Nairobi Technical Community urged ICANN's strong support for DCA's efforts on '.africa' domain!

May 5, 2010 - PRLog -- 11 March 2010, Nairobi Kenya:  At the public forum held on Thrusday that represented the  collective Board of ICANN Chaired by PETER DENGATE THRUSH, Chairman of ICANN, much of the Nairobi technical community represented by businesses and civil society expressed strong support for the '.africa' project as championed by DCA.

MS. SOPHIA BEKELE spoke at the public forum and praised the ICANN board for coming to the continent, to Kenya, and how successful the meeting was this week, stating  "ICANN continues to demonstrate that it's a truly international organization.  And the local host has been excellent and executed a well-organized conference".   MS BEKELE informed the Board "DotConnectAfrica is a TLD applicant and  we have formally been endorsed by various key regional organizations in Africa and the African Union which represents the heads of states of government of Africa", Sophia said.  "And given that we know that ICANN is working for several years on new TLDs, we believe you're close to adequately addressing the overarching issues, and we look forward to assisting ICANN in any way we can in finalizing these  overarching issues.   Once this is done, we believe that '.africa' looks forward to bringing the African continent the incredible benefits that a continental TLD promises".

DAVID SVARRER, from Digital Age Institute in Nairobi, Kenya said "It's an honor to be here and we were just listening to this lady, Sophia Bekele.  And I think there's a very interesting thing with these top-level domains, especially '.Africa'.  When I set foot here in Africa the first time in 1997, everybody here wanted a dot com, everybody.  And if you had a dot com, you were saying valued at the music.   What I can say is that if the '.Africa' becomes a reality, we are one of those who will be changing from  '.com'  to '.Africa'.   We will be very proud of running a business here in Africa, very successful in ICT, and we'll be very proud to market, for instance, also our digital journal in the U.S.  We have more than 2,000 readers over there.  And a domain for that where they download it from is a dot com.  That's, of course, fine. But we are Africa based.  We are Africa I.T. and we are actually proud of it.  I'm the only white in the company.  There are 27 others who are Kenyans.  And they are on the same top level as any other I.T. staff around the world.  So I'll just comment on this work done by DotConnectAfrica.  And we are one of those who are eagerly waiting for dot Africa to come up.   PETER DENGATE THRUSH, Chariman of ICANN thanked Mr Savver's local insite siting it as "excellent".  

CAROLINE JUMA from Kenya Computer Resources, spoke at the forum saying " I'm here today to give support to .Africa', as championed by SOPHIA BEKELE.  Different countries in Africa are currently looking at ways to work  together, especially in the ICT arena, shared services being the way to go.  '.Africa' would be key in this regard.   When talking about promoting and enhancing Internet, as I've read on the brochure that you have given us, what greater way would this be than to have dot Africa promote that?  And remember when '.KE' came in, and most of us had '.KE' and were very proud.  We were suddenly very proud to be identified as Kenyans because we had the dot KE. With dot Africa, pride will be even bigger, shared services will be enabled.  We will be able to walk as a continent.  Africa is a giant. It will be a positively visible giant through '.Africa'.

Over 50 local African communities showed up from Nairobi to the ICANN forum to support the efforts of DCA and '.Africa' at the public forum at ICANN.

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DotConnectAfrica is a non-partisan, not-for-profit organization incorporated in Africa and will sponsor, establish and operate a TLD registry with global recognition and regional significance dedicated to the needs of the Pan-African and African community.

http://www.dotconnectafrica.org
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