Dear friends and colleagues,
First allow me to wish you a blessed Ramadan full of peace and harmony to you
and all your loved ones.
On behalf of the RIPE NCC Dubai office, I would like to recap our second year
of operations with you now as we expect things to slow down from now until the
end of July.
In 2016, we continued to put a lot of effort into our engagement strategy on a
national level by visiting as many Middle Eastern countries as we could. Our
aim was to strengthen our relationship with our members and work with them on
enhancing our services and meeting their needs.
* Community Engagement
Member Lunches
Member lunches have been a big part of our member engagement strategy. We
noticed that our membership has shifted from the traditional telecom and
operator base to a broader base that includes different sectors like banking,
academic and enterprise. We wanted to make sure we understood the needs of
each sector to help us better meet their needs.
We organised seven member lunches so far and plan to host two more before the
end of the year.
2014: Yemen
2015: Iran, Saudi Arabia
Q1/Q2 2016: Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and Syria (the SY member lunch was held
during the RIPE NCC Levant Regional Meeting)
Planned for 2016: Jordan and Oman
Academic Engagement
We received feedback from the academic community that they wanted the RIPE NCC
to get more involved in helping the students and researchers better understand
how the Internet works.
We organised a half-day session with the students of the American University in
Beirut to discuss how the Internet works and the organisations that support it.
The session was well received and the RIPE NCC has been invited to conduct
similar sessions later this year in Saudi Arabia (Dammam, Riyadh and Jeddah),
UAE as well as a second session in Beirut with all the Lebanese universities.
RACI [1] (the RIPE Academic Cooperation Initiative) provided students and
researchers with a chance to travel to the MENOG meeting and present to the
technical community their work.
Banks
We noticed an increase in membership from the banking sector. The RIPE NCC
organised meetings with banks in Bahrain, Lebanon, Qatar and Saudi Arabia to
understand how the RIPE NCC can help them. The RIPE NCC and the MENOG technical
community is in a position to help with a number of issues raised by the banks
we met with and we plan to start working with them this year in Bahrain and
Qatar.
National IPv6 Working Groups
IPv6 deployment in the region varies drastically to say the least. We are
helping set up national taskforces and awareness meetings in Lebanon, Qatar and
the UAE. We are also seeing others like the Saudi Arabian IPv6 task force that
feel that they have serviced their propose after eight years of raising
awareness within the local community and see it is time to move on to discuss
other topics.
Over the past two years we organised or participated in national IPv6 efforts
including:
2015: Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Yemen
2016: Saudi Arabia and UAE
Planned for 2016: Qatar
** Capacity Building
IPv6 Roadshows [2]
The IPv6 Roadshow launched in 2011 as a joint initiative of the RIPE NCC and
the Middle East Network Operators Group (MENOG). Since then, 36 IPv6 Roadshow
events have been held in ten countries across the Arab region, providing
instruction to roughly a thousand participants.
2014: Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia (Riyadh and Al-Khobar) and UAE
2015: Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, UAE (twice) and Yemen (held in Jordan)
2016: Bahrain, Kuwait, Lebanon, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and UAE
Planned for 2016: Jordan, Kuwait and Oman.
Train the Trainer
In 2015, the IPv6 Roadshow launched the "Train the Trainer" (TTT) programme.
This spin-off programme is aimed at building a diverse pool of highly-skilled
Middle Eastern instructors capable of delivering future IPv6 Roadshows,
ensuring that the project can continue to evolve and scale to meet the growing
demand for this kind of training. We have had three TTT participants co-train
six of the IPv6 Roadshows since the launch of the programme.
***Regional Meetings
Levant Regional Meeting in Lebanon [3]
The RIPE NCC Levant Regional Meeting was held in Beirut, Lebanon. A total of
140 people from five countries (Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine and Iraq)
attended the meeting. The community raised key regional issues and Oregro, the
Lebanese incumbent, pledged to deploy IPv6 before the end of the year.
MENOG
MENOG 15 [4] took place in Dubai, UAE in April 2015. The main themes of the
plenary covered peering the in Middle East region, domain name operations and
securing online banking. 195 participants attended the meeting from thirty-two
different countries.
MENOG 16 [5] took place in Istanbul, Turkey in March 2016. Despite the
unfortunate circumstances that happened during the meeting week in both
Istanbul and Brussels, the meeting was still a success with 150 attendees from
fifteen different countries participating. The main themes of the plenary
revolved heavily around security and Internet Exchange Points.
We are excited to continue working with the technical community and the other
stakeholders in the region. We feel all the hard work we have put into the
region over the past two years has helped us figure out a formula that works
well with the needs and expectations of the region and we expect to yield huge,
tangible results in the near future.
We thank you all for your support and ask you to continue guiding us to better
support our region.
Kind Regards
Hisham Ibrahim
Regional Programme Manager
RIPE NCC
-------------
Useful links:
[1] RACI: https://www.ripe.net/participate/ripe/raci
<https://www.ripe.net/participate/ripe/raci>
[2] IPv6 Roadshows: http://www.menog.org/ipv6-roadshow/
<http://www.menog.org/ipv6-roadshow/>
[3] Levant Regional Meeting:
https://www.ripe.net/participate/meetings/regional-meetings/ripe-ncc-levant-regional-meeting/meeting-report
<https://www.ripe.net/participate/meetings/regional-meetings/ripe-ncc-levant-regional-meeting/meeting-report>
[4] MENOG 15: http://www.menog.org/meetings/previous/menog-15/
[5] MENOG 16: http://www.menog.org/meetings/menog-16/
<http://www.menog.org/meetings/menog-16/>
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