The Meeting ended with presentations from two FIRE Africa Grants and Award winnner, who had attended the AFRINIC-23 Meeting's FIRE Africa Workshop earlier in the week. 

Ian Mutamiri from the University of Zimbabwe, secured a FIRE Africa Grant in 2013 to develop a text-to-Speech (TTS) E-learning application for a low cost Android tablet to enable children in rural Zimbabwe to learn to read using their own languages. He gave the session a great update on the Shona E-Reader/MyNatiV app, how much progress he and his team have made in the last two years, how the FIRE Africa Grant has helped and their plans for the future. 

Bernard Adongo, Nikohapa Ventures, won a FIRE Africa Award in 2013 for the Nikopha Customer Engagement Platform, which enables customers to have one-on-one conversations with their favorite business through their mobile phone. He explained how Fire Africa has helped the team's progress and gave an overview of imrovements and what's in store for the future.

• Ian's slides can be viewed here.
• Bernard's slides can be viewed here.
• Find out more about FIRE Africa
  
• Read our FIRE Africa project case studies on the AFRINIC Blog
  

Technical presentations were next on the agenda. Amreesh Phokeer, AFRINIC Research & Development Engineer talked about fighting Spam from an INRM perspective, speaking remotely from the AFRINIC Headquarters in Mauritius. Amreesh focused his presention on a paper he recently published.

The next technical presentation was made by Jan Žorž, The Internet Society's Operational Engagement Programme Manager. Jan explained how the DNSSEC signing platform was established in Go6Lab. It is now being used for the production part of the network. Additionally, he gave an explanation on how DANE for sending secure email was implemented and tested.

• Jan's slides are available here.

Alain Aina, AFRINIC Director Research and New Technology AFRINIC addressed Internet security and the issue of confidentiality and trust on the Internet. Alain called for a more security through encryption on the Internet.

• You can see Alain's slides here.

Stephen Honlue, AFRINIC Trainer, concluded the technical presentations sessions. His talk focused on IPv6 Security threats awareness and possible countermeasures. His talk explored IPv6 vulnerabilities and showed how these threats can be dissipated.

• See Stephen's slides here.

The panel on the IANA Transition discussed the current status of the transition of the IANA Stewardship Oversight Transition, which is in full swing, as well as general Internet Governance.

Tijani Ben Jemaa (AFRALO) explained the existing mechanisms of IANA Transition and their implications to the governance of unique Internet identifiers. Tijani gave an explanation on what ICANN does and gave an overview  of the IANA Stwardship Transition oversight mechanism explaining the transition plan and the accountability mechanisms that will be necessary for the transition.

Slides

Mwendwa Kivuva, one of AFRINIC's Consolidated RIR IANA Stewardship Proposal (CRISP) Team representatives, spoke about the CRISP Team's work and the progress made on the IANA Transition so far. He reiterated the commitment of the NRO and the CRISP Team in ensuring the success of the proposal, transparency through the discussion process, and that the principles in the CRISP proposal are maintained. He indicated that two RIRs, RIPE NCC and AFRINIC have set up an IANA Review Committee. He also gave updates on the development of the Service Level Agreement (SLA), which is to be signed between the RIRs and the IANA functions operator. The SLA is in its third draft and ICANN is now reviewing it. The CRISP Team also reviewed the SLA and did not observe any inconsistencies. Mwendwa also indicated that the three ICANN operational communities (names, numbers and protocols) are collaborating in finalising the IPR framework before the submission of the full proposal to NTIA.

From the floor there were questions about the work of the CRISP Team, the mechanisms for the review committee, the delay of the transition and why the numbering community could not go on with the transition on their own without waiting for the other ICANN communities, the existing difficulties in coordinating different review panels for each community, vested interests of the US in IANA, African participation, and the sensitisation of the African community. It was observed that a lot has been done to ensure the community is informed on the IANA transition. Initiatives like local and regional IGFs, the CTO forums, and AFRALO teleconferences were identified as avenues that were used to inform the local communities on the transition.

 Slides

The day kicked off with representatives from the other RIRs (RIPE NCC, APNIC and ARIN), the Address Supporting Organization (ASO) and the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) giving updates on the most recent developments in their respective field of activity.

During this session, the attendees were interested in knowing more about IPv4 needs in other regions, the RIPE NCC's IPv6 RIPEness project and allocation of RIPEness stars and t-shirts, as well as the customer survey on the IANA functions.  

The slides for all these presentations available online:

• Slides APNIC
• Slides ARIN
• Slides RIPE NCC
• Slides ASO
• Slides IANA

Good bye Congo.

See you all soon at AFRINIC-24/AIS'16 in Botswana 29 May - 10 June.