With 2018 coming to a close, and with members of the Caribbean tech community, Ingrid Riley and Yacine Khelladi, the Community Chat panel discusses the ICT/tech trends and developments that have emerged, and those it had hoped would have gained more traction, over the past year.

 

This episode is also available in Apple iTunes and on Stitcher!

As we come to the close of the year, and as has been our custom, we, at ICT Pulse highlight what were some of the big issues of the year. This year, 2018, will be no different, but we have added a new spin: we have members of the regional ICT/tech community share their thoughts on what was big this year, and what might be missing in the Caribbean region’s tech space.

In this our last Community Chat for 2018, we have two individuals who are no strangers to ICT Pulse, the podcast, and to the regional tech space:

Ingrid Riley

  • Ingrid Riley,  the Founder of Silicon Caribe Media, which operates the platform Silicon Caribe, through which Ingrid and her team produce trend reports, guides and watch lists. Ingrid also organized and hosted Kingston BETA, the long-running tech community meet-up held in Kingston, Jamaica, which has been the model for similar events across the region.
  • Yacine Khelladi, an Economist and International Consultant, who is also the Latin America and the Caribbean Coordinator for the Alliance for Affordable Internet. Yacine  also moderates CIVIC, the Caribbean ICT Stakeholders Virtual Community, a multi-stakeholder, multilingual, regional network, and through those various roles, he should be able to offer a unique perspective on region’s ICT/tech landscape.

Unlike previous Community Chats, this episode focussed on one topic: ICT/tech trends across the Caribbean. However, the discussions were guided by the following four questions:

  1. Yacine Khelladi

    What tech areas were big in 2018?

  2. What surprised our panellists, e.g. because it got more (or less!) traction than they had expected?
  3. How is tech/ICT evolving in the region?
  4. What will be big in 2019?

Ingrid, who has been in the entrepreneurial space for over a decade, and is the eternal optimist, gave some first-hand insights and observations on some of the big and important issues this year. Yacine, the Economist, who is experienced in examining national and regional/economic impact, really called on all of us to question whether Caribbean countries, and by extension the region, have established proper digital agendas and national development plans and strategies, and consequently, whether we are in a position to truly realise the benefits that ICT has to offer.

As a result, the discussion we, the panellists, had was interesting and thought-provoking. It was not solely a purely enthusiastic discourse on all of the exciting things that are happening in the Caribbean tech space. It was tempered by a recognition of the things that have not been happening, or are not evident, along with its impact on countries generally, and the region as a whole.

 

We would love to hear your thoughts!

Do leave us a comment either here beneath this article, or on our Facebook or LinkedIn pages, or via Twitter, @ICTPulse

 

Select links

Below are links to some of the organisations and resources that either were mentioned during the episode, or otherwise, might be useful:

 

 

Image credits:  geralt (Pixabay);  I Riley;  World Wide Web Foundation

Music credit:  Ray Holman