The ZA·REN Week '23 is the only conference providing a holistic space in which IT practitioners serving South African higher education and research (be they from central IT, libraries, the research office, or research collaborations) can gather in a common space to exchange ideas and share challenges. Whilst ZA·REN Week is a new event in 2023, it incorporates several annual meetings and workshops previously held separately, together with a new format and additional content.
ZA·REN Week '23 is free to attend, but you will need to arrange your own travel and accommodation.
While ZA·REN Week '23 is aimed at those public universities and research councils using the South African NREN, representatives from partner organisations are welcome to join us.
Registration can be found under the Meetings & Training tab:
The annual SA ORCID workshop will take place on the 18 September 2023 at the Protea Hotel, Cape Town.
This workshop is primarily aimed at members of the South African ORCID Consortium, but is open to anyone interested in ORCID adoption in South Africa. It will provide consortium and ORCID updates, and community stories.
Room Location: Auditorium, Lower Floor
An up to date program can be found on the SA ORCID Workshop page:
https://events.tenet.ac.za/e/orcid23
Registration can be found under the Meetings & Training tab:
Please note the TRANSITS I training will be held over three days (18-20 September 2023) at the Protea Hotel, Cape Town.
TRANSITS I training is aimed at new or potential CSIRT personnel who wish to understand the main aspects of working in an incident handling and response team. It offers experience and expertise in Operational, Organisational, Legal and Technical areas which form the knowledge basis for CSIRT personnel.
Room Location: Room 4, First Floor
Registration can be found under the Meetings & Training tab:
DNS training will take place on the 18 September 2023 at the Protea Hotel, Cape Town.
This course is aimed at systems administrators responsible who've assumed responsibility for hosting AC.ZA DNS but who do not have a strong DNS background. It will cover the basic concepts of DNS, including how a domain name is resolved, the various types of DNS resource records, editing and managing zone files, and debugging and testing DNS.
Room Location: Room 5, First Floor
Room Location: Boardroom, First Floor
Monday, 18 September 2023: Cocktail Meet and Greet
19:00-21:30
Top Floor of Conference Venue C, Protea Hotel
Tuesday,19 September 2023: Dinners (V&A Waterfront gift voucher will be given to delegates)
19:00-21:30
Delegates will have a free night to choose any restaurant at the V&A Waterfront. TENET will host two tables each at Quay Four and Ferrymans on a first come, first serve basis.
Room Location: Auditorium, Lower Floor
Room Location: Auditorium, Lower Floor
TBA
Room Location: Auditorium, Lower Floor
Stage 16 load-shedding? The impact of load-shedding is profound, and many institutions are now planning for higher stages. Critically, if load shedding gets worse, campuses may be forced to shut down certain aspects of their operations, whereas others will become indispensable. In this session, we’d like to explore power resilience options, accommodating renewable/embedded generation, integrating energy efficiency, technical considerations, and sharing best practices and lessons learned.
Room Location: Auditorium, Lower Floor
The state of the system and the implications of load shedding for universities
CSIR: Overview of energy options
Andrew Owens will provide a presentation highlighting the key ecosystems and fundamental requirements in order to maintain data centre facilities in a highly interconnected ecosystem
All the "In the dark" speakers will hold a panel discussion and Q&A
Room Location: Auditorium, Lower Floor
New NREN Services
(10Gb) 100Gb will change everything:
In the early 2000s, SANReN started deploying 10Gb/s links and we profetically claimed it would “change everything”. With 100Gb/s now becoming the new normal, the scale has changed, but we still face some of the same challenges and opportunities we faced nearly two decades ago. Can your internal network handle such volumes of traffic? Are your firewalls the bottleneck? What happens when it goes down? Is it time to multi-home to manage risk?
Room Location: Auditorium, Lower Floor
100GB vs. 10GB sounds awesome, but the path towards completely utilising the increased capacity is a journey, not one event in particular. Several factors must be considered before embarking on this journey. Join me as I discuss the path North-West University took, as well as some of the challenges we faced.
UCT's 100G Network Upgrade Experience
As part of the National Integrated Cyberinfrastructure System (NICIS), DIRISA is mandated to support and enable the Research Community by providing them with data infrastructure for storing research data sets. DIRISA provides a large data storage infrastructure to the Research Community. Through DIRISA services, users are able to upload, store (short term), archive (long term), share, download data sets.
As part of NICIS, DIRISA is a national initiative that enables and supports data-driven research in South Africa. NICIS is able to provide support to the Research Community through leveraging skills and expertise that cuts across NICIS units. Each unit has its Core Services that it provides that also includes Networked Resources working collaboratively as Integrated Services Teams.
NICIS has built Research Cloud that is data driven and implemented and managed by internal NICIS staff.
Since NICIS is a national cyberinfrastructure, it supports a variety of thematic areas ranging from Health, Bioinformatics, Energy, Humanities, Science, Manufacturing, and many more.
This presentation will share with the conference the overview of NICIS and DIRISA and will also highlight the available services and data infrastructure that can be accessed by the Research Community for storing and sharing their data.
Trust, identity, and other buzzwords:
Globally we’re seeing trust & identity services being one of the core “plumbing” services provided by NRENs. Research exists in a space that’s not easily or well served by the commercial alternatives. However, in South Africa, take up is still lagging and many institutions struggle to set up and maintain the infrastructure required. This session aims to unpack some of the successes and failures inherent in identity and access management. (We can talk about certificates too…)
Room Location: Room 5&6, First Floor
Authentication is a process by which a role, product, site, object, or event is confirmed as original, genuine, real, or trustworthy. Institutions are slowly but surely moving away from Internet Protocol (IP) address authentication methods to more reliable methods. Just like any other institution, Nelson Mandela University also wanted to do so and investigated means for providing reliable authentication methods for our resources. We are registered with the South African Identity Federation (SAFIRE) and have Shibboleth as our web-based Single Sign-On infrastructure which is based on Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), a standard for the exchange of authentication data.
Nelson Mandela University has been using IP through Web Access Management (WAM) as a form of identity management that controls access to our resources, by providing authentication management, and single sign-on convenience to our users for more than 20 years. However, with the Fourth Industrial Revolutions (4IR) technologies, artificial intelligence (AI), and cloud-based applications, IP communication has become less reliable, especially with reimagining the 21st century institutions. The Electronic Resources Management (ERM) Librarians, together with the South East Academic Libraries System (SEALS) Principal Librarian have started the process of moving to Shibboleth authentication by removing WAM URLs on all our resource titles which are more than 400000.
To get the process started, the ERM Librarians drafted emails to our publishers who are service providers to get them to register our SAML identity with them. Our library so far has access to 183 electronic resources. Some of these resources are SAML compliant while others are not. To date, 110 e-resources are SAML compliant, 11 e-resources are non-complaint while 63 are in the process to be registered. This process was undertaken so that our library users can experience seamless access to our e-resources, on as well as off-campus. In our ERM office we use a separate desktop, which is connected to a stand-alone modem to test the remote access. We have found that with on-campus access, there are no issues, however with off-campus access it is not clear why Shibboleth, which is SAML based, is not giving our users the single sign on experience, alas we are experiencing more clicks than what we experienced when using WAM. This presentation is based on our findings and the way forward.
TBA
Many institutions are moving their identity infrastructure to the cloud. However, with traditional RADIUS and federation solutions tied to on-prem infrastructure, how do you continue participating in eduroam and SAFIRE?
Monday, 18 September 2023: Cocktail Meet and Greet
19:00-21:30
Top Floor of Conference Venue C, Protea Hotel
Tuesday,19 September 2023: Dinners (V&A Waterfront gift voucher will be given to delegates)
19:00-21:30
Delegates will have a free night to choose any restaurant at the V&A Waterfront. TENET will host two tables each at Quay Four and Ferrymans on a first come, first serve basis.
Cloudy with a chance of research:
Within the enterprise, cloud is rapidly becoming the norm. However, the availability of on-demand storage and compute creates both opportunities and challenges for researchers, and for the institutions they belong to. How are researchers using cloud in your institutions? What problems has it created? And how do we overcome those?
Room Location: Auditorium, Lower Floor
The increasing adoption of cloud technologies in research cyber-infrastructures, including commercial clouds (Azure, GCP, AWS), research-oriented clouds (CHPC’s Sebowa cloud and Ilifu cloud facility), and private cloud environments, has enabled greater flexibility and scalability in the industry and academia.. We present the use of Kubernetes and Cloud resources in the ongoing African Pathogen Data Sharing and Archive project, a multi-country effort to develop a mechanism for sharing pathogen genomic data among public health laboratories. Through this use case, we demonstrate how effectively utilizing cloud resources necessitates a paradigm shift in viewing infrastructure as an integral part of the application, rather than a separate entity. Emphasizing the significance of API-driven software-defined infrastructure over traditional methods like creating virtual machines and networks, we present lessons learned that challenge the conventional approach to managing research cyber-infrastructures.
UK and US studies show that research software underpins ninety-five percent of research. Thirty-three percent of international research produces new code. However, research software is still not recognised as a first-class research output, and the researchers who develop it often find themselves in dead-end career paths.
In 2012, research software engineers in the United Kingdom embarked on a mission to change the academic system to (1) recognise the value of research software; (2) recognise the role research software engineers play as part of research groups; and (3) develop a career path for research software engineers. Research software engineers (RSEs) typically spend most of their time developing software. They often have formal training in a specific research discipline and understand nuances of the field in which they work, which aids in developing appropriate software.
Notable organisations comprising the global RSE community include the United Kingdom’s Software Sustainability Institute, various country- and region-specific RSE Associations, the Society of Research Software Engineering (SocRSE) and the Research Software Association (ReSA). The Research Software and Systems Engineering Africa (RSSE Africa) community was established in 2019 and offers an online forum and regular community meetups for African RSSEs to connect and learn.
In 2020 ReSA published an initial mapping of research software initiatives (including projects, communities, and funders) for the Global North. The exercise was repeated in 2022 for the Global South. The second round of mapping increased awareness of research software initiatives on the African continent, but significant gaps still exist. Talarify is building on the work done by ReSA to increase the visibility of research software stakeholders in Africa.
In this presentation, the authors will introduce various concepts related to RSEs, and share resources such as software sustainability evaluation guidelines, training opportunities, and information about joining the African and global RSE communities. The presentation will also include details on joining global communities such as the Research Software Alliance, Society for Research Software Engineering, and RSSE Africa.
The NREN community includes many budding and established research software developers who may be unaware of existing and emerging opportunities and resources. They also often provide support to RSEs. The presentation will interest researchers who develop software, professional software developers in research environments, research and infrastructure managers, policymakers, funders, and more.
The South African Dialogue Facility programme recently supported two policy dialogues on open science hosted by the Department of Science and Innovation with the aim of strengthening science diplomacy between South Africa and the European Union. The most recent project conducted from 2021-2022 informs the development of a South African Open Science Cloud (SAOSC) to provide the research community with a federated and open multi-disciplinary computational environment where they can find and reuse data, tools and services for collaborative research and innovation.
Scientists increasingly seek to execute computational research processes on cloud-based infrastructure resources that provide the tools and services designed to meet the needs of their scientific domain, irrespective of geographic location. Reliant on robust existing research networks, many South African researchers have identified such resources, and are making use of them under personal agreements. Based on the value proposition that data held in South African repositories has significant impact on diverse areas of human development, with potential for exponentially increased effect if shared and reused by the research community, the SAOSC dialogue examined the practices and risks of engagement in international collaboration. Recommendations were made for support actions and services that enable South African researchers to access resources and contribute to global solutions, in the assurance of mutual benefit, and in alignment with the concurrent development of a national open science policy for South Africa.
Growing support of the global movement towards open science offers a new multi-dimensional approach to research cloud infrastructure by reducing current fragmentation in sustainable and federated infrastructure models to enable open sharing of scientific results for increased social impact and innovation. This presentation will provide an overview of guidelines and principles developed, addressing critical aspects such as governance and management, resourcing, policies, monitoring and evaluation, and the technologies enabling open science. Directed at the stakeholder community these take the novel form of a declaration, intended to secure the commitment of the research community to establish and actively support the SAOSC as a user-driven research support service.
A further set of policy-based recommendations will be discussed, setting out the necessary actions to be taken by the Department of Science and Innovation to establish an SAOSC. The recent emergence of initial cloud infrastructures, such as the SKA, ILIFU and SARIR projects provide the means to address immediate technical, policy and organisational issues with a long-term focus on human-centric research support, advocacy and change management in the adoption of evolutionary open science practice.
The IDIA Science Gateway was recently launched at https://gateway.idia.ac.za/ to provide a unified access point to IDIA / ilifu cloud resources for Astronomy and Bioinformatics. While the underlying resources have been in production for several years, the overall system is in constant development. This provides a glimpse of things to come in data-intensive research in the era of Global Open Science Clouds.
Cloudy with a chance of research:
Within the enterprise, cloud is rapidly becoming the norm. However, the availability of on-demand storage and compute creates both opportunities and challenges for researchers, and for the institutions they belong to. How are researchers using cloud in your institutions? What problems has it created? And how do we overcome those?
Room Location: Auditorium, Lower Floor
Luci Abrahams (PhD), LINK Centre, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
Co-author: Mark Burke, LINK Centre
Abstract (from Working Paper)
The presentation will briefly set out the logic, argument and considerations with respect to creating digital research infrastructure (DRI), building on the intentions and focus of the South African Research Infrastructure Roadmap (SARIR). In the past ten years since adoption of SARIR, those research infrastructures have evolved and progressed. Missing from the landscape is digital research infrastructure, a necessary foundation for advancing commercialisable innovation, the practice of open science and social benefits from innovation.
At present, the science and innovation landscape is characterised by highly variable research management capabilities, ranging from early stage digitalisation in some disciplines and fields, to the emergence of digital datasets and databases supported by infrastructure in the nascent stage of development, to established portals and data platforms in a limited number of disciplines and fields. Investments in, and efforts to develop, strengthen and expand such infrastructures are fragmented and isolated, losing out on opportunities for scaling up and accelerating digitally supported research, through the consolidation and concentration of resources.
Furthermore, bridging digital research infrastructure with other forms of national research infrastructure can take South Africa into fields of science, technology and innovation where it was not previously a player, promoting virtualisation, visibility, visualisation and valorisation, what we term “the four V’s”. In this paper, virtualisation refers to making artefacts, data, records, published and unpublished work, as well as research instruments, tools and virtual laboratories, available and easily accessible online, in public and in secure user-only access formats. Visibility, including visibility within particular research communities, and more broadly, arises from the practice of making knowledge available in a range of digital formats. Visualisation is made possible through the application of visual design software to any form of artefacts, data or publications, thereby increasing the capacity of researchers to make their work understandable and increasing the capacity of readers to interpret and build on the work. Valorisation is the desired end state of the many processes that apply to making research more widely valuable, beyond the research producer/creator. Each of the four V’s alone, and collectively, brings powerful capacities into the science system.
Digital research infrastructure can provide the basis for transforming current scientific knowledge production capabilities and practices, by shifting from relatively limited knowledge sharing to extensive data and methodological sharing, thereby empowering the scientific community in many ways, including in applying new methods and techniques of scientific discovery, in generating new research questions, and in answering old and new questions in ways not previously possible.
UNISA's experience with Cloud
Information literacy has always been an essential skill for all students, and in an era of #fakenews and ChatGPT its even more critical. However, on entering, university students have varying exposure to computers and the Internet. How do we help someone critically evaluate sources when they’re still learning to find information?
What are the current challenges universities face with information literacy? This is a problem that inevitably touches on the realms of both the IT help desk and the library. How can they work together to give students the best possible chance of succeeding?
Room Location: Auditorium, Lower Floor
TBA
Technology has greatly impacted teaching and learning, and research activities across universities. Academic libraries are not exempt from the changes technology has imposed on higher education generally. Aside from providing access to electronic resources, academic libraries have incorporated teaching critical evaluation of information skills to combat the deluge of unreliable information that is easily accessible via the internet. This presentation will touch briefly on how the intersection of information literacy principles and digital literacies principles address issues of generative artificial intelligence like ChatGPT in academia, and how this presents an opportunity for academic libraries to reinforce principles of critical thinking around information resources and information generation. This presentation will also discuss how academic libraries, through providing a central space on campus, is an ideal place for students to interact with technology and benefit from IT infrastructure on campus. In the case of Stellenbosch University Library, the library provides a unique space – a makerspace – where the university community has the opportunity to interact with different technologies like 3D printers, a 3D scanner, virtual reality, electronics and robotics. Through the academic library offering such spaces, disciplines outside of computer science and engineering focus areas have opportunity to explore technology for possible use in their disciplines. Examples of this are ancient studies (replicating artefacts for a more sensory teaching experience) and geography (making use of virtual reality for virtual site walkthroughs).
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Department of Communications and Digital Technologies passed regulations requiring mobile and Internet service providers to provide South Africans with "zero-rated" (free) access to education and health websites. Over the following two years, more than a thousand websites were zero-rated by operators including hundreds of University and TVET sites. This presentation takes a look at how the zero-rating process unfolded and the various challenges faced by operators (and the educational institutions involved). It concludes with some lessons learned for any future zero-rating initiatives.
Room Location: Auditorium, Lower Floor
The 2021 Cape Town Fire resulted in the destruction of the historic Jagger Library and Reading Room and 90 000 objects. A similar number was salvaged, triaged and are in various stages of recovery. To reach this point in a timeframe that has impressed among others UNESCO, a multi-varied approach was deployed that includes disaster management; project management; preservation and conservation; digitisation and digitalisation; information and knowledge management; and, information and communication technologies. This presentation offers a story of coherence and resilience in the face of an unimaginable disaster.
Room Location: Auditorium, Lower Floor
Room Location: Auditorium, Lower Floor
By Nicholas Mbonimpa
Room Location: Auditorium, Lower Floor
TENET's SLA Reference Group is a standing committee of TENET's Board. Its mandate is to advise the Board on all aspects of the contractual relationship with TENET, assessment of TENET's service delivery performance, and other related matters.
Each institution that has signed TENET's REN Services Agreement is entitled to designate two individuals to act as members of the Reference Group.
Room Location: Auditorium, Lower Floor
The future governance of the South African Identity Federation
The Participants' Forum & Steering Committee are an integral part of the governance of the South African Identity Federation. However, both have stagnated and no longer fulfil their envisioned role. Thus we intend to ask TENET's Board of Directors to disband the current SAFIRE Steering Committee in its entirety. In its place, we propose reworking the terms of reference for the current Participants Forum into a form recognised by the REN Master Service Agreement and incorporating those aspects of SAFIRE's governance that are not covered by the SLA Reference Group.
This session will provide current Participants in the Federation an opportunity to have a voice in formulating the future governance of the federation and the aforementioned terms of reference.
Room Location: Auditorium, Lower Floor
