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This repository hosts scholarly works, datasets, software tools, and resources specifically focusing on advancing networking technologies, fostering collaborative research initiatives, and promoting educational networking across the African continent. It aims to facilitate knowledge sharing and collaboration among institutions, researchers, and educators within the Ubuntunet Alliance network. We invite contributions from members and partners of the Ubuntunet Alliance, enabling the exchange of expertise, technological advancements, and research outcomes to drive innovation and strengthen the research and education networking landscape in Eastern and Southern Africa. Join us in our mission to shape the future of research and education networking across Africa through collaborative sharing and networking initiatives
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Browsing UbuntuNet Alliance by Subject "Africa"
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Item Africa IETF Initiative: The Role for NRENs(2016-11) Chege, KevinItem Afrinic at the Service of Universities/RENS in Africa(2019-11) Gokool, MadhiItem Executable Infrastructure for Regional Collaboration(2015-11) Becker, BruceE-Infrastructure has, over the years, proven its worth in enabling scientific collaboration, even at regional and global scales. The adoption of common platforms such as HPC, data management, etc has made sharing of scientific data, applications and research outputs more appealing and is accelerating scientific output, especially in regions where these were previously unavailable - particularly Africa, and areas of the Arab-speaking world. The CHAIN-REDS and ei4Africa projects have supported the development of the Africa-Arabia Regional Operations Centre (AAROC). The ROC acts as a coordination point, first for grid infrastructures, but has been expanded to more general collaboration infrastructure services such as science gateways, federated identity providers, document and data repositories, etc. This expansion of service offering to ever-more demanding research communities places unreasonable strain on a fully-distributed model, where every site administrator is expected to understand and operate these new services. This is particularly true in the African and Arabian regions, where knowledge networks are sparse. This contribution describes a development and deployment philosophy which adopts a "DevOps" paradigm which aims to encode models of services using Ansible, with Github and Slack as collaboration platforms. Site and service configuration has been coded into Ansible playbooks, providing a reproducible model of the service, which can be customised as desired on a per-site basis. Most importantly, this model is executable, meaning that any number of sites and services can be effectively deployed remotely, by a core team. Continuous integration is done at every commit of code, by executing the playbooks on a cloud-based development site, which provides transparency to the remote site administrators. The adoption of this methodology helps to solve the problems of sustainably maintaining service configuration, improving communication between site operations and service developers, ensuring the proper state of services, and verifying the state of deployment. Some of the main benefits of this approach are speeding up the deployment of new services, reliably applying updates and recovering from disaster. In this contribution, we show that the "traditional" HPC and grid service deployment can be reproduced and improved, by adopting a more modern operations stack. However, we also highlight how this has helped to deploy advanced services- federated identity infrastructure, science gateways, application repositories, and Open Access repositories in particular throughout the region in short time, and is now playing a crucial role in the strengthening of technical and scientific collaboration networks in the region.Item Governance Model for Education Roaming (eduroam) in African Research Institutions(2017-11) Ssentongo, LloydItem Growing a Data-Ready Continent: Every Contribution Counts(2017-11) Walt, Anelda van der Steyn, JuanItem Mapping the Research Collaboration Networks in Computer Science: The Case of Central, Eastern, and Southern African Countries(2017-11) Wilson Marwa, Charles; Sangeda, Raphael; Zozimus Lwoga; Edda, TandiItem Networks for European, American, and African Research: NEAAR(2016-11) Schopf, Jennifer M.Item Promoting The Growing and Access to Scientific Literature through NRENs in Africa(2014-11) Mulhanga, Marangaze Munhepe; Lima, Solange Rito; Massingue, Venâncio; Ferreira, João NunoItem Publishing & the Book in Africa: A Literature Review for 2018(2019-10-14) Zell, HansAll the records in the four annual literature reviews thus far published are scheduled to be integrated into the online database of Publishing, Books & Reading in Sub-Saharan Africa. Unfortunately, access to the database remains temporarily unavailable. It is currently still in the process of being relaunched by its new host institution, Kwara State University Library in Nigeria (and see also the 2015 press release at http://www.hanszell.co.uk/Site/PDFs/Press%20release.pdf) Due to a number of persistent technical problems relating to metadata mapping and software functionality, as well as ongoing software development and data transfer issues, there have been serious delays in the migration of the database. However, the new hosts hope that remaining problems and issues can now be resolved shortly, and that they will be able to relaunch the database sometime early in 2019 on a more dynamic, Drupal-based open source content management platform. The first batch of updates and over 500 entirely new records will then also be added to the database. Meantime the accompanying collection of books, monograph series, journals, articles, and other documents on publishing and book development in Sub-Saharan Africa, from 1996 to 2014, donated by Hans Zell to Kwara State University Library in 2015 is now accessible at the recipient library. This is a continuation of an earlier collection and archive (for the 1960-1995 period) that was donated to the African Publishers Network/APNET in Harare in 1995. The 1996-2014 collection has now been fully catalogued and records have been created for each item and integrated in KWASU’s Online Public Access Catalogue (OPAC). A complete listing and inventory of the collection (which includes unpublished and archival material) can be found at http://kwasu.edu.ng/library/pbrssa.html. This page also includes a user guide, and an online form to register for access to and use of the collection. Access is free to any bona fide scholar or researcher from around the globe. For more information about the status of the new database, or access to the physical collection, contact Teslim B. Balogun, Project Director, PB&RSSA, Kwara State University Library, PMB 1530, Malete, Kwara State, Nigeria. Email: teslim.balogun@kwasu.edu.ngItem Research Metrics: Does it Matter in the African Scholarship and collaboration?(2017-11) Kavulya, Joseph MuemaItem TV White Spaces Technical Rules For Africa To Enable Efficient Spectrum Management(2014-11) Pinifolo, Jonathan; Rimer, Suvendi; Paul, Babu; Mikeka, Chomora; Mlatho, JusticeItem Useful Flexibilities for African Regional Research and Education Networks(2015-11) Martin, Duncan H.The UbuntuNet Alliance is conceived of as an association of NRENs in a given region. The hierarchy Institutions → NRENs → Regional RENs characterises what may be called “the standard REN model”. Regional RENs provide transit to their member NRENs and interconnect with each other over interregional distances. The standard REN model expects no more of any Regional REN. The standard REN model evolved principally in Europe. In the writer’s view, the circumstances of African countries are too widely disparate for continued as-is adoption of the standard REN model. Greater flexibility is needed to allow UbuntuNet and other Regional RENs of Africa to serve universities that can be reached but are not yet served by an operational NREN. For example, some countries simply have too few universities to sustain the overhead costs or engender the significant buying power of an NREN. To overcome this, Regional RENs could offer a “catch-all” REN service to individual institutions that are not served by a recognised NREN. Some African countries are too large, too diverse culturally and/or too patchy in their infrastructural development to enable the ready establishment of a single NREN. Instead, collaborative REN organisations could be established at the sub-national level, and Regional RENs should accept such “District RENs” as legitimate customers. A Regional REN could also act as a proxy NREN in a country in which the universities use commercial ISPs but no organised NREN has emerged, and so facilitate the founding of a real NREN.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.