Coronavirus: We'll give our software to political parties to campaign - Kwadwo Dwomo II

The Chief Executive Officer of Comcent Limited, Kwadwo Dwomo II, has stated that he will release their software, Comcent, the first community media platform in the world, to political parties for use in their campaign in the December 2020 election.

He said, “We will be releasing our software to all political parties in Ghana to sign up and communicate to the constituents in all the various communities in Ghana. All aspiring members of parliament, who will be representing the various political parties, will be given leadership account so that they can explain their policies to the electorates for the electorates to make informed decisions. This will help to enhance and deepen our democracy of which Ghana has been a shining example to the rest of Africa. For the presidential candidates, we will give them superuser rights so that whatever they communicate will be broadcasted to all the communities in Ghana.”

From the research we conducted, this will be the first time a technology has existed for the sole purpose of letting political parties use it as their campaign tool. Existing social media platforms have come under attack from technocrats who says it should not be used to peddle political advertisements. However, this software will act differently because whatever is propagated will be a message that is coming directly from the aspirant and not as a propaganda by another firm, such as what happened in the case of Cambridge Analytica in the 2016 US election.

The Chief Communications Officer of Comcent Limited, Mr. Michael Anderson, also added his voice saying “I have started preparing letters to send to all the political parties to inform them of our decision to give them our software to use as their main online campaign platform. Before the end of April, we will meet all of them in one conference room so that we can educate them on how to use our software to get better results for their campaign. We do not want to discriminate against anybody so I will go to the Electoral Commission (EC) of Ghana to get the list of all the political parties and their contact information so that not one of the political parties will be left behind.

After that, we will do a lot of radio and TV interviews to get people’s attention to our platform.”

Asked when Comcent will become available for the populace, Kwadwo Dwomo II again stated that “Comcent will be made available to the populace in the latter part of April. We are done with creating it. We are now doing further testing to ascertain the correctness of the software.

Earlier this month, we released our application programming interface (API) that will give other software developers the chance to develop their solutions on the top of our platform. It can be found at www.comcentapp.com . We are making sure we leave no stone unturned to make the platform reliable and bug-free for our users. However, we will plead with our users to be patient with us when they find any bug. They should just report it to us on the platform and we will work on it.”

This solution has rather become more useful as the corona virus pandemic rears its ugly head. It is not yet known how long public gathering will be banned. The president has given the order that public gatherings must be banned for four weeks. However, if the number of cases of coronavirus victims continues to rise, then we might be looking at a longer ban which will make the introduction of Comcent very useful to the public and political parties alike.

The name Comcent comes from the two words: community and center and they have the mission to use technology to solve the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Goal 11, which is building smarter cities and communities.