already voted on this. Each poll allows you a single vote. The poll is on two separate pages so that is a possibility.
If that’s not the case please send me more details so I can look into it.
November 4th, 2008 @ 4:37 pm
Where can we tender for this 3 million rand contract. I’ll put one decent web designer on the whole project for two months – overkill I know but hey we want it properly tested and working don’t we!
November 4th, 2008 @ 9:15 pm
I don’t know if it was there before, but currently there is a link to at least check registration details. By default it isn’t on a secure connection, but it submits to a secure form. It seems one can also just go straight here: https://www.elections.org.za/AmRegister/AmRegister.aspx
Interestingly, from that page you can reach the FAQ (from 2006!) and several other pages that probably is the whole site (I didn’t bother to identify as IE to compare). It contains some interesting things by the “consultants” such as the tag, broken images and loads of commented html.
Perhaps more interesting than Firefox is Opera Mini – we’re not just talking about professional office workers with PCs and Firefox.
November 4th, 2008 @ 9:15 pm
Ok, I can understand the problem. The website *was* steamrollered into place by fast-talking, highly paid consultants (who actually knew little about coding and the web and non-Microsoft environments). The bits of code done in VB *are* crucial – if I remember correctly, during the last elections, a view of the site in IE yielded very different results to when viewed in Konqueror or Mozilla.
Now, when you have a ‘website’, and you ask for money to rewrite it, chances are you won’t be popular with your boss. And the budget of R3m? Those are the figures when you get a big consulting firm to come in and make your problem go away. Of course you could get a smaller company in, but then you would need to assess them to see whether they can do the job adequately, manage them (because they don’t have the smooth partner-types with Powerpoint slides to keep your boss feeling comfortable).
It’s a sick world, I know.
November 5th, 2008 @ 12:13 am
[...] The latest developments that made headlines today, in response to the HRC complaint, is that the IEC will be spending R3 million to fix their broken website. And when they say broken, they’re referring to the fact that it was designed and developed (way back in 1998) using Microsoft’s proprietary technologies – so in effect they will be redesigning and redeveloping it to support all their visitors. My response to this news echos what everyone else has said. [...]
November 5th, 2008 @ 8:32 am
Wow, everyone here is making huge assumptions on very little information. We don’t actually know what the R3 Million is actually paying for, so how can you criticise? Also, if the site has been the same since 2002/2003 then it’s not such a shock that it only supports IE, in those days Firefox, Mozilla and other browsers were not nearly as important as they are now.
Seems you can’t please people though. First they complain that it doesn’t work, then they complain that they are wasting money when they try make it work. Don’t forget, the R3 million is part of the budget that they would have gotten anyway, at least they’re using it to fix the site and not pay themselves bigger bonuses.
November 5th, 2008 @ 9:19 am
@Mladen Mihajlovic
The web site has been the same since 1998, not 2002/2003.
November 5th, 2008 @ 10:48 am
I’ll do it for 2.5 million. No, really. I’d hire some web developers (I’m not a real good one myself), and get it done, securing myself a *lot* of profit in the process.
November 5th, 2008 @ 11:25 am
3 Million to remove non IE browse block ?
I want this job for that money…fine example of wasting taxpayers money !!!
People that don’t have any clue making those kind of financial decisions…what a waste of money and opportunity for government tender from BEE company…they call them wealthy snakes
November 5th, 2008 @ 1:45 pm
OK so we all know that you can code and want to start a web development business, but can we PLEASE rather focus on the issue at hand, the exclusion of many many South African’s.
Now I don’t just mean the Firefox user out there. Those people with money enough to buy computers, that is the easy excuse that we can’t get the IEC to use as some magic get out of jail card.
The fact that 15-20% of South African’s use Firefox is not as relevant as the fact that in many ways this issue is about the unrepresented people. The millions of cellphone users, especially those who will in all likelihood never have owned a computer. People with disabilities, since the site is not W3C compliant who knows what it is doing for people with disabilities who need screen readers and magnifiers.
That is the fight.
November 9th, 2008 @ 4:24 pm
Hahahahah! This is a total farce! Reminds me of the heady days in the nineties when ridiculous amounts were spent by big corporates on websites that were ineffective and subject to frequent redesign.
November 9th, 2008 @ 10:27 pm
If you try to access the site using non-IE, you are told you need version FOUR or later of IE. Now that is going back a couple of years – probably 1998 would be more accurate than 2006.
However, I can’t get that verification image on either of my ie7 machines, one of which is a very recent re-install with no known issues whatever. The famous Red “X” comes up with “Verification code. Please enable images on your browser”. Oddly, I can see images on any other website I choose!
And, no, when the CIO says he is spending 3m “ront” to fix the problem, it is not unreasonable to criticise and say this is overspend and that IEC’s IT dept is incompetent. If we were given a laundry-list of things that will be done and new features that will be incorporated into the site, that would be different… he didn’t.
November 11th, 2008 @ 1:39 pm
[...] to Tectonic, the CIO of the IEC has a plan though! Spend R3Mil on redesigning and redevelopment of the website. Apparently because everyone is [...]
January 19th, 2009 @ 9:16 am
[...] November last year IEC chief information officer, Libisi Maphanga, said that the organisation planned to spend R3 [...]