Hi Anelda, First off, kudos/awe for tackling a pretty hard case. I'm not going to offer any solutions and probably not able to give cause for optimism either, but I'm interested in the details. We went through things like this in SA not so long ago (10-12 years), where lack of connectivity/insane bandwidth costs prohibited participation to certain scientific activities, and as we've seen, it can get much better.
The only thing I _can_ think of is to package this story up and take it to NSRC and AfricaConnect2 and say : Look, here is the problem, help us. I'm not sure if the NEAAR project is still operational, but they should probably know about this too. A question : is it possible to look at trying to build a critical mass in the university ? I have no idea what this environment is like in Gabon, but network connectivity and the infrastructure to access it is a pretty basic need which cuts across any research domain. Perhaps the Dean of Science could be challenged to find 2 or 3 other research groups on campus and a sort of cluster could be created. It's quite possible for one dedicated person to support more than one group, but it's way more difficult for 5 people to support 5 groups 1/5 of the time. If you can find a way to scale, you may see new properties emerging (sorry, physics metaphor). There's no silver bullet here, but making adequate funding available will probably keep the group alive long enough for adequate connectivity to come online. If you could have your folks in Gabon share some figures with people in WACREN, this might inform a discussion within Africa Connect. Won't solve your problem, but may make some changes down the line... > So, we have a use case (bioinformatics data analysis in the cloud), we have _which_ cloud ? Probably Amazon/Azure/etc. Can you be a bit more specific ? > a champion at the Gabon university (Dean of Science Faculty), we have the > network provider ready with plans to install (GabonREN), we have an existing > relationship between US/Gabon (so not one of those once off helicopter > capacity building initiatives). Would they be better served by landing some hardware in the place where the research group is ? I'm not particularly in favour of this - it can be onerous to put down kit in an already under-resourced place (seems staff is a bit of a problem), but it's something that can be quite easily donated. At least, compared to running network connectivity costs. > What we don't have: > > Skills in the IT department to install and maintain internet (The Science > Dean said they will have to contract these skills in) I would talk to WACREN about this. If we're talking about network engineer skills, there's a really active and supportive community. It could get something started... again, won't solve your problem, but will start a ball rolling. > Funding to afford the initial installation It sounds the easiest thing to do here would be some form of donation. I think a conversation with the NSRC may be more illuminating. Some contacts : For NEAAR : http://internationalnetworks.iu.edu/projects/NEAAR/index.html You can contact Jennifer Schopf [email protected] For WACREN / ekoKonnect you should already have contacts. I'm not sure who the _exact_ right person to talk to at AfricaConnect2 would be, but I'll forward this to Cathrin and Omo and see what comes of it. So, again, I know this won't solve your issues, but maybe we can get something started. Looking forward to what others may have to say in the thread... Vasbyt. Bruce -- Dr. Bruce Becker, Coordinator, South African National Grid http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6607-7145 http://www.africa-grid.org Meraka Institute, CSIR Meiring Naude Road Pretoria 0001 South Africa +27 12 841 3746 (w) | +27 12 841-4829 (f) | +27 84 989 6169 (m) | + 39 392 622 9279 AIM/GTalk/Skype/MSN/Jabber : brucellino _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.software-carpentry.org/listinfo/discuss
