Saamiyah organized a meetup to introduce MIU (Mauritius Internet Users group) to university students today. During the past week she posted the following on the University of Mauritius Computer Club facebook page:

Hello : ) Tomorrow there will be a talk about Internet in Mauritius by S.Moonesamy from the Mauritius Internet Users community in Phase II building, Room 2.7. There will be a questions and answers session for students. Time : 11 00 am.

The Mauritius Internet Users is a group of people dedicated to the advancement of the Internet in Mauritius. The group currently consists of 45 Internet users. One of the objectives of the group is to contribute towards a .mu ccTLD which is operated in a transparent manner for the benefit of the local Internet community.

The Internet users have various backgrounds; academia, business, technical (Information Technology). The group is open to any Internet user, irrespective of his or her background. The group has a mailing list where every member can express his or her opinion. The group takes its decisions by consensus.

How does the discussion list work?

All you have to do is send an email with subject-line as « subscribe » to sm+mu@elandsys.com. S. Moonesamy, SM as we call him currently manages the mailing list. Once you receive a subscription confirmation from SM you can shoot your query, observation or anything you’d like to share about your Internet experience in Mauritius. Send your emails to mauritius-internet-users@lists.elandnews.com.

Before I could join the MIU folks at University of Mauritius today I attended an executive meeting held by the Linux User Group of Mauritius (LUGM). We had to finalize a couple of official stuffs and approve membership requests that were pending for a while. Everything was done while munching some snacks & then having lunch at La Bouffe Jango, Quatre Bornes.

Lunch over, we packed up and rushed to the university. Once we reached I called up Saamiyah but this time MIU folks went out for lunch. We thus waited for them at the cafeteria while enjoying a coffee moment. They came a couple of minutes later. Om joined us as well, without his AIESEC folks. SM & I bullied him to bring along his team so that we could explain about MIU to a larger audience.

Cafeteria was however quite noisy and it wasn’t comfortable for us to hold a brainstorming session there. We therefore moved to a cozy bench under the shade of a tree. While the students were tossing their opinion on the quality of Internet on the university campus, a few others joined us, Ratna, Ashmita and Rashill (Om’s friend from AIESEC). SM had a quite lengthy discussion with him regarding the activities of AIESEC and was particularly interested to know the position of his friends on the topic of Internet quality in Mauritius.

Ratna, as a member of the University of Mauritius Computer Club, also deplored the quality of Internet on the campus. She informed us that a fellow student has been lobbying with the management to address the issue. He joined us later and gave us details about the request/complaint made. However, he said that there was poor participation of students willing to provide a proper feedback or complaint. He stated that the matter will not be taken into consideration by the management if the students themselves do not show any interest to address the issue. Students mostly voice out on social networks, then SM added how these platforms aren’t regarded as being serious when it comes to addressing real problems.

University of Mauritius

We left around 16h00 having discussed various issues and how we, as a user group, can be of help tackling the same.