printed and signed off by the Rapporteurs and the Team Leaders, who had then joined the exercise in the last two days. The signed documents were scanned and saved in soft copy. This means the record of what the people said is in hard and soft copies and properly secured at different sites. This information was to later come in handy to resolve issues that had arisen during the Thematic Committee discussions. As was the case in all the other exercises, the Data Uploading process had its own share of controversies and challenges: a) Because of the complexity of the software and lack of experience by the technical team, some information appeared to have disappeared from the system during the initial stages only to be retrieved later stuck somewhere within the system. This incident nearly caused huge problems on the process as critical information related to Land, Natural Resources, the Environment and empowerment appeared to have disappeared. b) The process took longer than expected because, as it emerged, some of the Rapporteurs were not computer literate enough, and had survived in the field courtesy of the assistance from some Technicians. The Select Committee had to engage some typist from Parliament to expedite the work. The Data Uploading exercise was however completed successfully, and the people’s views are safely secured. The list of participants during the Data Uploading exercise is appended to this report. 4. Thematic Committees Before the commencement of the Thematic Committees, a COPAC Quality Control team was established to thoroughly clean and audit all the data available. The Quality Control team was made up of the Chief Rapporteurs, one each from the three political parties in the GNU. The purpose of the Thematic Committee discussions was in fact to align what the people had said with the Thematic areas as agreed to during the First All Stakeholders Conference. It was basically to categorise what the people had said into their specific Thematic areas and trying to make sense of how the data could be interpreted. Pursuant to this, four hundred and twenty five participants, thirty percent of whom were from the political parties and seventy percent from civic society, formed the Thematic Committees. Chiefs and members of eight political parties which had participated in the March 2008 Harmonised Elections or had been part of the other prior COPAC processes also formed part of the participants within the seventy percent category from civic society. The Thematic Committee discussion workshop was officially opened by the Minister of Constitutional and Parliamentary Affairs, who implored on the participants to ensure that the people’s views would not be tempered with. The Thematic Committee discussions commenced with a one day workshop that looked at the following: 44 The Constitution Select Committee (COPAC) Report to Parliament, February 2013