One of my main goals to unite the technical community in South Africa.
I want to do this because I believe it allows the community to grow and develop. Through all my travels around the world over the past years, visiting many different technical communities, I’ve seen the impact that this can have. It’s in stark contrast to South Africa. It seems that South Africa engineers are overprotective of their perceived intellectual property and a more open approach to sharing and collaborating on industry challenges would, in my opinion, accelerate our development and bring us to the forefront of the industry. It is definitely a current shortcoming of the local community that I’d like to address.
It was these thoughts that I shared with the judging panel that recently chose me as a finalist in the IITSPA’s 2016 IT Personality of the Year Award. I was truly humbled by the nomination, and would like to send my sincere congratulations to the winner - Sbu Shabalala of Adapt IT. It was inspirational to be recognized with local leaders who are making an enormous difference to the local technical community. The leaders and captains of industry recognized by the IITSPA are a group of incredibly inspiring leaders who will make inroads (and headlines) in the years to come.
One thing I love about South Africa is that companies are open to learning and tackling issues in innovative ways. This is one of my favourite aspects of the local network engineering community, as well as it being a very entrepreneurial environment. I think that openness needs to be extended and exploited to let us grow faster, take the lead, and put the SA technical community on the map on a global scale.
Ed