In this our November 2021 Community Chat, and with two members of the Caribbean tech community, Claire Craig and Matthew Cowen, the panel discusses: making Caribbean Internet Exchange Points more visible and accountable; and the Caribbean region’s data scarcity challenge.
This episode is also available on SoundCloud, Apple iTunes, Google Play Music, Spotify and on Stitcher!
This Community chat episode is likely be the last one for 2021, as the ICT Pulse Podcast will be going on hiatus from the second half December, and returning around mid-January 2022. Nevertheless, and for this episode, we have brought back two of our veteran guests who always highlight important issues that may not necessarily be getting a lot of visibility these days – especially when so much of the focus for 2021 has been on digital transformation. However, their topics, if addressed, will not just open up considerable opportunities for the Caribbean region, but also help us better to understand our environment and to make more informed decisions.
Introducing our guest panellists and their topics
Claire C. Craig holds a PhD in Social Policy from The UWI, Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies (SALISES). Her area of research is ICT for Development (ICTD) specifically Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) in the Caribbean. She is one of the Caribbean region’s foremost experts on IXPs development. She holds an EMBA from the ALJ Graduate School of Business, The UWI, a Post Graduate Diploma, Information Engineering and a Bachelor of Business Management.
She recently retired from the post of Senior IT Officer, Enterprise Applications Support Manager at the University of the West Indies (The UWI). She has a successful ICT career and a track record of over 30 years’ progressive experience and competencies in: organizing, planning, communicating, coordinating multiple projects, training, lecturing, researching and presenting, combined with a genuine desire to develop people.
She is a Member of the Coordinating Team of the Caribbean Network Operators Group (CaribNOG), and was recently appointed to head the CaribNOG Research Unit. She is also a secretary or Latin America and the Caribbean Regional At-Large Organization (LACRALO) or the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a member of the Internet Society (ISOC), and has held several key positions on the board of other organizations.
Based on her role at CaribNOG, and following on our conversations in previous podcast episodes, Claire has been passionate about the transformational value Internet Exchange Points (IXP) can have in Caribbean countries, and in the region as a whole. Recently, CaribNOG was one of the winning projects under FRIDA, is an initiative of LACNIC, the Internet Address Registry for Latin America and the Caribbean. Their winning project seeks to develop a repository of information about the Caribbean IXPs, including, their contact information, location and IXP traffic statistics.
As a result, Claire wanted to highlight the proposed work of the project vis-à-vis the current state of Caribbean IXPs. She thus led the panel through discussion of the topic, “Making Caribbean Internet Exchange Points More Visible and Accountable”.
Matthew Cowen is an IT Specialist, Researcher and Digital Analyst, which specialises in ICT in the Caribbean region. He is also the Founder of dgtlfutures.com, a consulting firm that seeks to help small businesses across the Caribbean to develop and implement their digital transformation strategies. He is also the author of The Future is Digital newsletter, where he shares witty and insightful articles. More recently, he launched The Future is Digital podcast.
Matthew has more than 30 years’ experience in digital technologies and their use in business. His expertise includes market research and analysis, along with trends and opportunities for businesses in the digital space. He has beenliving inMartinique for over 15 years, and is fluent in both English and French.
As a researcher and data analyst, Matthew is continually confronted by the state of data in the region. Typically Caribbean data, particularly for tech, tend to fall into five distinct baskets: (i) the data exists and is current; (ii) data exists, but it is dated, which limits its application and usefulness; (iii) data exists, but it of limited granularity, which again limits its application and usefulness; (iv) data exists, but it is not readily accessible or manipulatable, such as being in a machine readable or in an editable format; (iv) the data Is not being generated as so does not exist.
Matthew, who part of a team is conducting a Caribbean digital ecosystem study, was prompted to ask us to tackle the topic, “The Caribbean region’s data scarcity challenge”, as so many of us have experienced the above scenarios at one time or another.
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Select links
Below are links to some of the organisations and resources that either were mentioned during the episode, or otherwise, might be useful:
- Claire C Craig
- Matthew Cowen
- dgtlfutures
- Caribbean Network Operators Group (CaribNOG)
- Latin America and the Caribbean At Large Community (LACRALO)
- Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)
- ICT Pulse Podcast episode, ICTP 094: Digital IDs and Internet Exchange Points Community Chat
- ICT Pulse Podcast episode, ICTP 160: Understanding how technology perpetuates bias, with Matthew Cowen, of dgtlfutures.com
- Claire Craig Presentation, Caribbean IXP Update
Image credits: C C Craig; M Cowen; Gerd Altmann (Pixabay); Chris Ciapala (Pixabay)
Music credit: Ray Holman
Podcast editing support: Mayra Bonilla Lopez
