[sdnog] Utilizing Sudan' Resources

[Samir S. Omer]

Dear Gael

good to hear from you again.

I agree with you, unless we can bring together all the stakeholders and have an open inclusive dialogue,
we cannot achieve what we are aiming for, that should be our focus.
I like the idea of starting with projects such as the mirroring of GNU/Linux distribution,
we could also reach out to Google for hosting a local mirror although i doubt they will accept

Samir


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Gael Hernandez" <gael at pch.net> 
To: "Samir S. Omer" <samir.saif at sudren.edu.sd> 
Cc: sdnog at sdnog.sd 
Sent: Saturday, February 21, 2015 2:27:49 PM 
Subject: Re: [sdnog] Utilizing Sudan' Resources 




On 4 Feb 2015, at 13:59, Samir S. Omer < samir.saif at sudren.edu.sd > wrote: 

Dear colleague and SdNOGgers 

I'm writing this email as a starting point to try to brainstorm on how to fully utilize Sudan' resources to achieve Network autonomy, rich local content, and maybe in the future have outer ISPs wanting to peer with us 

if we look at Sudan we can see that we have 

* good National fiber network that extends to all states in Sudan. 
* we have an IXP. 
* we a big datacenter maybe on of the top data centers in Africa. 
* we have good technical community and eager engineers. 
* the universities' online registration system, that was enforced by 
the ministry of education broke the online payment barrier that was 
always an issue in Sudan 
* Sudan terrain allows it to become a wholesale distribution point to 
neighbouring countries. 

seeing all of the above factors, I think achieving this goal is more of an awareness/governance/policy issues than of a resource issue. I know it's not a simple task that can be done in short time. 
for the time being let's just start the discussion 
so I like to hear from you on how can we possibly put all of these pieces together. 




Hi Samir and SdNOG, 

Greetings to everyone. My name is Gael and I work with PCH on policy topics. I recently joined the mailing list and I’d like to share thoughts about how to leverage on the many existing resources you listed. 

First of all, I totally agree with your diagnosis. You might have lots of resources but without the capacity of engaging with the relevant stakeholders and align each of the individual interests, then the resources become stale. What do you think of having SdNOG facilitating a process aiming at formulating and articulating a vision? The process should be as inclusive as possible so that, in the medium term, all the stakeholders can continue working in their environment (government, university, private sector, civil society) towards the vision. 

Another thing that could help to gain positive momentum is to propose feasible projects that can be quickly implemented and delivered, like for instance local mirroring of a GNU/Linux distributions. Technical projects like this could be quick wins for the community, and should be fun to work on! 

Just some thoughts, would be happy to hear feedback on how feasible these are. 

Gaël 

Gaël Hernandez 
Research and Outreach Specialist 
Mobile: +44 746 354 1032 

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