The AFRINIC Policy Development Appeal Committee is a standing committee to adjudicate on appeals in terms of the Conflict Resolution section of the AFRINIC Policy Development Process (PDP). Any such appeal will involve a disagreement regarding the actions taken by the Chair(s) of the Policy Development Working Group (PDWG).

NomCom is hereby calling for nominations from the community for three (3) (seats 3, 4, and 5) Appeal Committee positions up for election. NomCom would like to receive Nominations from all of the AFRINIC sub-regions and are explicitly looking for both Gender and Language diversity although a working understanding of the English language would be highly beneficial. 

The PDAC Charter is available at: https://afrinic.net/images/AFRINIC_Policy_Development_Appeal_Committee.v2.20171126.pdf

Eligibility

• Be a member of the AFRINIC policy development working group.
• Must demonstrate to have participated in policy discussions on the rpd list or during the AFRINIC public policy meeting.
• Such participation above shall be those made earlier than 6 months from the date of call for nomination.
• All nominations (including self-nominations) must be supported by a minimum of two AFRINIC community members; the two individuals must not work for the same organization. AFRINIC staff can neither nominate candidates nor support them.
• A person may only nominate one candidate - and, in case of multiple nominations by the same person, only the last nomination will be considered valid.
• None of the nominated persons may be an AFRINIC Director, or an AFRINIC staff.

To nominate yourself or a candidate of your choice, please complete the nomination form at: https://registration.afrinic.net/elections/appeal-committee-nomination-2018

Deadline for Nominations

The Closure of the Candidate Nomination period is 15th March 2018 at 20:00 UTC.

Please note that the election will take place during the AFRINIC-28 Annual General Members Meeting in Dakar, Senegal from 6th -11th May 2018

NomCom 2018

The Call for Presentations for the Africa Internet Summit, AIS’18 is now open. We invite all individuals wishing to present during the meeting, which will be held in Dakar Senegal from 29 April to 11 May to submit their presentation abstract.

To enrich the discussions and share knowledge with the technical community at AIS’18, we are seeking presentations of a wide range of issues, broadly related to access and development of the Internet in Africa. We are specifically interested in presentations focusing on:

• Internet Governance
• E-governance
• Internet of Things
• Internet Measurements
• Core Internet Infrastructure
• Access, Utility and Development
• The Internet and Economic Development
• Business Practices and Technology
• Higher Education in the Age of Technology
• Cyber Security
• Technology and Business
• Cloud Computing
• Open Data/Big Data
• Technology and Content Production
• Relations between Mobile Operators and the Internet Community
• Mobile Applications
• IPv6
• Peering and Interconnection
• DNS
• RPKI
• IXPs

Your contribution can be in the form of a presentation during a session, a tutorial, or a live technical demonstration.

Kindly read all information carefully before submitting your proposal.

Speakers’ Guidelines

• Presentations should be 15 -30 minutes in length, with approximately 10-15 minutes for Q&A at the end of each presentation.
• The maximum time allotted per presentation will not exceed 45 minutes.
• The presenter(s) will be required to upload their final presentation in PDF format, no later than five (5) days prior to the presentation date.
• Presenters are responsible for producing any handouts if required. There are usually approximately 200 delegates in each session.

Presentations with marketing and/or commercial content will not be considered.

How to submit a Presentation Proposal

1. Please register/login on the AIS’18 website at:  https://www.internetsummit.africa/
2. Fill in the online form with the requested information.
3. In the Speakers section, provide your abstract, your biography and slides if available and you are done!

Important dates to note:

• Deadline for submitting an application – 9 March 2018
• Deadline for submission of draft presentations – 6 April 2018
• Submission of final presentation – 22 April 2018

AIS’18 Team

Please note that Tuesday 13 February and Friday 16 February 2018 are public holidays in Mauritius.

In this regard, AFRINIC Offices shall be closed.

Any urgent issues can be addressed to:

• new-member@afrinic.net for queries or clarifications regarding how to become an AFRINIC member.
• hostmaster@afrinic.net for additional resources, any general queries related to resources management.

As a result of the successful IANA Stewardship transition [1] in 2016, the IANA Numbering Services are today being managed through an SLA between ICANN and the five RIRs.

IANA Numbering Services Review Committee

The Internet Number Community, produced a proposal [2] on the IANA Stewardship transition, outlining the concept of such an SLA [3]. The proposal also called for the establishment of an IANA Numbering Services Review Committee (IANA RC) [4] to advice and assist the RIRs in the review of the IANA Numbering Services. The IANA RC was established in 2016 and is composed of representatives from each RIR region. 

IANA Numbering Services Performance

• The IANA services are today provided by Public Technical Identifiers (PTI) [5] which as of March 2017, publishes monthly performance reports on the IANA Numbering Services:
  https://www.iana.org/performance/numbers
• Based on these monthly performance reports, the five RIRs have produced an 2017 IANA Performance Matrix Summary Report (for the period of March - December 2017): https://www.nro.net/wp-content/uploads/IANA-RC-Annual-Summary-Matrix.pdf

 The IANA RC report

The IANA RC will publish an annual report as advice to the NRO EC with its evaluation of the IANA Numbering services. The report will be based on the IANA Performance Matrix Summary Report, as well as any input gathered on the performance from the global number community.

 30-day public comment period

As part of the open, transparent, and bottom-up spirit of the number community, the IANA RC is launching a public comment period of 30 days, seeking any comments or input from the community on the IANA numbering services performance. The IANA RC encourages all members of the Internet number community to review the public IANA Performance Matrix Summary Report. Comments on the IANA service performance should be sent to:<iana-performance@nro.net>. The public comment period ends on Sunday 11 March at 23:59 UTC.

Next steps

All public comments will be published on the IANA RC website, and will be considered as input to the final report by the IANA. At the end of the 30-day public comment period, the IANA RC will meet and evaluate all input to the final report. The IANA RC report will be published on the IANA RC website:
https://www.nro.net/iana-numbering-services-review-committee/.

References:

1. IANA Stewardship Transition Archive - https://www.nro.net/iana-oversight/archive/
2. Number Community Proposal - https://www.nro.net/wp-content/uploads/ICG-RFP-Number-Resource-Proposal.pdf
3. The SLA for the IANA Numbering Services - https://www.nro.net/updated-5-2-and-signature-version-of-the-sla-for-the-iana-numbering-services/
4. IANA Numbering Services Review Committee - https://www.nro.net/iana-numbering-services-review-committee/
5. Public Technical Identifiers (PTI) - https://pti.icann.org

Further reading:

• Consolidated RIR IANA Stewardship Proposal Team (CRISP Team) - https://www.nro.net/nro-and-internet-governance/iana-oversight/consolidated-rir-iana-stewardship-proposal-team-crisp-team/IANA Stewardship Transition
• Coordination Group (ICG) - https://www.ianacg.org
• Proposal to Transition the Stewardship of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) Functions - https://www.ianacg.org/icg-files/documents/IANA-transition-proposal-final.pdf

The AFRINIC Board has appointed the following people to the Nomination Committee (NomCom) for the 2018 year:

• Kaleem Ahmed Usmani (Mauritius)
• Komi Elitcha (Togo)
• Wale Adedokun (Nigeria)
• Haitham El-Nakhal (Board representative, Egypt)

Alan Barrett

CEO, AFRINIC

The most recent ASO Review concluded with 18 recommendations, which the NRO has resolved to accept. The first 17 recommendations are well defined and practical, and can be implemented by actions of the NRO Secretariat, or of the ASO Address Council, with respect to administrative procedures, documentation, or in some cases adjustments to agreements which are expected to be non-controversial.

The 18th recommendation of the Report is that “The NRO should initiate a public consultation, involving the five RIR communities, to determine the future structure of the ASO”. The NRO EC has concluded to accept that recommendation and is hereby launching a consultation on the issues identified in the ASO Review Report.

While each of the RIRs will launch consultation processes within their communities, the NRO has agreed on this joint announcement, and coordinated call for contributions, in order to maintain consistency in scope of regional consultations, both with each other and with the Review Report.

Scope

The Review Report concludes that “The core mission and administrative tasks for which the ASO was set up remain largely unchanged, and there is no pressing need for organi[z]ational reform”, but at the same time it recommends a “call for a community-wide reconsideration of the role and function of the ASO within ICANN”.

More specifically, the following questions related to the ASO MoU have a TTP (percentage of respondents in Top Two Boxes) that requires us to pay attention to the minority views:

• Does the ASO MoU adequately describe the role and function of the ASO within ICANN? 52% answered Yes.
• Does the rationale for the ASO as spelled out in the ASO MoU need to be updated post IANA transition in light of the creation of the ICANN Empowered Community? 50% answered Yes.

Additionally, the report allocates significant attention to the efficiency of the Internet Numbers Community involvement in ICANN activity after the findings in the question “Does the ASO have a continuing purpose in the ICANN Structure?” with 17% respondents not answering “YES”. Suggesting that some of the activities related to the ICANN engagement might be of marginal interest to the Internet Numbers Community and that could be reviewed:

“We did hear of concerns within the Internet Number community regarding the increasing amount of volunteer time that ICANN engagement seems to require, much of which is of marginal direct interest to the Internet Numbers Community. The NRO will need to regularly evaluate these concerns, and act pre-emptively, if necessary, to ensure that the benefits of the ICANN system are not perceived to be outweighed by the “costs” of engagement“.

Issues to Address:

The scope of this consultation includes the structural implications of issues identified by the ASO Review, including but not limited to:

• Any updates and adjustments identified as required for ASO-related documents
• Any procedural clarifications and adjustments identified
• Reported confusion of roles between ASO and NRO, and their components
• Perceived complexity of relationships among NRO, ASO and ICANN
• Relevance and cost to the RIRs of various ICANN engagement activities

Out of the Scope of this consultation are the following aspects:

• Global Policy Development Process (GPDP)
• ASO AC role with GPDP

Specific Questions:

The NRO EC is looking to specific answer to the following questions:

• What adjustments, if any, should be made in order to address the issues described above?
• Should adjustments be limited to NRO MoU, ASO MoU, and/or ICANN Bylaws
• Over what timeframes should these adjustments be developed and implemented
• What strategic aspects should we pay attention to when considering these adjustments?