Search engine giant Google will tomorrow launch an elections website in Kenya designed to provide information and news related to the March 4 general election.
According to the details already released, “the hub shall also act as a gateway to Google+ where Kenyans shall be able to interact with their leaders”.
Among those invited for the launch include the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) as well as civil society and non-governmental organisations that are expected to play a critical role in the successful conclusion of the elections.
The hub is expected to enable Kenyans to follow election results more closely as well as make it easy for people to collate news on a single Web-portal. It will use analytical apps such as Google Fusion Tables.
In the recent US elections, Google launched a Web-portal that was later flooded with news, videos and events related to collective political goings-on enabling citizens, politicians and the media to keep in touch with political happenings on one dashboard.
Google described the portal as “an election hub where citizens can study, watch, discuss, learn about, participate in and perhaps even make an impact on the digital campaign trail”.
Should the Kenyan portal take the same form, each presidential aspirant will be offered a page with news and videos posted there.
The portal also has the ability to fix real time statistics on the trends section of the hub, which will show volume of each aspirant, YouTube views as well as mentions in Google News stories.
To Kenyans, this could offer a new method to survey candidates’ popularity as opposed to traditional opinion polls, which have been marred by claims of manipulation, as the portal will also show real-time statistics on the candidates, including YouTube views as well as mentions on Google News stories.
