[Community-Discuss] Future of AfriNIC Discussed at IWEEK 2018

[Adewole Ajao]

Hi Marcus,

I happened to be attending AfPIF and like most AFRINIC community members
was curious about the session so I attended. I believe any AFRINIC staff
that attended also did so primarily as curious community members; It
appeared they were not invited in any official capacity (but I may be
wrong). I did not take any notes but if memory serves me correctly, I can
summarize as follows:

The presenter expressed concerns about the current state of AFRINIC's board
of Directors and the fact that a quorum of elected directors is required to
convene an AGM, conduct elections, etc etc. He expressed concerns about
some of his questions not being answered by the board, about slow
processing of requests by AFRINIC staff, large IT department, travel
budgets being expended, the PDP, and other issues he has raised in the
past. He charged the ISPA members to be more active since they make up a
large percentage of AFRINIC's revenue base. Others spoke of low technical
proficiency of AFRINIC staff when evaluating requests for additional
resources (in their own view) and requests for paperwork to justify
resource requests. There was also talk of calling for an SGMM to deal with
the governance(?) issues raised.

In response, some members present declared that a better solution would be
to assist the technical staff and help them understand their network
designs, encourage more qualified people to run for board positions rather
than criticize from afar, etc etc.

I would say it was an interesting show and would encourage that more
AFRINIC members gather in their local regions to discuss the improvement of
the RIR and the services being offered to them. The session could have had
a different outcome but because several people were passionate enough to
speak their minds openly and challenge what they did not think was
accurate, I think it was productive. I also believe that by now, the
AFRINIC staff would already be applying the feedback received to improve
existing processes.

Something that makes me curious however is this: Do members in other
regions not request resources from AFRINIC? Are others not suffering poor
services or do they just keep quiet about it?

I know the response to my next question will be that some of the stats are
available at https://www.afrinic.net/en/services/statistics using data from
ftp://ftp.afrinic.net/pub/stats/afrinic but I think it would be useful for
those of us with limited technical capacity if the AFRINIC IT team could
provide a web page that shows:

Political map of Africa and Indian Ocean region with
- Number of new member allocation/assignment requests this month
- Number of additional resource requests this month
- Number of technical support tickets created this month
- Number of technical support tickets resolved this month
- Any other visualizations that we think could be useful to make those
statistics more useful to the rest of us. Not bar graphs and line charts,
please!

Ideally, a visitor should be able to change the timeframe to reflect a
specific day, week, month, year, etc. We could even throw in a heat map for
existing membership numbers and resource allocation/assignments. The
intention is not to polarize the community further but to help everyone
(regardless of their technical capability and where they are) appreciate
the services being offered by the RIR.

Okay it's time for you all to go to my paypal donate link for the iWeek
reporting service I just offered :-p

Have a productive week ahead!

Regards,
Dewole.


On Sat, Sep 22, 2018 at 6:15 PM Marcus K. G. Adomey <madomey at hotmail.com>
wrote:

> Hello,
>
> There was a session at IWEEK 2018 on AFRINiC future. A session requested
> by ISPA members to discuss AFRINIC future [1]
>
> Can AFRINIC officials who attended the session tell us what transpired
> from the session?
>
> Why is AFRINIC future so important for ISPA members to demand a session on
> the topic at IWEEK?
>
> Thanks
>
>
>
> Marcus
>
>
>
> [1] https <https://iweek.org.za/session/the-future-of-afrinic/>://
> <https://iweek.org.za/session/the-future-of-afrinic/>iweek.org.za
> <https://iweek.org.za/session/the-future-of-afrinic/>/session/
> <https://iweek.org.za/session/the-future-of-afrinic/>the-future-of-afrinic
> <https://iweek.org.za/session/the-future-of-afrinic/>/
> <https://iweek.org.za/session/the-future-of-afrinic/>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Community-Discuss mailing list
> Community-Discuss at afrinic.net
> https://lists.afrinic.net/mailman/listinfo/community-discuss
>
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