About the Internet Society 

Board of Trustees

ISOC Meetings - November 16 - 17, 2002

Education Report

Randy Bush, Zita Wenzel, and Steven Huter

INTRODUCTION

The Internet Society (ISOC)'s work for the past decade to transfer network technology through its educational programs established one of the Internet's principal training efforts, which contributed significantly to the creation of many of the national and regional networks in developing economies around the world. Working in collaboration with the Network Startup Resource Center (NSRC), Escuela Latinoamericana de Redes (EsLaRed), and numerous other international partners and sponsors, ISOC's educational programs catalyzed the diffusion of networks in developing economies by helping local network engineers establish the initial Internet connections and networks in their respective countries.

Hands-on training has proven to be the most effective tool for transferring network information and technology. ISOC's approach has been to "train the trainers" -- whereby interested and competent students in previous workshops become teachers in subsequent workshops. This helps foster sustainable regional training mechanisms, and cultivates a culture of network operators and engineers helping each other. The fruitful collaboration results in a human network of competent engineers and system administrators who cooperate technically; this ultimately helps achieve our goal of developing stable international networks so organizations and end users can work over the Internet with their colleagues around the world.

While the Network Training Workshops (NTW) were all given in the developed countries bringing in students from developing countries, the ISOC strategy developed in 2001 is that the workshops should move to where the students are in situ in the developing countries and economies.

SPONSORED EVENTS

1. La Fundación Escuela Latinoamericana de Redes (EsLaRed) and the Internet Workshop for Latin America and the Caribbean (WALC)

Taller sobre Tecnología de Redes e Internet para América Latina y el Caribe Santo Domingo, República Dominicana 6-10 May 2002 http://www.walc2002.pucmm.edu.do/inicio.htm

The 2002 workshop was organized by la Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra (PUCMM), El Foro de Redes para América Latina y el Caribe (ENRED), and la Fundación Escuela Latinoamericana de Redes (EsLaRed).

Held in conjunction with annual ISOC Network Training Workshops, the first WALC event was organized in 1998 in collaboration with ISOC, ENRED, and EsLaRed. The main purpose of the WALC workshop is to provide technical training to engineers and network professionals from countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, in Spanish and Portuguese. ISOC continues to support the annual WALC workshops in cooperation with EsLaRed to achieve that goal. The Network Startup Resource Center (NSRC) provided some assistance to the routing track at WALC 2002 by helping procure a routing kit from colleagues at Cisco Systems, and books for the workshop participants.

2. The African Network Operators Group (AfNOG) in conjunction with the Network Startup Resource Center (NSRC)

The AfNOG 3 Training Workshop, Lomé, Togo 5-14 May 2002 http://www.afnog.org/

Fifty-three network engineers from twenty different countries participated in the AfNOG 3 training in Lomé. The African instructors and instructor-trainees for the Lomé workshop are network operators and system administrators from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Togo, South Africa, and Uganda. International colleagues from Australia, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, United Kingdom, and the United States also helped organize and teach in the workshop.

Most of the African instructors for AfNOG 3 were previously participants in the annual INET/NTW educational workshops organized by the Internet Society (ISOC) and the NSRC from 1993-2000. This illustrates major progress towards fulfilling the goal shared by AfNOG, ISOC, and the NSRC to train a critical mass of professionals in network infrastructure and services who teach others in their country and region what they have learned in the educational workshops.

Comments from the workshop evaluations indicated a high level of satisfaction among the participants, and notably, appreciation for an advanced level of technical training in French, the principal language for many of the continent's network operators. For the first time in the history of the AfNOG and INET/NTW workshops, the English and French sessions covered the same material with equivalent depth and scope, achieving the goal to eliminate the effects of language barriers.

For more information about the program in Togo, please see http://ws.afnog.org/ and http://nsrc.org/afnog/afnog3.pdf.

CURRENT ACTIVITIES

1. Network Training Workshops

We have found that regionally based workshops are the most cost effective way to train the greatest number of individuals, and help cultivate stronger technical collaboration within the region. We propose to further develop the teaching and learning models used in the technology workshops organized by EsLaRed and the African Network Operators Group (AfNOG), with ISOC and NSRC support. ISOC has received specific offers from various groups to provide training facilities (we would provide course materials and instructors, as needed) in Dubai, Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Morocco. The NSRC works with many network operators and organizations in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the New Independent States that have also expressed interest in hosting regional educational workshops.

Through our extensive base of professional contacts, the teaching teams organized by ISOC and NSRC provide access not only to expertise, but also to the community and culture of "real" network operators. Most networks are built and grow through a complicated process of personal relationships, trust, and mentoring. Developing an on-going relationship with engineers and operators further up the chain, in terms of resources and access to new technologies, helps those in developing economies evolve faster, and provides the necessary avenues for scaling up their networks over time. Finally, it's as important to learn the social and managerial components of running a computer network as it is to learn the technical aspects.

2. Thailand Regional Training Center

The Asia Institute of Technology (AIT) in Bangkok, Thailand has proposed to establish a regional training center, to be headed by Professor Kanchana Kanchanasut. ISOC's educational team is currently helping to develop the concept, and strengthen regional collaboration. We have also been working with the Asia Pacific Network Information Center (APNIC) and the infoDev program of the World Bank concerning this proposal. The NSRC has already provided a small library of technical reference books and some networking equipment to help get things started.

3. Workshop Courseware Project

While we have access to a significant amount of excellent teaching materials and lab-based exercises, the materials are not well organized at the moment. We propose to gather and organize the existing materials, document what is there and what is missing, fill in the gaps as needed, augment the content, codify it, and package it so that our partners and collaborators can use the materials to put a course together, as needed. The primary languages of our existing teaching materials are English, Spanish, and French; we have access to materials in several other languages, and also have colleagues who can produce teaching tools and materials in other languages, as needed.

Among the topics covered in our current materials for Internet services are UNIX system administration, operating stable, reliable servers in the Domain Name System (DNS), building secure mail systems and secure web servers, designing web sites, scaling customer and end user support, implementing network security tools, and managing mailing lists. Regarding Internet infrastructure, we have lectures and lab-based exercises for teaching about configuring and operating large-scale backbones. Topics include basic routing, Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) routing, Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing, management of router configurations, designing NOC (Network Operations Center) facilities, network security, and establishing peering and Internet eXchange (IX) points. We also have access to other teaching materials through our numerous colleagues and affiliations, such as IPv6 tutorials and a multicast engineering curriculum.

We have submitted a funding proposal for these activities to Qualys and the Swedish International Development Co-operation Agency (SIDA).

CONCLUSION

The ISOC educational team and our colleagues bring considerable experience and perspective in designing and deploying Internet technology. Moreover, our extensive international contacts, established over the years through the INET/NTW programs, are willing to contribute their time and expertise to enhancing global network operations, and teaching others about how to maintain and scale up their national and regional networks, as evidenced by their participation in ISOC activities.

The Internet Society's educational programs have contributed significantly to the proliferation and diffusion of networks in developing economies by helping local network engineers establish the initial Internet connections and networks in their respective countries. We plan to build on this foundation to enhance ISOC's programs and contributions in today's Internet.

In the coming year, we propose to continue assisting engineers, Internet service providers, and research and education networks in the less connected parts of the world by building on past successes, and expanding the regionally-based initiatives. In collaboration with our many international partners, we will make available and transfer the necessary tools, technology, information, and training necessary for strengthening international networking operations and mechanisms for continued Internet development.