Africa IETF initiative: The Role for NRENs
Abstract
Background: The Internet allows for ubiquitous communication globally thanks to the design, implementation and use of Open Standards. It allows us to communicate with anyone in the world using standards such as SMTP, DNS, BGP, HTTP among others. The key organization for Internet Standards development is the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) which meets 3 times a year and does majority of the work via mailing lists categorized under different Working Groups each tasked to come up with a standard that if accepted will become an Internet Standard. Participation is open to anyone in the world to participate in the design of Open Standards that will determine what the future Internet will look like.
Problem statement: Participation at the IETF by engineers from Africa is very low. This is mainly because of low awareness levels. As a result, Africa is not playing a big enough role in the design of what the future Internet will look like as other researchers and engineers from other parts of the world actively work on designing the future Internet.
The Initiative: The Internet Society has a launched an Africa wide initiative to increase the awareness levels and participation of various stakeholders from Africa to the IETF including Universities, Network Operator Groups, researchers, NRENs, Policy organizations, ISOC Chapters and University Students among others. It is hoped that this initiative will encourage more researchers from Africa to take up Internet Standards development and eventually lead to Africa hosting its first IETF meeting.
The Paper: This paper will describe the role for NRENs in raising awareness and increasing participation of African researchers, University students and engineers in the work of Internet Standards development. To be discussed are: - What Internet Standards are - What role African NRENs can play in Internet Standards - How ISOC plans to help African NRENs in Internet Standards development work