[menog] RIPE NCC Dubai Regional Office in Operation - Second year recap

Wed Jun 8 11:30:53 UTC 2016

Dear friends and colleagues,

First allow me to wish you a blessed Ramadan full of peace and harmony to you and all your loved ones.

On behalf of the RIPE NCC Dubai office, I would like to recap our second year of operations with you now as we expect things to slow down from now until the end of July.

In 2016, we continued to put a lot of effort into our engagement strategy on a national level by visiting as many Middle Eastern countries as we could. Our aim was to strengthen our relationship with our members and work with them on enhancing our services and meeting their needs. 

* Community Engagement

Member Lunches 

Member lunches have been a big part of our member engagement strategy. We noticed that our membership has shifted from the traditional telecom and operator base to a broader base that includes different sectors like banking, academic and enterprise.  We wanted to make sure we understood the needs of each sector to help us better meet  their needs. 

We organised seven member lunches so far and plan to host two more before the end of the year.

2014: Yemen

2015: Iran, Saudi Arabia

Q1/Q2 2016: Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and Syria (the SY member lunch was held during the RIPE NCC Levant Regional Meeting)

Planned for 2016: Jordan and Oman

Academic Engagement

We received feedback from the academic community that they wanted the RIPE NCC to get more involved in helping the students and researchers better understand how the Internet works.

We organised a half-day session with the students of the American University in Beirut to discuss how the Internet works and the organisations that support it. The session was well received and the RIPE NCC has been invited to conduct similar sessions later this year in Saudi Arabia (Dammam, Riyadh and Jeddah), UAE as well as a second session in Beirut with all the Lebanese universities. 

RACI [1] (the RIPE Academic Cooperation Initiative) provided students and researchers with a chance to travel to the MENOG meeting and present to the technical community their work.

Banks

We noticed an increase in membership from the banking sector. The RIPE NCC organised meetings with banks in Bahrain, Lebanon, Qatar and Saudi Arabia to understand how the RIPE NCC can help them. The RIPE NCC and the MENOG technical community is in a position to help with a number of issues raised by the banks we met with and we plan to start working with them this year in Bahrain and Qatar. 

National IPv6 Working Groups

IPv6 deployment in the region varies drastically to say the least. We are helping set up national taskforces and awareness meetings in Lebanon, Qatar and the UAE. We are also seeing others like the Saudi Arabian IPv6 task force that feel that they have serviced their propose after eight years of raising awareness within the local community and see it is time to move on to discuss other topics.

Over the past two years we organised or participated in national IPv6 efforts including:

2015: Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Yemen

2016: Saudi Arabia and UAE

Planned for 2016: Qatar

** Capacity Building

IPv6 Roadshows [2]

The IPv6 Roadshow launched in 2011 as a joint initiative of the RIPE NCC and the Middle East Network Operators Group (MENOG). Since then, 36 IPv6 Roadshow events have been held in ten countries across the Arab region, providing instruction to roughly a thousand participants.

2014: Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia (Riyadh and Al-Khobar) and UAE

2015:  Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, UAE (twice) and Yemen (held in Jordan)

2016: Bahrain, Kuwait, Lebanon, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and UAE

Planned for 2016: Jordan, Kuwait and Oman.

Train the Trainer

In 2015, the IPv6 Roadshow launched the "Train the Trainer" (TTT) programme. This spin-off programme is aimed at building a diverse pool of highly-skilled Middle Eastern instructors capable of delivering future IPv6 Roadshows, ensuring that the project can continue to evolve and scale to meet the growing demand for this kind of training. We have had three TTT participants co-train six of the IPv6 Roadshows since the launch of the programme.

***Regional Meetings 

Levant Regional Meeting in Lebanon [3]

The RIPE NCC Levant Regional Meeting was held in Beirut, Lebanon. A total of 140 people from five countries (Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine and Iraq) attended the meeting.  The community raised key regional issues and Oregro, the Lebanese incumbent, pledged to deploy IPv6 before the end of the year. 

MENOG

MENOG 15 [4] took place in Dubai, UAE in April 2015. The main themes of the plenary covered peering the in Middle East region, domain name operations and securing online banking. 195 participants attended the meeting from thirty-two different countries.

MENOG 16 [5] took place in Istanbul, Turkey in March 2016. Despite the unfortunate circumstances that happened during the meeting week in both Istanbul and Brussels, the meeting was still a success with 150 attendees from fifteen different countries participating. The main themes of the plenary revolved heavily around security and Internet Exchange Points.

We are excited to continue working with the technical community and the other stakeholders in the region. We feel all the hard work we have put into the region over the past two years has helped us figure out a formula that works well with the needs and expectations of the region and we expect to yield huge, tangible results in the near future.

We thank you all for your support and ask you to continue guiding us to better support our region.

Kind Regards

Hisham Ibrahim

Regional Programme Manager

RIPE NCC

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Useful links:

[1] RACI: https://www.ripe.net/participate/ripe/raci <https://www.ripe.net/participate/ripe/raci>
[2] IPv6 Roadshows: http://www.menog.org/ipv6-roadshow/ <http://www.menog.org/ipv6-roadshow/>
 [3] Levant Regional Meeting: https://www.ripe.net/participate/meetings/regional-meetings/ripe-ncc-levant-regional-meeting/meeting-report <https://www.ripe.net/participate/meetings/regional-meetings/ripe-ncc-levant-regional-meeting/meeting-report>
[4] MENOG 15: http://www.menog.org/meetings/previous/menog-15/

[5] MENOG 16: http://www.menog.org/meetings/menog-16/ <http://www.menog.org/meetings/menog-16/>
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