UbuntuNet-Connect 2016 Conference Papers and Presentations
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Browsing UbuntuNet-Connect 2016 Conference Papers and Presentations by Subject "Africa"
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Item Africa IETF Initiative: The Role for NRENs(2016-11) Chege, KevinItem Networks for European, American, and African Research: NEAAR(2016-11) Schopf, Jennifer M.Item Video-Conferencing for Outreach Communication Strategy to Enhance Academic Publishing and Research Communication in Africa(2016-11) Okoka, Wilson; Nagasha, Irene JudithThe paper presents the effectiveness of video-conferencing community outreach projects in enhancing research ethics communication for public awareness in Uganda. It sets out to establish how vital the practice of research ethics in cross-cultural environment was in enhancing the smooth tripartite interactions among the researchers, communities and host institutions. The objectives were to: get an overview of community outreach research ethical issues and communication strategies; establish researchers’ outreach methods (approaches); identify the ethical challenges facing inter-cultural research in the country; assess the key enablers of community research ethics; and discover creative methods of infusing ethics in a cross-cultural community research. This review was conducted by sourcing documents, current literature and news bulletins, online search engines, through discussion with key informants, documents from Ugandan government specifically the ministries or national as well as international bodies, and lessons learned from research ethical practice. The findings were generally disappointing, contrary to the widely issued guidelines. There are rampant unresolved ethical issues that are worsened by communication gaps; field ethical challenges include: wrong attitudes, behaviour, methodology, perceptions, communication strategies, and cultural illiteracy; commonalities of outreach themes, agreements, modalities, methods, target communities, networks, and funding sources; many absentee field researchers and fictitious research sites; and weak ethics culture. Ethical issues are prompted by flouting guidelines, weak or lack of capacity, experience, integrity, professionalism, communication skills, or ignorance. There are multiple gaps in university coordination, concepts, methods, planning, budgeting, and implementation leading to project failures, budget overruns, conflicts, and disincentives. Community participation ensures trust, effective communication, and social acceptance. Inter-cultural community involvement promotes ethical research good practice among the researchers themselves on one hand, and the inter-cultural demographics plus the host institutions, on the other. Outreaches are critical for achieving early adoption and widespread diffusion of research ethics and culture in communities. They should be well planned, implemented, monitored, and evaluated for enhanced participation, transparency, empowerment, mutual trust, sustainability, and gender equality to achieve SDGs in Uganda.Item Videoconferencing-as-a-Service for African NRENs(2016-11) Bristow, RobItem When is it an African NREN: Building a Vibrant and Sustainable National Research and Education Network in Africa(2016-11) Eshun, Benjamin A.A National Research and Education Network (NREN) is both; 1) a high performance communications network owned and operated for and by the education and research community of a country and; 2) the organization that operates that network, constituted as a consortium of members, a dedicated agency, a company, NGO, or other type of body. In World Bank partner countries an NREN may simply be a consortium of universities that organize themselves as a “buying club” in order to get a better price from Internet Service providers (ISPs), or it may be more sophisticated and be offering connectivity services to its members. (Case for NRENs 2009). Several countries around the world have adopted the NREN as the centerpiece of an advanced network for collaboration and communication between the Tertiary and Research Institutions within their country and to other parts of the world. (Ravinder 2008; C@ribNET 2010). Around the time of GARNET’s inception in 1995, the United States Congress took critical steps toward what was called then the National Public Network. The United States Senate and the House of Representatives moved toward enacting legislation to authorize their NREN (Kahn 1992). Yet in the context of Ghana and most other Africa Countries, the lacking of similar political strong intervention is what could have led to slow deployment of the NREN. Poor Internet connectivity is one of the pertinent issues in the digital divide between developing and industrialized countries, hampering the transition to the global information society. Africa is currently the most under-served continent in terms of the information and communication technologies. Hence the collaboration amongst tertiary education institutes in Africa is imperative to make them key players in the enhancement of information and communication technologies for society (Ravinder 2008). GARNET like most other African NRENs has gone through several iterations of starting and stopping, various Boards and memberships, and various models of operations, which did not make any significant process in providing a sustainable NREN. Current attempts to have a sustainable NREN have been directed towards providing technical and services oriented solutions by focusing on the business model and financial plan(casefornren.org). Beyond merely the technical aspects of scalability, our concerns lie in how to reproduce and translate the necessary learning processes alongside the spreading of artifacts, funding, and people. (Braa, Monteiro et al 2004). A conscious effort has to be made using the theory of Information infrastructures to look at the collection of governance, policy, structures, people, procedures and technologies that Page | 46 ISSN 2223-7062 Proceedings and Report of the 9th UbuntuNet Alliance Annual Conference, 2016 pp 45-52 make up an NREN and its infrastructure in order to make it sustainable (Star and Ruhleder 1996). Without a conscious effort to achieve sustainable systems, initiatives from aid organisations, governments and NGOs are likely to replicate past outcomes of lengthy technology deployment and fast technology abandonment (Beardon et al. 2004). In order to leapfrog NRENs into becoming a vibrant and sustainable, the practices that have worked elsewhere on the continent should be reinforced. There is no need to rebuild the same problems in the new networks we are building. Instead there is a need to make the NREN stronger by building an organization with and active and vibrant community. In order to achieve this, interventions would have to be taken in the areas of governance, policies, procedures as well as the products and services that the NRENs of today would be providing to its community of users and practitioners like Universities ICT Directors, Researchers, Academicians, Librarians and other stakeholders. The presentation will propose key interventions that would be the set of actionable items for Governments, Donors agencies and other relevant stakeholders that are interested in either establishing or strengthen NRENs in Africa could use to ensure that they would be viable.