Thursday, December 02, 2004
At the end of the day it's about reaching the people
By Haru Mutasa
Highway Africa News Agency (HANA)
A Sudanese delegate at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) conference in Cape Town stands and speaks about his home country.
“In Sudan we started what is called the Free Internet system where internet users only paid for local call costs and not ISP costs,” he began, “The number of internet users tripled impressively. Then the numbers stopped growing and we found out it was because many Sudanese people did not have access to computers to enable them to connect to the Internet in the first place.”
Access and the cost of computer hardware is just one obstacle to internet development on a continent where less than one per cent of the population has access to the internet.
“If you want to bridge the internet gap between yourself and someone else, you have to run faster,” said Clement Dzidonu, a member of the regional Internet group Africa At-Large Advisory Committee (ALAC), “But how can we bridge the digital divide if we are not engaging our communities? Charity begins at home and by home I mean both at the individual country and organisational level. For ALAC the issue of governance is more about people engagement and involvement.”
The African branch of ALAC, was set up to give and encourage Africa's Internet users the opportunity to actively participate in matters and decisions made concerning the internet and how they are affected as users. This is one of several At-Large Communities around the world.
“Our organisation aims to do a lot of things,” said Dzidonu, “promote Africa's role in Internet Governance space, facilitate Africa's participation in global Internet decision making processes and give Internet users a platform to get involved and influence policies related to the Internet and its use.”
He was addressing delegates at the ICANN At-Large meeting in Cape Town today, a meeting which culminates in a series of workshops and forum discussions educating people on how they can and should become “not only active but informative players on the Internet”.
A host of groups participate in the At-Large structures to increase community participation on the Internet in Africa.
These include civil society groups, academic and research organisations, consumer advocacy groups and computer user organisations. They all play a role in community development in their respective countries and regions.
The ball has already started rolling.
“In January next year we will be on the streets in full force spreading the word on the Internet and what it can do,” he said, “We are embarking on an active campaign that will reach schools, NGOs and other organisations in all regions of the continent. Our people need to have a say in what is going on and this is one of the ways they can do that because at the moment, the rules are being set elsewhere, and Africans are being left out of the process.”
User groups interested in climbing aboard the Africa At-Large participation wagon should first get certified by ICANN. Certification is free, easy and done on line by visiting the website http://alac.icann.org/
Big turn-out at ICANN conference
By Haru Mutasa
Highway Africa News Agency (HANA)
Over 600 delegates are attending the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) conference in Cape Town, the fourth time such a meeting has been held in Africa.
Addressing journalists last night, ICANN CEO and president Dr Paul Twomey stressed the need for continual cooperation between stakeholders on Internet related matters.
“This meeting aims to strengthen partnerships between all stake holders involved in Africa-related Internet issues,” said Twomey, “and it is encouraging to see an impressive turnout from the Government Advisory Council (GAC) which says a lot about the African involvement at this conference.
The GAC
Issues to be covered throughout the week include, among other things, new generic Top Level Domain (gTLD) strategies, implementing policies concerning internet governance and discussions on how the ongoing United Nations’ internet governance process could affect Africa’s internet users.
“ICANN has just appointed Frank Fowlie as the new internet ombudsman,” said ICANN chairman Dr Vint Cerf, “If the board's actions are in contradiction to the by-laws it has to follow, he (Fowlie) accepts the complaints and reports his findings to the board.”
Cerf said the Cape Town meeting will also unveil ICANN’s three year strategic plan and shed light on the status of the African Network Information Network (AfriNIC), the soon to be implemented Regional Internet number Registry (RIR) for Africa.
“ICANN has received the application for AfriNIC and we have granted a provisional relationship for the body to act as a potential Regional Internet Registry (RIR). We are all very excited by this and hope that in the first quarter of next year the final application will have been received.”
The ICP2 system, similar to that used in the Latin America, is being used to assess and facilitate the implementation of AfriNIC.
The week-long Internet conference ends this Sunday and Twomey hopes stronger relationships between ICANN, governments and various stakeholders will have been forged to improve and better manage Africa’s Internet climate.
says South African Minister
Cape Town
By Thrishni Subramoney
Highway Africa News Agency
South African Communications Minister, Dr. Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri has called on Internet authorities to allow governments of developing countries to have more of a say in how the Internet is governed.
Matsepe-Casaburri was officially welcoming delegates attending the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) conference, in Cape Town, South Africa today.
While the South African minister praised the global Internet organization (that manages Internet
addresses) for the lengths it has made in transforming itself, she also reminded delegates that from the perspective of African governments much still needed to be done.
“ICANN is transforming itself from a club of “haves” to include the “have-nots. The geographical
diversity of its offices and hopefully the creation of one in Africa soon is very encouraging,” she said.
However she added: “Names and numbers are important, but they are not the only concern. We need to create affordable Internet access in a legal environment.
South Africa is not anti-ICANN, but we have always been critical because governance structures have always skewed in favor of those who started the technology. Governments should have a greater voice in Internet governance.”
Matsepe-Casaburri's comments come on the heels of heated debate at the first UN Internet-related conference, the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) - held in Geneva in December last year.
Developing countries at WSIS argued that bodies that managed the Internet (like ICANN) were based mainly in the developed world and therefore representation from the developing world in Internet governance was largely absent.
A Working Group on Internet Governance was formed at WSIS to look at how the medium is governed and what role goverments should play (if any) in managing the medium.
Matsepe-Casaburri urged the Internet fundis from around the world attending the Cape Town gathering to also bear in mind what she sees as ICANN's challenges.
Among her concerns were a need for Internet governance structures to be more inclusive and “security and stability” in the medium. She cited the scourge of child pornography as one threat to security that needed to be dealt with firmly.
Answering the South African minister in his welcome address, ICANN President, Paul Twomey gave his assurance that one of the reasons that the conference was brought to Africa was to create engagement on Internet governance issues between the developed and developing worlds.
“ICANN is not about creating core access infrastructure, but we can ensure that there is a single, global, inter-operable Internet,” Twomey said.
“What ICANN can do is ensure that every new voice has access to the world and the world has access to every new voice.”
By Haru Mutasa
Highway Africa News Agency (HANA)
Is there a twelfth official language in South Africa? If you are in Cape Town this week you would be forgiven for thinking so.
It is acronyms galore in the Mother city as a new language invades and wreaks havoc inside the International Convention Centre where the annual Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) conference is being held.
The very technical verbal diarrhoea has delegates at the conference speaking in tongues in a language only they seem to understand.
“WHOIS Crisp?”....
ICANN and ALAC must work together...
GAC can not exist in a vacuum.”
These are just some of the many statements making the rounds inside the building – abbreviations of much longer terms used to describe the Internet and how recent developments can be used to better Africa and its people.
Anyone interested in learning this new lingo can do so by either attending the conference, taking part in the webcast live on ICANN's website, www.icann.org, or by joining one of the ICANN-related mailing lists.
It was believed the 21st century would bring with it a lifestyle of dramatic proportions – ultra fast cars, out of this world trendy wear and endless, affordable trips to the moon and back.
A few years since the turn of the century, none of these predictions have materialised in massive proportions and people go about their business following the same routine they have been doing for years.
Things seem normal or are they? For Cape Town, normality will only return on Sunday when delegates leave and take their language, South Africa's shortest ever recorded week-long twelfth official language, with them.
By Thrishni Subramoney, Highway Africa News Agency
Cape Town - If Santa Claus ever created a special IT deployment squad, it would probably be a bit like NetDay South Africa.
Armed with open source software and refurbished computers, the non-profit organisation has been sweeping through the country, setting up computer labs
free of charge in schools that are on the leaner end of the digital divide.
The group has set up a free Internet cafe on the outskirts of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) conference at the Cape Town Convention Centre, in the hopes of drawing more support for their initiative.
General Manager, Edward Holcroft says NetDay South Africa has deployed networks to more than 300 schools since it was created in 1996.
“All the schools have to provide is the room, the desks, electricity and security. We do the rest,” said Holcroft, chatting on the fringes of the ICANN conference.
NetDay is based on the US initiative by the same name - started in the nineties by a group of school teachers eager to introduce their pupils into the Information Communcation Technology (ICT) fold.
The South African version received funding from the International Development Research Centre until 2001. However, when the IDRC scaled back its South African operations, NetDay was forced to operate on business. It now does IT consulting on the side to support its projects and pay support staff.
While the use of refurbished hardware in developing countries has become a contentious issue of late, Holcroft said fixing up used machines has served a
two-fold purpose.
Not only does a poor school receive a free, high quality computer lab, the re-furbishing and installation process is used as a training ground for young people who want IT skills but cannot afford to high tertiary tuition fees.
One of the technicians behind the transformation is Tsholofele Tshenye who joined NetDay as a volunteer four years ago and was hired after six months by NetDay. He says he has enjoyed the experience immensely.
“I've been travelling almost everyday since I joined up, and I can now do anything that has to do with computers. I must've helped do more than a hundred deployments at schools since,” he said.
The fact that NetDay only uses open source software - that can be freely used, copied, distributed and altered – has also been instrumental in keeping the company alive.
"Teachers and learners who are used to proprietary software, like Windows, have found it very easy to switch from one to the other. The interesting thing is
that after three to six months they start to prefer the open source stuff. They say it breaks down less and they have more technical support,” he says.
Holcroft says NetDay hopes to expand its operations to reach more schools. It is currently working with Uniforum, South Africa - a non-profit organisation that
administers the co.za domain name to urge businesses to support the campaign as part of their social responsibility obligation.
Holcroft believes development would be considerably faster if non-profit organisations worked together.
"One of the real problems with the NGO sector in South Africa is the lack of collaboration between organisations doing fundamentally similar work. What
we need is an umbrella body for all the NGOs dealing in this particular sector, and then we could pool our resources and be more effective,” he said.
By Rebecca Wanjiku, Highway Africa News Agency
CAPE TOWN December 1, 2004 - Africans wishing to use local languages
in Internet domain names and content can now do so, courtesy of a new
movement to internationalise domain names.
Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs) seek to recognise the distinct
African languages and characters without necessarily encoding them
into English. This means that African languages with characters
different from the English alphabet can easily be used.
In Africa, domain names currently only use letters of the English
alphabet and even where local languages are transliterated, the
meanings can sometimes be distorted due to lack of critical accents on
the key boards.
At the ongoing International Corporation for Assigned Names and
Numbers (ICANN) regional conference, the urgency of IDNs has taken
centre stage and its proponents are touting it as a solution to
Africa's communication problems.
Mouhamet Diop, an ICANN board member from Senegal, describes IDNs as a
good choice for Africans to "feel themselves in a new environment and
communicate the way they do in their daily lives."
"I am not afraid of technical challenges, its time to say 'we can make
it'. It's hard listening to technical people talking about Africa and
IDN. It's the first step to allow people to feel themselves in an
environment where they can deal with their issues the way they want,"
Diop told workshop participants.
So how will IDNs work? Once an organisation or community's domain name
is registered, the language can be unicoded and a dictionary developed
which will allow registrars, world wide, to pick it up and install on
local servers.
Here is an illustration in the African context - if the Kikuyu
community in Kenya
decides to register the domain name www.mugikuyu.com (but with proper accents
unavailable on this key board), the community itself will be
responsible for developing the relevant linguistic tables which other
stakeholders may convert into unicode.
This means that local communities can use the Internet to communicate
and do business. It will also open the internet to many millions of
people who can only read and write their mother tongues. The net
result will be to make the internet more inclusive.
According to Valentin Nemeth, a senior engineer at the Thawte internet
security company, IDNs will also protect intellectual property and
trademarks. "It will now be possible to secure trademarks that are not
necessarily in English because there will be international standards,"
says Nemeth.
However, Diop argues that trademark issues properly rest with the
relevant regulating authority, adding that policies must be formulated
to fight trademark infringement.
The IDN question reached centre stage in the last three years after
ICANN responded to a wave of protest coming from Asia Pacific
countries such as Japan, China and Korea. Their particular concern is
that respective languages cannot be written at all using western
alphabets.
Since then, ICANN has formed committees in all regions to come up with
questions that need to been addressed.
Vint Cerf, ICANN chairman says IDNs offer immense opportunities, but
at the same time, create their own challenges such as the registration
of thousands of new domain names and the fact that dedicated keyboards
must be designed and built to support each language.
While sharing his experience as president of African Academy of
languages, Adama Samassekou reminded participants that Africa is the
only continent where children go to school and study in languages
other than their own.
He urged all stakeholders to make a special effort to ensure that IDNs
succeed in Africa.
The African Academy of Languages was created by African heads of state
to validate the use of African languages in official functions.
However Samassekou reminded delegates about lethargy within African
leadership pointing out that Swahili was recommended as an official
language of Organisation of Africa Unity (now Africa Union) in 1986
but was only implemented in July 2004. Swahili is widely spoken in 15
East and Central African countries.
The former president of the World Summit on Information Society WSIS)
preparatory committee promised to tackle the issue of African
languages in Accra and Tunis during the Africa bureau meetings and
WSIS phase II respectively.
IDN may be a nice song to many linguists and computer scientists but
Maxime Some from University of Versailles says there is no hope if
there is no harmony between scientists developing the technology and
linguists.
"Computer scientists are ignoring linguists and going on with their
inventions. Scientists and linguists need to work together. There is a
need to break walls and work in unity," concluded Some.
