|
Media InformationArchived Press ReleasesISOC Announces New VP for Education along with a New Education StrategyFOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: 18 January, 2002 The Internet Society announced today that a new Vice-president for Education has been appointed and a new education strategy proposed. The new Vice-president is Randy Bush, a network engineer who has extensive and successful experience working with developing countries and large commercial networks. He personally assisted many countries in establishing their first connections to the Internet. In addition, a new position and person has been announced as Associate Vice-president for Education. Dr. Zita Wenzel has been appointed to this position. Dr. Wenzel has significant experience in technology transfer and education in computing and networking within the US, the Asia-Pacific Region, and the Caucasus and Newly Independent States. Also working on the new team will be Steven Huter, of the Network Startup Resource Center. Mr. Huter has been providing day-to-day non-technical assistance for many worldwide regions, especially Africa and Latin America. The new education strategy will be based on a three-point program: networking education, policy education, and standards education. Networking education will entail programs designed to produce technology transfer to developing countries and economies. Policy education will produce information for public policy makers. Standards education will facilitate the transfer of technology standards information to developed and developing countries. The vision is to leverage successful network education and "train the trainers" in situ and encourage inter-country technology transfer while educating public policy makers about options and consequences and about standards and directions. The goals are to maximize decentralized, distributed network education by continuing to train local networkers, particularly in less advantaged regions, and develop trainers in addition to developing and distributing a tool set for regional registries. Another goal is, working with the ISOC Vice-president for Policy, to educate public policy makers around the world via policy slates and workshop programs so that they help, rather than hinder, prudent and secure Internet diffusion and development. A third goal is to educate and guide the developed and developing countries by presenting standards/technology advisories and position papers. The new team is looking forward to coordinating and collaborating work with other multinational and local agencies in order to continue to leverage and build on different organizations' efforts in these areas. More details will be available shortly on the ISOC web site: http://www.isoc.org/educpillar/ Randy Bush Bush directs the NSRC activities, and works closely with NSRC staff at the University of Oregon Computing Center to provide core technical work towards the NSRC's goals. He provides ongoing leadership and guidance to continue development of the African Network Operators Group (AfNOG), and chaired an interactive discussion about building Internet exchange points at AfNOG's annual meeting in Accra, Ghana in May 2001. Collaborating with network engineers in numerous countries in Africa throughout the year, and NSRC staff at the University of Oregon, Bush has provided technical guidance to scale up several of the university networks and commercial ISPs in the African region this past year. He is currently driving the technical discussion to establish the first Internet exchange point in Uganda, which will benefit the academic/research community and commercial service providers. Bush runs systems which provide primary nameservice for several country code Top Level Domains, and secondary nameservice for several thousand zones in developing country networks on NSRC servers. He also currently hosts or mirrors web servers for universities and research networks in Uganda, Tanzania, Thailand, Togo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and a particularly large one for Peru. He hosts numerous mailing lists for scientific projects in Belize, Tanzania, Uganda, a regional list for trade and commerce in Latin America, and the AfNOG mailing list and web site. As an active leader in the Internet Engineering Task Force, and an Area Director in the Internet Engineering Steering Group, Bush regularly argues for the technological needs of low bandwidth networks outside the USA in the various IETF forums that affect international network engineering. Zita Wenzel Dr. Zita Wenzel is the coordinator of APRUNet activities for the Association of Pacific Rim Universities at the University of Southern California (USC). She was Project Director at the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) for the transition of services provided by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) which resulted in the creation of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). She was also director of the administration and transition of the US domain (.us). She represented the United States (.us) in the country-code top-level domain (ccTLD) constituency of ICANN where she regularly argued for the needs of low bandwidth countries and economies. Wenzel is also a NATO networking consultant, primarily responsible for the Republic of Georgia and the Caucasus. In addition, she is a member of the NATO Silk Task Force which is a satellite project to provide cost-effective connectivity to five countries of Central Asia and three countries of the Caucasus. The NSRC collaborates with Wenzel on international networking activities; she provides assistance to network engineers and ccTLD administrators that contact the NSRC for information. Under the auspices of the NSRC, Wenzel produced a document entitled, 'Guide to Administrative Procedures of the Internet Infrastructure' which has been translated into French and Spanish and is used in networking workshops worldwide. This document has been approved by the Internet Engineering Steering Group and published as Informational RFC 2901. She has also been involved with the IETF Internationalized Domain Names working group and was co-editor of the requirements document. Steven Huter Huter works at the University of Oregon Computing Center, and provides support to numerous NSRC projects and activities. This includes responding to requests from US academics in need of networking information and assistance with their research projects; responding to developing area network operators requesting technical assistance/information, designing/building networks, and/or assistance with procuring equipment and technical books for training; working with student employees to maintain the NSRC networking database and other activities, and helping organize and staff network training workshops. Huter collaborated with African colleagues this past year in coordinating the fund-raising, staffing, equipment and book donations, and general organization for the AfNOG 2 meeting held in Accra, Ghana in May 2001. He worked closely with the local hosts and African instructors to ensure the success of both the one-week educational workshop and the technical meetings that were part of the events. Contact:
About ISOC: ISOC provides an international forum to address the most important economic, political, social, ethical and legal initiatives influencing the evolution of the Internet. This includes facilitating discussions on key policy decisions such as taxation, copyright protection, privacy and confidentiality, and initiatives towards self-governance of the Internet. ISOC created the Internet Societal Task Force as an on-going forum for discussion, debate, and development of position papers, white papers, and statements on Internet related societal issues. ISOC is the organizational home of the International Engineering Task Force, the Internet Architecture Board, the Internet Engineering Steering Group, and the Internet Research Task Force - the standards setting and research arms of the Internet community. These organizations operate in an environment of bottom-up consensus building made possible through the participation of thousands of people from throughout the world |
